PucaTrade and I Are Getting a Divorce

When we first met, PucaTrade and I were like two peas in a pod. We went everywhere together: work, home, the grocery store, the laundromat, the bank, and even my brother’s wedding! I spent time staring deeply into the PucaTrade mobile site, and the soft LED glow gave me great comfort. I spent nights sleeping soundly knowing I was happy, comfortable, and maximizing my trade value.  Things were good, and I was more excited about trading cards and playing magic than I ever was before. For many months I was doing exactly what it seemed PucaTrade was intending me to do: put cards I don't want into hands of players that want them, and get cards I want in exchange, and in the process save time and money.

Our relationship was built on the foundation of value. What made PucaTrade so much better than everyone else was having its roots in eliminating the costly middle man: No Ebay fees, no TCGPlayer cut, no low buylist prices, and no gas money driving to a shop. I’m not trying to cash out of the game, I just needed companionship and someone that could help me trade without camping out at an LGS or attending all the big tournaments. PucaTrade was able to do just that, and did it well! The community was helpful and friendly, I got to get good ‘prices’ for my cards that beat the pants off of an online buylist or selling a card to the store, and I was able to turn my standard cards, unused modern staples, and unwanted foils into cards I played with day in and day out. I wish I could say that the same value was still there.

Fast forward to today: We still spend our time together daily, I still have a list of cards I'm trying to trade, I still have cards I want, our relationship is still the same in a lot of ways, but it just doesn’t feel ‘right’ anymore. The service went from being in a place where there was so much trade that I was afraid to put cards on my want list thoughtlessly because of how quickly cards were snapped up and traded, and now I have thousands of points, cards I can afford on my want list, but no movement for sometimes months at a time. I don’t expect instant gratification, I realize my early experiences of the ‘sparks’ when our relationship was growing is not something that will happen forever. It takes work from both sides to maintain a relationship, and I'm starting to think that PucaTrade has slowly been moving on a path that I can't follow.

Let me tell you a story of our most recent activities. I gathered some foils and standard cards, in the $10-15 range, and put them up for trade. I was excited to share them with the world. These weren’t obscure EDH cards, or little played foils that earned the price from their uncommon or old status, they were cards from standard and modern, and PucaTrade comforted me once again whispering “On average this card is traded 3.8 times a week.” But weeks turned to months, and in despair I was forced to put it out of my mind. I had to spend a lot of time thinking if this was even worth all the effort, all the pain, and I ultimately decided it was time to be done with it.

In what I thought would be our last days together, I filled my want list with a multitude of cards, and I could afford any of them. In the past I would've been out of points in literally one second. PucaTrade was the place to do exactly what I was trying to enable, here’s some random old card you forgot you had or never played with, and you could throw it on this website and get like $35 worth of cards out of it. Once again all I was met with was the waiting game. I had thousands of points, dozens of wants, and no movement for weeks on end. I noticed a trend of others incentivizing getting specific cards; paying extra percentages, extra points, or paying extra for postage tracking, and this made my heart sink. I had to give in, and I went through my list, found what I card I wanted to the most, and put a bounty of bonus points on it.  Within minutes of doing so, I was inundated with a deluge of messages about the card. Questions about how much I would overpay, what levels of card quality I would accept, if I would pay for tracking. This experience was just the nails in the coffin for my relationship with PucaTrade. 

These incentives, shipping fees, and bounties, these are all the things that PucaTrade didn't have, and exactly why I was so attracted to it. It’s lost its value. The only reason I use it in lieu of buylisting or ebaying was to avoid these things, and things have progressed to them being unavoidable. Have a moderately costed card you are trying to move? Well you better check out how many are available because you could be waiting a long time. Have a lot of points you are excited to spend? Well you better be prepared to pay sometimes even HIGHER than equivalent of the Star City Games price for the ‘privilege’ of trading peer-to-peer. The ‘market’ prices of a card don't matter if no one will sell it to you at that price.

So when at an impasse, I decided that it was important for me to move on. I haven’t deleted my account, I have a couple hundred points in going to try and clear out when I need a few things. I don't plan to renew my silver account, and doubly so after the realization that almost none of the promised features have been added and the user experience has gotten worse over time. I am not mad that I spent the time that I did with PucaTrade, I will always look back on most of my time with sparkles in my eyes and full deckboxes. I'm glad that I was able to trade thousands of dollars of cards to get cards to play with, and I’m glad that I am done. It’s a separation I am comfortable with, and I wish nothing but the best for PucaTrade going forward.