Link to our Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1365447257/magic-the-gathering-mtg-pricing-trading-and-collec

Hi, I’m Alasdair. I run MTGPrice.com: a site that helps people price, collect and trade Magic cards. I’ve been playing magic since Revised and I’ve played a LOT of tournament magic, including on the Pro Tour (I did terribly 🙂

MTGPrice.com has been around for almost three years and more than 200,000 magic players use it every month to track the value of their collections, look up historical prices, see what cards are currently rising or falling or just to compare prices across different vendors (unlike some other sites that use a single source, we pull prices for everyone from TCGPlayer, eBay and Amazon to ChannelFireball, StrikeZone and ABUGames).

For almost the full three years, people have been asking for us to create an iOS and Android app.  We’ve decided that now is the time to build one.

The thing is, we want the app to be really, really good. We don’t just want to repackage our website and call it an app – we want the thing to be native and fast and slick and wonderful – all the things a really great app should be. Thus, we’ve turned to kickstarted to help us get the cash needed to hire a world-class designer and a developer to help us.

What we’re building

We’re building an Android and iOS app with the following features:

1. Fast price lookup with autocomplete. Shows our “Fair Trade Price”, current price at a bunch of stores, historical price graph. We pull prices from many difference sources, not just a single site.

The premium version of the app will also show buylist prices (the cash price a vendor will pay you).

This is our core use-case: the idea is that you’ll be able to pull out your phone and know the price and price history of a card (in any printing) in under five seconds.

2. “My Collection” tool. Track your complete magic collection and its total value. Track the value over time in a graph. See which cards have changed in price recently.

Manage your “wishlist” of cards and receive alerts when we find especially good deals on these cards.

Track multiple collections – perhaps you want to track all the cards you lent a friend, or all the cards in a particular deck.

3. Fair Trade Wizard. Trading with someone at a GP? Just pull out the MTGPrice.com App and you can tally up each side of the trade. The premium version of the app (which you’ll receive if you back us) also has an option to show buylist prices of every card in the trade.

We don’t stop there. The Fair Trade Wizard will log this trade for you, automatically updating your collection and wishlists. It will also let you review these trades in the future so you can see if you’re making good trades over time.

4. Trade Matcher. Want to trade with another app user? Just enter their username (or scan a QR code) and be told all of the things someone wants from you and what you can give them.

The MTGPrice.com app will work out the best possible trade between the two of you, taking into account every single card you have for trade and every card in your wishlist.

The premium version (which all backers receive) will also let you mark specific cards as high or low priority so you can ensure you get those above all others.

5. Trade Locator. Find everyone in the area with the MTGPrice.com App and arrange trades with them!

Imagine being at a GP with four thousand people in the room. You need a foil Snapcaster Mage but can’t find anyone with one to trade. Hit the “Trade Locator” button and see everyone with trades nearby. Type in a card and see any users with that specific card for trade.

(Of course, you can disable this feature whenever you don’t feel like trading.)

6. Price alerts. We’ll give you an alert if a card on your wishlist or in your collection sees a price movement past a particular threshold. We’ll also tell you which cards you don’t own are currently hot and which are drifting downwards.

7. ProTrader features. MTGPrice.com has a service (currently $4.99/month) that provides a TON of extra features for people with larger collections. For example, you can view historical inventory graphs for specific vendors, get daily alert emails showing trending cards and use advanced tools to find the best deals available form each store. (You can read more about ProTrader here: http://www.mtgprice.com/protraderSignup.jsp)

As part of the app, we’ll have additional ProTrader features available for subscribers, including in-app price alerts.

Important Notes

REALLY IMPORTANT: The first $10K will fund an ANDROID version of the app. The next $5K (if we manage to raise it in a stretch goal) will fund concurrent iOS development. If we don’t raise $15K, we will still build the iOS app using our own funds but it will be delayed until the Android app is complete.

Additionally, we have a whole bunch of stretch goals in mind if we can raise above the $15K needed for both platforms. Specifically, we’ll support international vendors, multiple currencies, different card conditions (only NM-M for now), hundreds of different vendors and faster price updates (currently we update daily). We’ll go into more detail if it looks like these stretch goals are reasonable.

Anyway, what are you waiting for? Help us build the most amazing MTG App in the world!

Link to our Kickstarter page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1365447257/magic-the-gathering-mtg-pricing-trading-and-collec