By request (from ChannelFireball) we are now tracking prices for almost all of their cards. Since we don’t have a good idea about volume yet and we are still testing some things, these prices will NOT be included in the Fair Trade Price calculations or the “lowest price” button for several weeks until we are sure all the kinks have been worked out with the integration.

As you can probably see, the card price graph is getting somewhat cluttered as we add new sources. This page is currently undergoing a substantial rework – expect to see a revised page with better design up by the weekend.

Additionally, we have clarified our development goals for the next few weeks. Our top priority is to improve the single-card pages to add more data, even more accurate graphs, more information about a card and a better design. We are also cleaning up a few cards that have missing images or are missing a price from one or more vendors.

Additionally, we are trying to decide on the best approach when a vendor is out of stock. Should we show the price they are listing the card for even when they have none in stock or should we show a price of zero instead? MTGMintCard is a big offender here – they are out of stock of most of the older cards and have them listed for very odd values (often 75% lower than other vendors). We mostly ignore these large deviations in our Fair Trade Price calculations but it still makes for an odd-looking graph.

As always, we welcome your feedback, either below or at webmaster@mtgprice.com

Happy Trading!

Firstly, yes, the new homepage (www.mtgprice.com) looks a little weird right now. Once the next crawl of prices is complete it will hopefully fix itself somewhat. In addition, we’ve noticed some major issues with the way we handle prices of old, high-value cards that are very thinly traded and we’re working on fixing those by tomorrow.

Next – given the new Sorin, Lord of Innistrad preview, people are eager to pick up black/white dual lands. For example, check out this reddit post: http://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/oc2sj/im_ready_for_you_my_lord/

Now, look at this graph of the number of “in stock” copies of Isolated Chapel at Starcity:

Notice the huge downswing? That implies these things are selling like hotcakes.

We haven’t noticed an upswing in prices yet, but we can see one around the corner if the buzz continues.

We’ve been tweeting about Mindbreak_Trap for a couple of days now. The Ebay price has nearly doubled since Christmas, vendors have really spiky volumes (indicating lots of sales) and some vendors are significantly raising prices.

This is a mythic rare that came out 2 years ago, costs $2 and is a 4-of in many sideboards since it hoses combo, can counter uncounterable cards and is played for free against anyone who plays 3 spells.

Think it can hit $8 given the new modern format?

We’ve been quiet for a while now but we’d like to stress that this isn’t because we’ve stopped working – quite the opposite! Instead, we have been working on new features for out January 1st 2012 launch.

Today was the first day that we rolled out the new features to our closed beta users. (A “closed beta” is simply a beta test with a few hand-selected users who are happy to use a site full of bugs.)

This is a fairly significant milestone in terms of the site – our “core launch” features are actually live and running right now and it looks like we will be “feature complete” (that is, only working on bugfixes) by the 23rd of December. This is the day that we will open up our public beta to those users who signed up (link is on the http://mtgprice.com front page).

The initial features are fairly simple – users are able to track their own collections along with trades and new additions and to see the price of their collections over time.

In addition, users can see how things like the 2011 World championships affected the price of single cards or their entire collection.

Additionally, users will be able to create decklists and share them with anyone interested, and again, these lists will show historical prices over time so you can see how different events impacted the price of various cards.

The decklists will show users who are logged in the cards they are mising and we have set up one-click ordering of only the cards that you still need to finish your deck at the lowest prices around.

We also allow users to log trades via the wizard that we released earlier (it now has a new look) – this will let you determine if you consistently make good trades over time and should let you keep your collection up to date more easily.

Lots of cleanup has also been added, including (finally!) access to foil card prices. We’ve always been gathering these prices, so you should have several months of data to peruse when the feature goes live on January 1st.

Alerts have also been added. These alerts are user-configurable and can be set up to tell you if any card is selling below a specific threshold price, a percentage below the “Fair Trade Price” or is significantly trending up or down. It’s also possible to view lists of cards sorted by recent gains and losses and those cards that are selling significantly below their typical price at a specific vendor.

The features above, while fun, are just the beginning – we’ll be rolling out at least one significant new feature every 2 weeks for the forseeable future. Our goal is, and always has been, to build a site with the fastest, most reliable MTG card prices around and to give players the tools to use this data effectively.

Look for more blog posts with further details and sign up for the beta if you haven’t already!