As a B&M store owner myself, this is exactly why I am considering trying out Puca. The ability to relatively smooth out my inventory would be a huge boon. Currently, almost every week I mail off hundreds of cards to various buylists for store credit to use on the cards I run low on. I pride myself in always having every standard card in stock at all times, and whenever I have fewer than 10 copies of any standard card, I use my online credit to pick up a few playsets (going into the holiday rush, I had a minimum of 20 copies of every single standard card).

I have 2 concerns though:
1) How easily will it be to get a couple of playsets of the cards I need? For example, here are the cards I need to pick up 6-8 copies of each:
Brimaz, King of Oreskos
Chandra, Pyromaster
Courser of Kruphix
Elspeth, Sun’s Champion
Goblin Rabblemaster
Hero of Iroas
Stormbreath Dragon
If I put 8 copies of each of these cards on my want list, assuming I had enough puca points, how long would it take for me to get all these cards?

2) Is Puca a huge Ponzi scheme (or will it be)?
The fact that new puca points can be created/purchased is terrifying to me. It just seems like the kind of thing where 5 years from now we find out the owners of the site were creating thousands of points for themselves. It would be stupidly simply for the site owners to do this on a small scale – enough for them to run an online store stocked solely by cards ‘purchased’ with puca points they created.

I agree that there are a good number of people on there looking for that, there are still plenty of random oddball things you can find people looking for as well…Granted you might have to dig a bit, but there’s still plenty of tradeable things on there.

Ah I see thx for the tip about the Upgrade. I just posted off my first Send so lets see how it goes 🙂

Brecht, I recently signed up at Pucatrade and after looking at which cards were wanted, got a similar impression as you. However, it would be a rare thing for the features of the MTG economy to be radically different somewhere as if stepping onto another planet where our trash suddenly becomes treasure. After browsing the site a few minutes I quickly deduced the site is great for trading modern staples for cards I want or, much less frequently, standard staples for cards I want. I’ll have to check it out again when Fate Reforged is released as I heard players on the site tend to want standard cards much more if they are newer and scarcer. The site is certainly not what I fantasized it would be since I don’t see how I can turn my undesirable cards into better stock. Maybe I’ll find a use for the site but you won’t find me stalking the site for hours or days looking to trade $15 dollars of near bulk for a single fetchland!

Those are very valid arguements. I do apologize that my viewpoint is always biased towards American readers in that I often forget the additional challenges non-US speculators face. You are correct in that points cannot be directly redeemed for cash, but if you have an upgraded account you could theoretically sell your points for cash using a 3rd party (the seller can give the points to the buyer after being paid).

Being outside of the US means sellers have less incentive to choose me versus a domestic buyer because our bid price for the cards are the same (TCG mid) but I would cost the seller higher postage.

Brett,
I definitely appreciate the store owner input and I can definitely understand that selling on TCG is going to be more lucrative, however, I think that if you (as a store) have difficulty maintaining certain cards in stock (as in your local player base doesn’t want to trade/selll them in) then I think Pucatrade is an excellent source for rotating stock. If you’re store is large enough/successful enough that you don’t have to turn people away when they request the hottest standard cards because you’ve run out then I definitely think you don’t need Pucatrade. I just know that the smaller local stores in my area often run out of certain cards (currently Flooded Strand and Temple of Enlightenment) and nobody is really trading them in….but they have a lot of Polluted Delta’s.

tl;dr Your article was decent, but definitely not something any LGS employee should use for the purpose of the store. PucaTrade is great for backpack grinders and casual traders, but not much else.

O I definitely agree that you don’t want to just put “everything” up on your want list immediately. I have to disagree with your statement “the people with points always want fetchlands”…I sent out pile A and the only fetchlands on those were Scalding Tarns…I think it’s awesome that you can have your “want” list filled so quickly and I feel like stores should use this as a tool to refill stock they are constantly running out of. I also don’t go for any orders that won’t break 150 points because you are 100% correct regarding the cost of shipping.

I needed some more crappy cards for my collection, 1 minute after I updated my want list, all my puca points were gone. Like everyone was waiting for that and tried to send as much crap as possible. It felt like I got attacked by sharks. 5 minutes later I had 3 messages of people who were too late to grab my points with the question when I will have more points so they can ship me the cards I want.

This gave me the feeling that this economy is sliding towards a very unbalanced one.
I can’t predict the result of this, but I have a bad feeling about this.

Also, the function: auto match is not that great, because if you have some uncommons in your have list, people with 100 points will show up with the message that they need lots of the uncommons, but you can only send one or two because of the low amount of points. Not worth the shipping costs of course.