Development Log
Merry Christmas and happy holidays! I am writing just to give a couple updates of what's coming up. 1) Card Market Data. I will be adding a toggle to view European market analysis soon. 2) PSA market price data. I have started collecting graded market price data from pricecharting's API and will be looking into how to map this to TCGplayer products. 3) Better sealed product searching 4) user profile pages 5) all other TCGs from TCGplayer will be supported soon. 6) More frequent price updates (hourly). That's it for now! Thanks!
Added new layout to card items on the winners/losers pages and also upgraded our algorithm for detecting price changes. I think this does a much better job at filtering out false positives. Started collecting graded price data from pricecharting and European prices from Card Market, will look to implement that over the next month. Happy Holidays!
Huge update, totally refactored the site, deleted probably close to 10k lines of duplicated code. Why would you ever duplicate code? So stupid. But I am past that era of my life. Clean, modular, maintainable code! I took some time also to try and fix as many small UI issues as I could. Now that my code is actually readable I am going to try and hold myself to a higher standard and deliver a crisp performance-focused experience for users. Thank you to all of you who continue to use the site, I am beyond grateful for all of you. - Michael
Added a search bar to the site! Now you can search for cards by name. I'll work to add more search filters and improvements to the search bar soon. This was a long time coming and I just wanted to get something out there for it.
The first index has been published! I'm super excited about this and will bring it to other games soon. I was hoping to start with yugioh and keep an index updated that tracks the top 50 meta cards value over time as a way to gauge the cost of the format. But, I saw a really cool project in process on Twitter by @Peak_Hobby where they had created an index based on Pokemon series, which was news to me that Pokemon TCG sets are released in series. But this was super exciting to me because it meant there was a static way to create an index without having to gauge meta use like I had been planning for Yugioh. But the issue was that theirs wasn't published and only tracked the aggregate market price and I really wanted to try to develop an actual index like the Dow Jones or the S&P 500. While the current implementation is not perfect it's good enough for now. Going to mess around with a bunch of different options to see what's best. Exciting times to see so much cool tech innovation happening in the tcg space.
Site is looking really nice right now! I am working on some behind the scenes data architecture improvements. I'd love to have the site load everything super fast. Definitely a lot of improvements to make!
Wow! It's been a while since I have posted here. Just pushed an updated "top 10" page, check it out! It's a compact format that allows for easy screenshotting and sharing. I also just set up the price collector to track sealed products so expect some new features to explore sealed products soon!
Watchlists are now live! You can now create your own watchlists to track cards over time. I have not tested this feature all the way but from what I can tell it works. If you notice any bugs please let me know in the discord!
Exciting we have finally launched tcgmarketnews.com! Now supporting: Digimon Card Game, Flesh & Blood TCG, Lorcana TCG, Magic, YuGiOh, One Piece Card Game, and Pokemon! I have been reaching out to market watch content creators from various games to hopefully get some feedback and help me improve the site. I have noticed a couple errors in the other TCGs and have fixed them but worry I may mess up things and not be aware due to a lack of experience with the other games. Lots coming down the line! If you are a creator reading this please reach out to me to join the ambassador program!
Portfolio mode is now live! You can now view your portfolio and see how your cards have performed over time. There is a LOT of work left to do on this. Some things don't work very well. But, I shipped it! Join the discord if you notice any bugs!
DARK MODE go crazy O.o
I'm happy to announce the release of a new Set Explorer tool O.o Although I've been using it internally for some time, I finally found the opportunity to share it with you all. This tool is perfect for browsing recent sets and discovering undervalued cards. Currently, the Set Explorer is very basic, but stay tuned—more features and enhancements are on the way! My focus has been on developing another project for TCG content creators, which has limited the time I could dedicate to this site. However, that project is nearly complete, and I've started to revisit and improve the Set Explorer during my downtime. Big updates and exciting changes are coming soon. Thank you for your continued support!
TCG MARKET NEWS COMING SOON!!! I have expanded data collection to include 1) Digimon, 2) Flesh and Blood 3) Lorcana 4) Magic 5) One Piece 6) Pokemon. There will be some major challenges in bringing analysis to all of these TCGs as I will need to partner with people familiar with each of these markets in order to provide the best analysis possible. In that light, please reach out to me if you consider yourself an expert in any of these markets, email me at [email protected]
It has been a really exciting 2 months for this site! In October we doubled our affiliate income from September so up to ~$60. This does not quite cover the costs of running the site which is around $100/month, but really cool to have some of it covered and finally be making SOME amount of money. Thank you to everybody who supports the site by clicking the TCGplayer links. Really means so much to me! This site has been a huge passion project the last 5 years as I have been learning to code and it's so rewarding to see people enjoying it. Last post I mentioned the ambassador program, this is still in progress but the idea started to get so big I have decided to build an entirely new site to help support all TCG creators. I am actively developing that tool and hope to launch in January of 2025. But I still have lots of plans for this site. I will be updating the public watchlists and trying to keep them relevant for cards I would be picking up in anticipation of new set releases and future formats. Hopefully can help people get cards like Trident Dragion before they spike. I have released some updates that improve the user experience last night including 1) Automatic price updates when adding cards to watchlists without a full page reload via AJAX. 2) Reworked the sidebar on the home page, now has tabs for public vs. private watchlists which I think looks much cleaner especially on mobile. 3) Many other small changes to improve the experience of adding cards to watchlists/creating an account on the site. The next major feature I hope to add are the watchlist email alerts. So stay tuned! Coming soon!
Working on rolling out an ambassador program which will allow content creators to promote their own yugiohmarketnews.com dashboard with their affiliate links. In preparation I have been cleaning up my coding environment which was previously atrocious. However now I have fixed several issues including: 1. continuous deployment on pythonanywhere which includes automatic site updates when I git push from my development environment (previously it was all production). 2. SSH tunneling on local as pythonanywhere does not allow direct database connection from outside pythonanywhere. 3. all absolute file paths have been replaced utilizing pathLib. Hoping to send out ambassador proposals this weekend or monday. Tell all your favorite creators to join!
Decided to launch the new update with minimal testing. Join the discord to alert me quickly if you notice something not working as intended. Or email me at: [email protected] Thanks!
I believe the MVP for the new update is complete! I am really excited about this update. The site now includes user accounts which allows users to create custom watchlists. This adds a TON of user value and I am hoping creates a lot more sticky users. This was a really fun challenge to implement and I am so excited for everything it allows me to do now going forward. Expect lots of cool features coming soon. All that is left to do is 1) make the site mobile responsive and 2) Make sure the security is adequate.
Discord Bot Market Report feature is back online! I fixed it in July but recently noticed it was down again. I think I added a permanent fix this time. There has been so much activity after the banlist that there were too many cards to include in the report so it was hitting the maximum size limit and failing. I added a 10 card limit to ensure it never hits the size ceiling again.
Big changes coming! I just finished porting my local watchlist/collection tracking app to my host. I am working on design, cleaning up features, figuring out layouts etc. I think this month I will launch!
A publication? For the Yu-Gi-Oh! Secondary market? Wow. This is something I have been wanting to try for some time and have attempted before but have never actually ended up putting anything out there. Check out the "Investment Research" Tab to take a look. I hope to do this again next month and possibly put more effort into the misc. section as there was a lot of activity outside of mermails, malice, and Evil Heroes. Hope you all enjoy thanks!
A new feature! *Investment Research* This was a fun project to implement. I recently gained access to a large dataset of tournament topping decklists from the past 20 years and this was my first thought of something that has not been done before. Currently this table only contains cards with one printing and I am pondering other cool analysis I could do with this data including adding pricing data to this table. User accounts/watchlists are getting closer and closer. I have scheduled two weekends where I will have no plans this month other than working on this site so fingers crossed we can implement before the end of august! Thanks everybody!
The Discord bot is back online! Recently we surpassed 75 servers which means I could apply to be a verified discord bot. During this process there are some changes I had to make that resulted in certain permissions being turned off. I did not notice that this crashed the discord bot. Now however that has been fixed and until I hit 100 servers everything will stay the same. If we hit 100 I will need to change how commands are entered but that is a problem for another day. Thanks everybody! Side Note, I am close to implementing user accounts and watchlists. I am really excited about this and I hope we can create a much more customizable user experience with these new features.
It has been slow going implementing user accounts and watchlists. The demo I have up and running locally is using sqlite and the service I use to host will need to use postgresql so changing the backend setup has been a little tedious. But progress is being made! I'm hoping to be done by the end of July.
Welcome to the YugiohMarketNews.com Development Log! Exciting Stuff! I will just be sharing my own random thoughts and updates that are happening behind the scenes here. First update, the discord bot reached over 75 servers! Applying to become a verified app and we can expect some updates soon because of that. Road to 100 servers! Next, I am currently working on some huge updates including 1) The YugiohMarketNews Blog - integrating a free flask blog template I found online that will let me manage blog posts. I plan to post daily if not several times a week short snippets of whats happening with the market. 2) User Accounts / Watchlists - Soon, you will be able to make an account! Whoa! With this account users will be able to create their own "Watchlists". I envision this being useful for people who want to track groups of cards prices over time. For example, you could make a watchlist of RA01 and RA02 QCR hand traps to track their price fluctuations over time easily in one place. Lots of exciting user value and benefits can come from this change! More details to come soon thanks for stopping by!
After a couple years of working on yugiohmarketnews, I did a complete rebuild of the site from the ground up fixing all of my messes. It was during this time too that I really started to figure out what I could do to filter out annoying non-applicable price spikes from my data (old cards with low sales volumes etc.). So my analysis got a lot better. Also I should mention these last few years I'd been using my tool to post market watch changes for House of Champs youtube channel in his discord which was a lot of fun and gave me a good testing ground for how well my site could detect interesting market changes. I launched the new updated site in 2024 and another market watch youtuber, YGOFreshOffthePress go subscribe, was super cool and started giving me feedback, showcasing it in his videos and overall just being a really cool supportive dude. This was really motivating. Since then I've been posting some updates above^. I've rebranded to tcgmarketnews and now am working to cover all major TCGs and create the greatest market analysis tool ever built.
So after a year or so of tieronemarketspace being a bust and feeling sorry for myself I decided to make a new more topical domain name, yugiohmarketnews.com. I also built a basic Flask web app with a scrolling panel users could use to see the top winners from different time periods. This one took off a bit! I had maybe 10-15 daily users for awhile. This really motivated me. I kept working on the site for the next couple years improving my coding experience and figuring out what I was trying to make.
I launched the first iteration of this tool at www.tieronemarketspace.com. It took form as a web page with an embedded google studios dashboard. I wasn't a great coder yet so being able to make a dashboard in google with drag and drop features and hook it up to a daily csv export from my database was a huge leap. I had figured out the backend development but then jumping to frontend was a hurdle for me. I posted the site on reddit, and got pretty much no traffic. I shared it with some market watch youtubers, they didn't seem to care. That made me sad I thought they would really like it for their content.
Even though we had graduated, my partner and I were still eligible for the 2021 business plan competition. So I continued working on building a demo and my partner made us a great presentation. Then at the 2021 PLU Business Plan Competition, we won. It was one of the best days of my life. We used the funds to pay some developers to finish my demo site and none of that ended up working out (hard to hire randos). So I used my cut of the funds to buy a new laptop (the same one I'm writing this on now) and got to work learning how to code.
After our tough loss in the 2019 business plan competition, I really had thought we would win or at least place, I decided I would try to build something we could use the next year, a demo site or something. I had no experience coding but found a blog that walked me through how to build a web scraper. After a few days of working I had a semi-usable script, and thus began my coding journey! I worked on this over the next year but sadly, the 2020 competition was cancelled due to COVID. Bummer. So, I graduated and got a job and continued to pursue learning how to code and build the site.
At PLU I continued to pursue my finance degree and joined our schools Student Investment Fund which managed ~$200k. During that time I became more familiar with that world and kind of fell out of love with the idea of working in finance. Our school also had an annual Business Plan Competition (think Shark Tank) that offered a grand prize of $8,000 to the winner. I entered my sophomore year with a hilariously terrible idea, a rentable hot tub on a truck trailer. We did not win. The next year I pitched my partner on an idea I had been thinking about since high school, a data analysis tool for Yugioh card prices. We spent the next year working off and on. We came up with some rough ideas and pitched it the next year having made major improvements since the hot tub truck trailer. But our vision and presentation were lacking. We did not make it to the finals.
My peak yugioh era, I learned how to play locals at The Gamers Den in my hometown of Cambridge MN and spending hours and hours on Duelingbook.com playing every deck imaginable. I also started buying and selling a lot of cards on ebay to fund my hobby and became really fascinated by the secondary marketplace and how cards could rise and fall in price so dramatically. The first time I tried to speculate on cards I researched OCG trends and after seeing mind crush was in a lot of side and main decks to combat nekroz, I ended up buying 50 ultra rare copies of mind crush before The Secret Forces was released in the TCG and made a couple hundred bucks. Enough to buy some of my first meta cards like a Shaddoll core! This led me to choose to study finance in college at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA.
While at a church summer camp in Colorado my friends and I started talking about yu-gi-oh cards we had as kids. When we got back from camp we all dug out our old boxes of cards from our closets and started playing at lunch "as a joke". Well, that joke would go on to take over my life for the next 10+ years, woops!