Puca Pals: Getting a Promotion – Week 33 – 36

Puca Pals is a monthly/bi-weekly article I write to chronicle my adventures on Puca Trade, the online trading system where Magic Players around the world trade with each other. In the articles, I will be discussing what cards I’ve traded away, the total amount of shipping I’ve paid, the total profit I’ve made after shipping costs, and what cards I’ve received in return. If you have any questions regarding the website feel free to ask. If you want to make your own account there, click on this unique invite link of mine and get started!

Week 33 and 34: October 6th – October 20th (2015)

Cards Sent

• Complete Disregard (foil)
• Blighted Fen (foil)
• Urza’s Incubator
• Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker

Week 35 and 36: October 21st – November 4th (2015)

Cards Sent

• Sliver Hivelord x2
• Black Market x2
• Vigor
• Dungrove Elder
• Kruphix, God of Horizons
• Death’s Presence
• Dragon Broodmother x2
• Blighted Cataract x2 (foil)
• Blighted Woodland (foil)
• Urza’s Incubator
• Akroma’s Memorial
• Dictate of Erebos

I’m not really sure if I was busy this entire month and unable to make it to the post office, or if I had too many points and was pulling back on sending cards out, but the month of October in 2015 was pretty pathetic. Only 4 cards sent in the first 2 weeks, and only 16 cards in the final 2 weeks. A quick check of my running total at that time showed me at 40,000+ points, so perhaps that was the case during this month. I’ve sent out more cards in one week than I did during this time.

Initial Costs and Total Shipping

I didn’t get too many cards for great deals. A lot of the cards I sent during this time barely netted me any profit, but there were a few bright spots. I got the Black Markets for about 350-400 yen each, Dragon Broomothers for about 500, an Akroma’s Memorial for 300, and the Vigor I sent only cost me 500 yen initially. The Urza Incubators were also only about 250 yen each, and since this was before the reprint I got a nice little profit on them as well.

A total of 13 envelopes went out during this time with 20 cards inside them all. Nothing to a far away play, and no heavy packages, but still it wasn’t too exciting. The cost was 1430 yen to ship them, or 71.5 yen per each card. Not really where I wanted to be, but I guess sending out some cards were better than not sending out any at all.

Profit and How Long it Took to Ship Cards

During this time, I was still working on increasing the average profit I would make on each card sent, and it didn’t seem to be so bad. The Sliver Hivelords got me more than 850 points in profit, the Black Markets were more than 750 points profit, all the Blighted foil lands I sent out also helped out as I received around 700 points profit on one envelope of them. There were a lot more packages that netted me 700-800 points on each one, so it doesn’t look so bad. The problem is that I didn’t send out a lot of cards.

From October 6th-20th, my profit was a pitiful 1400 points, but from October 21st – November 4th it was a more robust 7545 points in profit. For the first two weeks, the per card profit on 4 cards was only 350  points (one of the worst weeks in profit in a very long time), but the next two weeks were a little more profitable at around 472 points of profit per card. While this beats the per card average from the last two weeks in September, it is no where close to the final week of September which was 521 points per card.

My total profit for the entire month of October in 2015 was a paltry 8945 points, or 2236 points a week. Sad. My shipping only ate into about 16% of my profits though. This could have been worse. Even though it shows that I’ve had a decrease in profit margins over the previous 2 months, I still felt like I was moving in the right direction. Most cards took about 7-9 days to arrive at their destination, but one card heading to Canada took almost a month to get to where it needed to be (25 days). Countryside locations tend to take longer to get to. 

What I Received

I was pretty happy to get this Flusterstorm for my legacy deck at this time, and it was one of the biggest ticket items I had ever gotten on Puca Trade, but it didn’t compare to what I got about 1 week later!

Yep. A this point in my Puca trade experience, I had gotten not one, not two, but THREE Goyfs through the service. My overall point total took quite a big hit during October, but that only motivated me to send out more cards in November and December to get back up there.

During this time I also got a pair of Gideon, Ally of Zendikars, 2 Ajani Vengeants, some Ulamog, Ceaseless Hungers to complete my playset, and a number of Stronghold and Exodus cards to further fill out my Tempest block cube. It was a very good month for getting standard cards from the Battle for Zendikar set as well.

Getting a Promotion

If you’re still using Puca Trade, you might have noticed that the website has started using something called “Promoted Trades”. Users of the website have been clamoring for a way to offer up more points for a card they really want, and after a short trial period, it’s finally happened. Puca Trade now lets you add any amount of points you want to a card to entice other people to send the card to you. This is an absolutely huge improvement for the website. While there is still the problem of people not sending cards that often, this function gets the website one more step towards a fully functioning market economy.

The sweepstakes and the insurance ideas were cute and did an okay job of removing points from the Puca Trade economy, but they will pale in comparison to how well promoted trades will affect the puca point market. I’d like to add that points are not only being removed from the economy from people adding extra points to trades, but also by the “fees” accrued whenever you activate a promoted trade. It differs depending on what level member you are, but the bottom line is that Puca Points are regaining their value.

This new feature will create extra fluidity to the market and get points moving more often. Over the last few months the transfer of points to and from users for cards has been glacial, but as of late things have started to pick up. It’s all going to start with the heavy users of the website. Those people that never gave up hope in the system will be going through more and more points and will need to send more cards out to get those points back. Slowly but surely this means people who have been sitting on their points for a while will start getting cards again and they’ll be enticed to send out more cards as well. These two Riskhar’s down below were received by offering a bounty on them. Prices between Puca Trade and Japan vary so much I’m fine offering 30-50% bounties on some cards because it still ends up being much cheaper than buying them Nagoya.

I’ve already sent out a few cards this year that were my first ones in more than 5 months because I’ve had some cards come trickling in. I said before that my threshold would be around 20,000 points, and once I hit that I’ll consider sending stuff out again. While it will start out as just a few pebbles rolling down a mountain, eventually it will become a full on avalanche and Puca Trade will be close to returning what it was before. Now I don’t expect this to happen in the next month or so, but I’d like to think that by summer the trades will return with some normality. Lots of people will be offering tons of extra points to get cards sent to them, which means that they’ll have to send more cards to refill their points eventually.

As for how many extra points you should offer on your promoted trade, that’s up to you. Keep in mind that you’ll have a lot of competition and people will be trying to outbid you. If you don’t offer enough, you’ll be passed over, but on less popular cards you can use the promoted trade function to put your want first and foremost before anybody else’s.

Things are going to change for the better. It might be late summer, but it will happen. Keep your hopes up and keep trading!

If you have any other questions or comments about today’s article please feel free to leave them down below! If you enjoyed this article and are convinced to start a Puca trade account, feel free to thank me by using this link to give me a referral bonus! If you are already a member (and have a silver or gold account) and want to show your appreciation, I’m always willing to accept gifts of points ^_^. Just check out my profile and click the “SEND POINTS” button. Thanks again for reading and see you back here in a few weeks for my next update!