Magi-Soft Forums

So you move away from Magic Geekery? =P

ha ha.. that location thing is purely for fun Im always there, in my mind..
Im finding a new boondocks to live in after moving away from the other boondocks.
Depending on internet availability and gumption, I will attempt to keep the updating going...


"Lord have mercy on the boy from down in the boondocks"

A new updated price collection is up on my site..
973 now fixed!!

Noticed some errors recently.
In addition to incorrect sets, there are a number of cards incorrectly priced due to bad data that missed filtering from the ebay-sales script that MT uses. If you sort a pricebase by price descending, you will notice some cards priced way over what they should be. These can be edited by hand if you wish. Currently under 10 of these stand out with prices over $50 to $1000 which should be $0.10-0.50 commons. Also, there are a large group of cards mispriced with 9.99 prices. REMEMBER that the data is not 100% accurate, and don't trust any totaling of value of a list of cards if the list has these particular cards in them! Use common sense on the prices given.
(this was added to the first post also)

In this last update, I corrected some of these; but I may not continue to do so for every update. Its far too time consuming, and I'm making guesses as to what the price should be.

I started a thread on MagicTraders to bring this to their attention, but nothing has come of it (AFAIK); the current pricelist still has the same errors it seems to be carrying over for years.

http://www.magictraders.com/ubb/Forum8/HTML/001889.html

Well folks, upon getting back to my comp and downloading new prices, I was in for a shock.
I noticed something disturbing from the list a month ago.. the filesize went way down (used to be around 1100kb, now 680kb), only around 8000 prices listed now. From a cursory look, it appears someone did change the script programming, and all the stale Raw-N 1 cards were dropped. The previous behavior was those cards with 0 activity were left untouched and rolled their price over to the next list. Now all that better-than-nothing historical rollover data is gone from new pricelists, leaving a huge void of nonpriced cards. There are still N=1 cards, but only from current sales.

On one hand, this is a good move, eliminating unreliable data in favor of reliable current activity. On the other hand, if a card has occasional sales, it may appear for a few days and then vanish off the list, losing the recent fact of activity and possible pricing for someone interested. The prices of the infrequent and few-sales cards are lost. The Pricelists have gone from their namesake to a Whats Hot list, only listing what few cards are in demand on the market.

I can no longer use the price data for MWS with so many prices missing. Again, some data, albeit "last known" and unknown when the last activity was, is extremely better than nothing. I may need prices for 6 year old commons (for example), which will never be sold on ebay in singular; their last known price was great (if accurate - not 9.99 or something silly). Now I can only stare at a null entry and wonder what the price was.


So, given that I don't want to support a list thats not comprehensive anymore, I will suspend updates until I figure out a way to fix this situation. Possibilities include spending a lot of time with some spreadsheets creating a correct baseline price for all the cards using saved pricelists from years of data, (fixing all the out-of-range bogus prices like the $200+ commons and 9.99 ones - bad data) that see no action and will not appear in new pricelists, then once that task is complete I can repeatedly synch in the latest data and make a proper price file release.

You can update your MWS prices on your own with the online update, but be WARNED if you do, MWS *CLEARS* the price base you choose to save data to, so you will only get the much smaller list of prices from MagicTraders and all the non-listed cards will go to the red n/a. If you need the latest prices, and want to keep SOMETHING rather than nothing for the old non-selling cards, do create a new separate price base for the current MT data download, and add it to your price pane view in mws "manage price bases" menu.


For now I will direct you to some websites that are tracking historical trends on card prices (cool!) or otherwise list prices easily:
http://www.findmagiccards.com/ store prices
http://blacklotusproject.com/ shows a hi-tech graph, data starts from late 2008
http://apathyhouse.com/pricelist/pricelist.php lots of data, older price histories

Ok. Scratch that. After discovering the above and talking on magictraders forum, I heard back from Leshrac, an admin, and he settled the story. Seems there was a recent server move, and they decided to set the pricelists to a blank slate - Since July sometime they have only been recording current auction prices. All the carry-over data from years now on card sales that have had no activity are gone. So, all the inaccurate data is gone, which isnt so bad, because all we have to do is wait a while for sales to happen and gradually rebuild data points. So far, compared to the original listing with 14000 entries, the latest download comes up with 9133. Two weeks ago it was 1000 less. So a week or two, and there should be enough data to be worthwhile to make an update again with significant coverage of cards.

Now.. neat trick to pass along. Compare pricing from old to current in MWS:
Start with your current state of price files. Run the price import update (from online), save the data in a new file or you will lose your old prices. Now in the bottom grid open the .mwprice file you just updated. Select a card of your choice, and compare the price in the base to the price you see on the right sidebar of MWS.. since MWS loads the prices into RAM when it starts up, you get to see your old prices there (until you restart MWS if you updated overtop your current magictraders file).

I noticed a healthy price jump on T1 cards from June to now.

Ok time to resume updates. The card count today is 9585.
New price zip uploaded..
NEW: I'm leaving the june/9/09 pricebase files on the website as a different download for archival purposes for folks who want to look up one of those cards which no longer has price data due to the magictraders list reset. These archive pricebases have different names so they won't conflict with the current ones. Add them to your "pricebase management" list if you wish, however I do not recommend showing more than 4 bases at one time due to mws memory issues.

Click into my Profile to hit my website link (this new forum has no WWW button on posts).

Total fixed is 632.. M10 fully working too.
Luckily all the MWS expansion codes have matched the codes used in the pricelists in the last few years.
I also note that the pricelist does not carry prices for any of the recent box sets.. duel decks or From the Vault.

Back..
Card count way up this month, 14290. Back to where it should be.
Fixed count - 830

See website download like before

Holiday season update..
fixed 872, card count slightly higher than last month.

Cheers!

Well I have been away! Found a gf.. kinda took away my time.. and I didnt have computer setup for months..

959 now fixed, more cards with the new expansion and such.

Back again, new RoE prices and such. Mine, Mine, Mine! has resurfaced in the prices and now has to be manually fixed again for its commas (its that 1 card skipped when you do a straight internet update from magictraders).
1050 fixed.
New files on my website..

I found a few things to change today. With the latest GoblinHero base as reference, I was working with the Magician database software to update its set codes and noticed Starter 2000 is coded as S00 now, where for years past it was ST2. This needed to be addressed in my price fixes! I have updated my fix script now, and it now properly codes the 12 cards in the MagicTraders prices from ST2 to S00.

Additionally I discovered I had coded a fix for the card Who/What/When/Where/Why to strip the slashes, and this edit is no longer needed to match up to the GH database entry, so I removed that fix check from my script.

I have manually revised my last price files with these changes and uploaded it now to my site. The first post of this thread's change list is updated as well.

Back for another update - found some more things to fix. I've changed the set code for the Player Rewards from REW to MPR to match GH's base, and found the old Arena promo card needed its code fixed and was not before. I'm setting those old book promos to PR as they have been for years, however GH's base has 3 extra set codes for them (I've noted this in the first post for a while now). To see their prices you will have to view the price base file and search for them - they will not match up to GH's base set codes for the auto-prices box to show them.

Current update fixes 1103 entries..
Total card prices coming in from MagicTraders is 15438, compared to 17716 records available. (Some foil prices appearing only in the Foil list for promos not counted)

Well, the slightlymagic base now has alot more promos, and JSS is there called JUN, so I've added that code change. No other promo set seems to match up. (Most promos in the price lists are just PR)

1120 fixed, zip files uploaded.

Oh, and I've finally updated my old-frame theme up to ROE icons...

Ok - time for another update. 35 more cards fixed. I took the liberty of resetting some fake 9.99 prices back to normal, and IA Trailblazer was $85?? WTF? I can only guess the MagicTraders ebay script doesn't screen out artist proof sales.

Surprisingly after doing a personal high-value cards price check, LOTS of prices are UP. Heck, I just sold a played Tundra for $52.. a nice profit from when I bought it at $18 in 2002. Of course I'm not gonna get that full amount after the combined ebay and paypal fees take 13 FVCKING percent off..