DevLog #10 MTG Trader

Welcome to our DevLog for MTG Doctor Phoenix, the next generation of MTG Doctor. If you’ve been a member of the MTG Doctor community all these years, thank you for your support and if you are not familiar with MTG Doctor thanks for taking the time to read our log. This time we are introducing all the new experiences coming to the MTG Trader feature.

Re-Design Motivation

The MTG Trader feature was originally designed with the goal of having a way to evaluate trades by providing an estimate of the value of the cards exchanged. While it accomplished that quite well there are a few areas we wanted to improve upon.

• Glanceability: When looking at a trade we currently have to look closely at the number of copies of a card we are exchanging. We found over time that this could be taxing to some and slow the overall trade.

• Lack of Intuitiveness: The original version drops us into a screen with little information about the feature itself while the modal for the card options gives too many options many of which we experienced over time were going unused and just adding to the lack of intuitiveness suffered by the original version.

• High Interaction Cost: Often times we have a physical trade binder but when using the original version we were still required to find each card we were trading using a limited search something which also ended up slowing up the trade and added friction to the experience.

New MTG Trader

For the new version the trade screen now conveys more information about the components in the trader reducing the amount of guess work needed.

The information about the number of copies and the value of each has also been accentuated in this new design allowing us to get that information at a glance. If multiple copies are being traded they are now displayed as a full card for each copy rather than the small piece of information that was displayed in the rows of the original version.

Another improvement to the glanceability of this feature was the addition of the foil treatment to a card copy. Not only is this information now glanceable in the new design but it’s also a feature that was not present in the original version.

The individual card controls also saw a simplification in this feature doing away with some of the controls to simplify the overall interaction to reduce much of the friction during the trade.

New Features

During this re-design we also took a moment to improve the overall trader experience by adding new feature.

On of those feature is the ability to complete a trade. This integrates the trader with our collection feature allowing for more than a simple cleanup. When completed, a trade will now add the received cards to your collection. This is an optional feature which can be toggled on or off when completing the trade. If the cards involved in the trade were selected from one or more of the binders, the copies traded will also be removed from those binders.

The other new addition is the binders feature that allow the creation of binders to be used to track cards for trading. Binders allows us to reduce the time spent looking for the card during a trade by allowing us to have those cards already set aside inside the binders ahead of time.

Much like with physical binders this features let’s us have one or more trade binders with the copies of cards we have available for trading. One additional benefit from the digital nature of MTG Doctor is that we can also have what we call chase binders.

Chase binders are binders of cards that we are interested in trading for. With binders, adding cards to the trade is just a matter of tapping on the card in the respective binder cutting down on the need to search for the card every time.

When selecting a card from a binder it will be added to either the giving or receiving side of the binder depending on whether the cards tapped is inside a chase binder or trade binder respectively. And much like with the trade view, binders display each copy in the binder as an individual card copy.

Closing Thoughts

Thank you for reading this far and for using MTG Doctor all these years. Whether it has been one year or the entire 12+ years MTG Doctor would not have grown into such a great tool as it has. Join us during future DevLogs as we continue to share the next generation of MTG Doctor built on over 12 years of experiences and lessons. 

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