There’s a new TCG marketplace in town. Today, on March 10, CardNexus is launching a hub for buying and selling cards in the US, Canada, and most of Europe, adding to the website’s card game inventory tracker which was already in open Beta.
But CEO Tristan Foureur doesn’t want to stop there. His end goal is to create a one stop shop for TCG players and collectors, incorporating each and every part of the “TCG journey”, with every useful tool you might require.
He says right now the TCG fandom is “scattered” across multiple different deck-building and buying/selling websites, with fans of less famous games still using Excel spreadsheets and Google Docs to log their cards. CardNexus’ mission statement is to make that organization simple, giving you more time to focus on the fun parts of the hobby.
Right now, the site will let you track your collection and buy and sell cards. But eventually, CardNexus wants to include everything from constructing and sharing decks, to tournaments, and even finding a local group to play with.
This ambitious plan is pretty boggling to comprehend, especially considering CardNexus’ small team and humble origins. The French company started a year and a half ago with three founding members, and it began simply as a pet project, a way for Foureur and friends to track their Sorcery collections, a new niche TCG which lacked the tools available for the likes of Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon.
Now CardNexus supports 10 different trading card games, with more planned in the near future. For instance, Star Wars Unlimited is on the no-too-distant horizon, apparently.
In a recent interview, I asked Foureur how difficult it would be for a new site to establish itself in the TCG secondary market, amongst more entrenched websites like CardMarket and TCGPlayer. He seemed undaunted, though, and claims that actually the barrier to entry is low.
In a recent interview, I asked Foureur how difficult it would be for a new site to establish itself in the TCG secondary market, amongst existing popular websites like CardMarket and TCGPlayer. He seemed undaunted, though, and claims that actually the barrier to entry is low.
He argues a lot of the collecting, sharing, and trading activity actually goes on in a motley assortment of Discord and Facebook selling groups – and they suck.
“It’s just post after post of people taking pictures of their cards or binders, and it’s a big mess. Like they’re doing ad hoc auctions in the comments… It is painful, it’s really not great.”
His logic seems to be that if people are merrily doing it that way, there must be a gap for a better service, whether that’s streamlined, convenient systems or extra tools to entice users.
Speaking of which, another tool CardNexus has developed, which it hopes to launch in the next 2-3 weeks is a multi-TCG card scanner. “We think we have the best card scanner that was ever built,” the CEO boasts, touting its ability to appraise cards in less than 100 milliseconds. I was pleased to see it had a system for flagging cards when two very similar variants exist, as card scanners without this feature have in the past briefly fooled me into thinking I was holding a super expensive Yugioh card, instead of simply bulk.
Another thing that caught my attention is that CardNexus’ road map is actually public. You can go online now and see what the developers are working on and even comment on and suggest features you want to see next.
Foureur expects to spend the next month or two on stabilization and squashing bugs. “We’re opening the flood gates, and we’re going to see what goes wrong, and things will go wrong,” he says. But after that, you’ll be able to track the progress the team is making for yourself.
I have to say, while initially sceptical about how another card marketplace could make its way in the world, I was impressed by Nexus’ ambition. Though I can’t pass judgement from just a few seconds of watching Foureur dart around demoing different filters and screens, what I saw of the available tools did look pretty swish.
I suppose this website’s success or failure is going to depend on whether folk find it more convenient than what’s already out there, sufficiently so that they’re willing to make a switch.
Source: Wargamer
