Hello everyone! I’m stepping out from behind the usual confines of the Insider zone to bring you a very important announcement regarding the future of Quiet Speculation and some of our very best features.

As you may be aware, a while back (almost a year ago, time has certainly flown), I introduced the Prediction Tracker, an idea I dreamed up after months of raging about the quality of some of the articles I read. I was tired of reading articles about how the author made the most amazing and perfectly correct call on [CARDNAME], while simultaneously ignoring the cards they said would spike and instead faded into obscurity.

With very few people willing to delve back into old articles and point out these incorrect calls while others would blindly support a writer, I decided there had to be a better way to keep people accountable.

Enter the Prediction Tracker.

Of course, in its final evolved form (Stage 2 even), the Tracker did so much more than that. It allowed an easy way to contributors to collaborate on card speculating, and provided all of that information in an easy-to-read format for readers of Quiet Speculation. We made some very public and correct calls on the Tracker, including the rise of Consecrated Sphinx and Dark Confidant, which made everyone involved a ton of cash. In no time at all, my little idea to add accountability to the financial world had quickly become a tool to make all of us hundreds of dollars from Magic, and needless to say it was one of our most popular features.

The problem is that, as a startup, we at Quiet Speculation have lots of good ideas but not always the technical expertise to make it work, and the Tracker showed our limits when we hit our input limit a few months later. We made the best of the tools we had, but the bottom line is that it simply grew too big.

At that point, the decision was made to take the current model of the Tracker down while QS founder Kelly Reid worked on a new version, one he built himself while teaching himself how to program. From there, we hoped the new version would roll out soon, but it wasn’t able to happen as quickly as we had hoped. That said, there is a very good reason for this, and I’ll let Kelly explain in his own words.

“Here's what you need to know:

We have spent the last few months working with Ross Allen, who is the guy behind Black Lotus Project. He'll be developing a new generation of our software, one which will add real-time pricing capability to our site.  We developed a rudimentary new prediction tracker, but rather than release it, we want to let Ross do his thing.  He's a professional, a front-end developer for airbnb.com <http://airbnb.com> , and wrote the ticker that appears on our site.

Our development has hit a bunch of small speed bumps, the kind that every little startup goes through, and we decided that until we have a Ross' software working, we wanted to have something online since we got so many requests. We're excited about what he's working on and appreciate the patience as we learn and grow as a young company!”

As you might have gathered, we have decided to do what we can with what we have while Ross works on developing our software on a more professional level. I’ve seen the very early stages of this, and I can tell you it’s some pretty awesome stuff. There isn’t a ready-to-announce timeline yet on the stuff he and Kelly are working on, but there is something else we can do.

That’s right, the Prediction Tracker is back.

You can always find the Tracker up at https://www.quietspeculation.com/predictions/. In addition, at the top of our homepage under the Prediction Tracker dropdown you can always click on “This week’s Tracker” to find the above link.

Bringing it back

I’ve known for a little while that it was best to get something up while the new Tracker is being developed. I also knew that we needed to address some of the problems of the old Tracker.

The biggest issue we had is that we had too many people inputting too many cards. We don’t need a pages-long list of every card that might someday find a home; we need an easy-to-access page that will let readers know what we are targeting personally.

I feel like we’ve addressed that concern by keeping the contributor list a bit tighter (though we’ll likely be adding 1-2 people over the next few months), and asking each contributor to keep the number of cards they include down to the calls they feel most strongly about.

As always, let me stress that we’re not some faceless corporation rolling out these features. We’re Magic players and traders just like you working hard to make Quiet Speculation the best it can be, and your feedback is vital to that. Let me know what you think about the Tracker and any ways it can be improved. You can reach me through the comment section here, inside our forums or on Twitter @Chosler88.

I’m as excited as all of you for the next phase in Quiet Speculation’s evolution, and I hope you all enjoy the Prediction Tracker and get as much out of it as I do!

Thanks for reading,

Corbin Hosler

@Chosler88 on Twitter