If you follow me on Twitter (@goingmadlem), you'll know I spend the bulk of my tweeting doing one of three things: complaining about people in public/people driving, trolling Nick Becvar, or tweeting about Pucatrade.

Pucatrade started as a way for players to get fair trades with their cards but has grown to be so much more. Like all great websites from the last decade, Pucatrade provides a service that generates volumes of data. I'm not saying that Pucatrade is the MTG equivalent of Facebook, but there are certainly a number of applications beyond just trading cards.

The Basics

For those of you already familiar with Pucatrade, you can skip this part unless you just really like words. There will be plenty of those.

Pucatrade uses its own currency to facilitate trades. This currency is known as "Puca Points."

How do you acquire this mythical currency? You can buy points, which helps fund the site, or you can send cards to other players. The point values are based loosely on a combination of TCGPlayer and other stores' prices, so a point translates to roughly one shiny penny.

So let's say Bob has acquired 500 pts and added a card worth 450 pts to his "want list". You can simply confirm the trade and mail him the card. When he receives the card, he confirms that he received it and you get the 450 pts. After that, you add cards to your "want list" and as points become available to you, people will start mailing you cards.

I know what you're getting ready to ask. What happens when someone starts scamming? Pucatrade has a pretty responsive staff when it comes to disputes, but the most important thing to remember is that most players have to "buy in" to the system to get points in the first place, so honesty is a welcomed side effect of the system.

You Can Stop Skipping Now

Pucatrade does offer a number of features and tools that you can apply to Magic Finance in general. For example:

One of the most basic tools you have access to are the most sent cards. This gives you a finger on the pulse of the Magic community as a whole. While Pucatrade isn't universally used by Magic players, there is now a large enough community to treat it as a legitimate "sample group" that represents Magic as a whole. Just looking at the top sends here, you see that Pucatrade is clearly not a "casual" player's tool to get random EDH cards and the like.

The top sent cards page shows the top 50 cards sent and is sortable into various time frames. A simple drop down menu lets you choose between weekly, monthly, or even the top traded cards of each year.

Just looking at the top eight cards on this list shows me that Treasure Cruise Delver decks are extremely popular in Modern. So much so that the components have been elevated to the most traded cards of all time.

Predicting Price Spikes

I've been using Pucatrade as a tool for predicting the trajectory of cards for a while now. Because the number of points available rivals the number of Pokemon in the wild, players feel like they really need to catch 'em all, so trades don't often last long for cards worth more than than $2-3 (my minimum send threshold is $2.50, for example). When I take a look at my "sends" page, I can garner a decent amount of information based on what I see.

The sends page is sortable by a number of categories, as you can see below, so it's easy to manipulate the data to give you exactly what you're looking for.

I usually log into my account at least once a day, but more often around big tournament weekends. Here's a small section of the sends page just to give you an example.

This is what my sends pages as looked like for the past couple months. Steam Vents galore. Everybody wants Steam Vents, but I'm not sending many.

Why is that? Because look at how many people are clamoring to get them! I can click through to each of these players profiles and see their entire want lists and you know what I see? Just Steam Vents.

So this tells me two things: tons of people want Steam Vents and most people don't want to send them at the current price.

I can search "Steam Vents" and Pucatrade will pull up every version printed. If I hover my cursor over the edition I'm interested in, it will reveal how many people want that card and how many people have that card to send. Every user has their own priorities for what they're going to send, but for the most part, people only add cards to their "Haves" if they're looking to send those cards out.

You can also click through to the version and see who both wants the card and has the points to cover it right now.

Seeing the same cards on the sends page day after day tells me those cards are either experiencing a spike or a pseudo buyout.

That's right, there are some #MTGFinance gurus on Pucatrade as well, and it's often funny to see the correlation between Tweets and what everyone has on their "wants" page.

For example, a few months ago someone (I think Corbin Hosler) tweeted that Doomwake Giant was a good "penny stock" pickup. Next thing I knew, my entire sends page was filled with Doomwake Giants, and I watched its asking price go from 45 points all the way up to where it is now.

Once in a while if I like a pick, I'll dive in. Here's a snapshot of my inbound trades from the last few days:

The great thing about utilizing Pucatrade to acquire penny stocks is that you don't foot the bill for shipping. If you have some points sitting around unused, just add those cards to your want list and they'll start showing up a few days later.

The Watcher

Another tool that I utilize is the "Watch" list. This tool is a great way for me to keep track of cards I know I'm going to want eventually but am not quite ready to pull the trigger on because I don't feel they've hit bottom or are not my top priority quite yet.

As you can see, I have a passing interest in playing Faeries in Modern. But I am not ready to commit to acquiring the cards just yet because I think these cards have room to come down in price. You can also see Lifebane Zombie in there, another card I feel has long term potential but hasn't found it's bottom.

You can also use this tool if you just want to create a list of cards that you want to keep an eye on the price of, though I'm sure there are other ways to do that more effectively.

Access

Pucatrade is a great way to sell into spikes without the hassle of listing cards on eBay or TCGPlayer.

If money is your only motivation, you'll want to go a different route, but if opening your trade binder to thousands of players instead of dozens is your goal, Pucatrade is a tool for you.

I consider myself a fairly casual user of Pucatrade. I normally just check it a few times while watching movies or football or even Magic coverage. Here's a look at the top cards I've received and you can see the total dollar value of the trades of completed at the top.

As you can see, I've "traded" away nearly $7,000 in cards that I didn't want for cards that I did want, including the bulk of my foil Khans fetchlands and some foil shocklands for my Ravnica Cube(d).

Pucatrade also gives me access to cards that aren't as readily available for trade at my local game store. For example, I wanted 8-12 copies of Elspeth, Sun's Champion before rotation. There were basically none available for trade at my local game store, so I acquired them on Pucatrade when they dipped down to roughly $20. And once they hit $25-28, I mailed half of them right back out. "Flipping" cards at your local game store doesn't work nearly as well when you're trying to trade cards at a higher price back to the same people you got them from.

Storing Value

This is far and away my favorite feature of Pucatrade. The ability to store the value of my cards.

Every time a new set is released, I tear into those boxes like a mad man and make two piles: the "keep" pile for the cards I need for decks and the "ship" pile for cards  I think are going to go down in value (hint: almost all of them).

A couple hours after the set is released, I've already mailed out a number of the set's hottest cards at the hottest prices. Even just being able to "cash in my chips" by sending out Standard cards that I'm not using lets me get out at the best possible moment without having to decide what exactly I want to trade for. How many times have you sat down with a trade partner that wanted everything you were trying to get rid of but currently had nothing you wanted?

Pucatrade is one of the best kept secrets in Magic right now. But unlike most "best kept secrets," it only gets better with more users.

It allows you to store value, anticipate trends, and gives you access to thousands of trade partners the world over. You can literally turn a mountain of commons and uncommons into the cards your little heart desires most. They'll even give you points just for signing up to get you started.

Hell, they'll even give me points if you sign up here. You can't beat that for value, and value is always the most important thing to any Magic player, right?