Where I’ve been, and Where We are Going!

After a brief illness and some work related travel, I am back and wanted to take this opportunity to give some updates on recent happenings around these parts, as well as the direction we’re now heading. This will mark my 25th post since posting Have Courage and Be Kind, my often referenced discussion about my journey on PucaTrade. Shortly thereafter, I started expanding with other MTG topics outside of the realm of PucaTrade.

The Beginning

The first three articles are by far the most read and referenced things I have posted thus far.  Almost daily, new users come into Discord with questions and concerns with the health of Pucatrade.com and the volatile economy.  For easy reference here are the three articles in chronological order:

• Have Courage and Be Kind
• Puca Trading–The Strictly Average Method
• Strictly Short – A Want List That Works

The Team

Somewhere in between the second and the third article the SA team grew by one. I obtained an Editor and a sort of consigliere. Let us call this mystery member of the team Mr. White. The thoughts and meat of the articles remained my own work, but Mr. White advises me on how to get my message out and helps me immensely by fixing my mistakes.

We began to have discussions about the future of the site, and what the end goal would be. I came to the realization that my little project here would need to have some financial help if it would succeed, so we decided to create a Patreon to assist in covering some of the expenses.  The first month of Patreon was insane, as our partners on the site raised over $65 in the first month. Which shattered our first 3 goals within days of posting them. Thank you for that!

Patreon Giveaways and Goals

Our drawings for the January Patron Giveaways were held the first week of February. We gave away 1,000 puca points (any patron is eligible for this), 2 packs of Eternal Masters, and a Foil Grenzo from Conspiracy two. Recently I’ve been working hard on getting the new web host environment set up so I can move the site off of the free WordPress host, as this was made possible by Goal #1. I anticipate being able to announce the new domain name and have all of my existing content moved over by the middle of next week.

Once the new site is setup, I’ll begin to address the next two goals. Goal #2 was setup to allow me to stream regularly and record videos for the site. I’ve started doing some random streams and will soon work out a schedule for recording weekly videos; I still need to acquire some hardware and software for this.  My focus has been moving the site to the new hosting, and I anticipate having this done by the end of February.

Goal #3 was also shattered during the first month, which was to Post daily content, instead of 3 times a week.  For the near future, until Goals 1 and 2 are actualized on my end, we’ll keep with the 3 times a week schedule.  I am anticipating having a revamped posting schedule during the beginning of March. The ideas is that we’ll be publishing 3 unique content pieces a week, and we’ll be hosting 2 guest pieces a week. The end goal is to offer a benefit to other writers to join the team on a regular basis. I’ll be working on a cleaner and better content submission process along with the new site, to allow users to send in their work.

February Giveaway

For the month of February, I will be giving away a Battle-Box to my Premium Patrons. If we can sign up more partners on the Patreon site I will sweeten the deal with the Battle-Box, and also send it in a handcrafted deck box that I bought from a craftsman within our community. The deck box is gorgeous and the purchase and process has given me an idea for a new article series on the site.

Artist Showcase

I’ll soon be writing an article about the craftsman who I’ve purchased two deck boxes from (One as a giveaway for Patrons, and one for my personal decks.) This will be the first piece in the Artist Showcase series, where I plan on showcasing talented craftsman and artists in the Magic Community. If you have something neat and creative you would like to share, please feel free to drop me a note here.

This showcase can be used to help promote sales of a service or just show off something cool being working on.  The idea is to build up all who are creating cool things.  My Artist Showcase is meant to celebrate the works of others but not compare or create any sort of competition among the creators.  There will be plenty of times where I’ll post a piece about a creator that is overlapping with something someone else is creating.

Anyways, that’s it for this week.  I am looking forward to battling at Game Day this weekend and will be doing a write-up on the deck I landed on, and my tournament results for the weekend.

May your Draws be bombs, and your Mulligans be few,
Strictly

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