Week 5: Life Counters

I have been thinking a bit lately about the best way to keep track of life during the game. My playgroup mostly uses 20-sided die, however, when I visit local gaming stores I often see people using paper & pencil or a phone app. While my playgroup enjoys dice because of the visibility and tradition, I think paper & pencil or phone apps work well because they show current life total and the history of past life loss or life gain. I think this is the reason why these methods are so popular, especially at a competitive level. Personally, I think these methods are very good for competitive play and so I think the casual group is where we should look for innovation. I have seen a lot of custom counters and spin downs and life wheels, so there are obviously people who want to personalize their method of tracking life. It would be fun to see more innovation coming from companies. I think the recent release of Commander's Arsenal had an awesome dice and I would love to see more of that from Wizards and other companies. Especially when it is a "collector's item," because I saw that dice being sold for $20 on ebay, so clearly there is a demand (even if it is due to rarity). Hopefully we will see more of this type of innovation in the future. Happy Holidays!

Week 3: Trade Binders

What is your favorite way to store your trades?

For most people it is probably one of three things:
- Trade book with plastic placeholders
- 3-hole punch pages with plastic placeholders (to insert inside of a binder)
- Box or rubber-band

My question for the readers of this blog: do you can see any type of innovation for holding trades?

If you had to come up with a solution that would solve the 5 major issues below what would it be?
- Volume (being able to carry a large amount of cards)
- Portability (easy for travel and not too large)
- Protection (protecting the cards)
- Visibility (making the cards easily visible & accessible)
- Price (cost to own and use)

Currently I think the current options solve these issues well, but for the purpose of the blog let's see if we can think of an improvement for each issue. I will update as people post their ideas! I encourage you to participate! Don't be afraid to push the boundaries, but make sure what you suggest is also feasible (only the cards are Magic).

Volume:

Portability:

Protection:

Visibility:

Price:

Other: This is for any other improvements or innovations that you all can think of.

I will start us off with an idea. This would go under the Other category. I think it would be cool if there was a phone application that you could enter your collection into. It could have a simple search engine and provide real-time prices via TCGplayer or something similar. This way players who want to look for specific cards could look through another player's trades more quickly. Something like this may already exist, but I didn't see anything too advanced with my quick Google search.

See you again next week!