Building CardCore in Public
Dev logs, feature deep-dives, and the story of building a trading card game platform from scratch.
Building CardCore - August 27, 2026 - Seven Games, One Platform
Pokémon just went live on CardCore, making seven trading card games fully transactable on one platform. Here is why that number matters more than the games themselves.
Building CardCore - June 4, 2026 - The Bigger Room: Magic, Three Stores, and a 3 A.M. Disaster
Seven weeks of silence: how the Sector Qualifier went, launching Magic: The Gathering, three live stores, and the night a 3am update bricked production.
Building CardCore - April 17, 2026 - Founders, CardsHQ, and the Make-or-Break Window
One day before the 500-player Sector Qualifier, 68 commits deep, a squad dinner at CardsHQ, 20 pre-orders out the door, 10 trade-ins taken on the chin, a Founders Club in the wild, and the uncomfortable honesty that the only real reward for pulling this off is more work.
Building CardCore - April 15, 2026 - 50 Down, 500 to Go, and LXO Just Signed On
Three days after our first real tournament we have two hundred new bugs fixed, one expensive pricing lesson, a brand new pro-team partnership with LXO, and a 500-player Sector Qualifier looming at Gas South on Saturday. Breathing optional.
Building CardCore - April 12, 2026 - The Lab Goes Live (Soft Launch Day)
28 commits, 2AM finishes two nights running, and today nearly 70 players walk into TCF Gaming Arena for the PQ to stress-test CardCore in the wild. The Lab, sideboard zones, pull list overhaul, trade-in tooling, and a deploy pipeline that catches its own mistakes.
Building CardCore - April 9, 2026 - Theory Boards, Trade QA, and 90 Commits in 48 Hours
CardCore shipped a full collaborative theory board system, crushed a 9-bug QA session on the trading platform, overhauled Box EV, landed TCGPlayer Sprint 3, and pushed 90 commits across 30+ tickets in just two days.
Building CardCore - April 9, 2026 - Wait, There's More (Part 2 of a Day That Refused to End)
The first blog post covered 90 commits. Then we kept going. 31 more commits, real-time WebSocket collaboration, a 9-bug theory board audit, automated QA robots, and a 22-hour session that started at midnight.
Building CardCore - April 6, 2026 - Meta Intelligence, 37 Commits, and the VL's Who Made It Happen
CardCore shipped a full /meta page with archetype tiers, matchup analysis, and deck builder intelligence - plus load testing, pricing fixes, and a shout out to the team that makes it all possible.
Building CardCore - April 5, 2026 - Deck Builder V2: Meta Stats Baked In, Analytics on Everything, and Pulling Some Heat
The CardCore deck builder just got a massive overhaul - live SWU Meta Stats on every card, deep deck analytics, test hands, and a considering shelf. Plus a personal aside about cracking packs and remembering why we build this.
Building CardCore - April 5, 2026 - Five Games, One Platform, and Why We Built a Safety Net First
CardCore now supports five trading card games - SWU, Magic, Lorcana, Sorcery, and Riftbound. But before we shipped a single new game page, we built the nonprod safety infrastructure to make sure we never lose customer data again.
Building CardCore - April 3, 2026 - Meta Stats, Deck Comments, and the Road to Best-in-Class
Three days of intense building: SWUMetaStats integration, deck comments, full-text synergy search, trade workflow redesign, pricing architecture overhaul, and a 22-ticket sprint plan to make the deck builder the best in the SWU ecosystem.
Building CardCore - March 31, 2026 - Twin Suns Builder, DB Pool Crisis, and 16 Commits
The Twin Suns Module Builder goes live with 12 curated modules, a critical DB connection pool exhaustion bug gets squashed, checkout pricing validation gets fixed, and the collection dashboard gets a major performance overhaul.
Building CardCore - March 30, 2026 - Square Terminal Goes Live, Tournament Check-In Ships, and Our First Team Meeting
First real credit card payment through Square Terminal, a full tournament check-in system built for the April 12 PQ, card processing fee transparency, and CardCore's first team meeting with 5 people.
Building CardCore - March 29, 2026 - Performance Hardening, 142 Tickets Closed, and 2,000 Cards Sorted
Made the whole system feel snappy for 200+ concurrent users, found and fixed a critical financial math bug, crushed 7 user-reported bugs, and sorted nearly 2,000 cards from A Lawless Time by hand.
Building CardCore - March 29, 2026 - Player Tools Launch and Sealed Product Goes Live
Shipped a full Tools section with Box EV Calculator, Playset Cost Calculator, Market Dashboard, and Draw Calculator. Plus sealed product is now buyable in the store with a full staff acquisition workflow.
Building CardCore - March 28, 2026 - Inventory Loaded, Square Terminal In Hand, and Magic on the Horizon
SWU inventory is loaded and ready, bought another case of Lawless Time, Square Terminal arrived for contactless payments, and Magic: The Gathering card import is taking shape behind the scenes.
Building CardCore - March 27, 2026 - Three Pricing Bombs, a Visual Revolution, and Why I'm Looking at Magic
Found three critical pricing bugs that would have burned us at the convention, shipped visual overhauls across every major feature, got our first table covers delivered, and started researching Magic: The Gathering.
Building CardCore - March 26, 2026 - Trilogy Overhaul, Five Bugs Crushed, and Convention Gear Is Coming
Rebuilt the Trilogy deck builder from scratch, shipped a card preview system, squashed five user-reported bugs, and our custom table cover and polos are on the way.
Building CardCore - March 25, 2026 - A Partnership, A Visual Overhaul, and Twenty Bug Fixes
Shipped a SWU Meta Stats integration from a real partnership meeting, overhauled the store visual design, then triaged 25 user-reported bugs and fixed 20 of them in a single session.
We Got a Vendor Booth at the Atlanta Sector Qualifier
CardCore is officially vending at the Star Wars: Unlimited Sector Qualifier in Atlanta on April 18th. Plus we shipped a QR scanning portal, wishlist sharing, and ordered our first branded polos.
Our Server Couldn't Handle a Convention - So We Rebuilt It at Midnight
Load testing revealed CardCore's single-process architecture would buckle under 50 concurrent users. At midnight, we ripped out the service manager and rebuilt on pm2 cluster mode. Here's what broke, what didn't work, and what saved us.
The Trading Refactor, Repack Oversight, and Our First Instagram Post
We shipped the biggest feature overhaul in CardCore's history - a complete rebuild of peer-to-peer trading with 14 new database tables, a tradeable quantity engine, user blocking, IOUs, and auto-expiry. Plus repack store management and our first social media post.
Day One of Being Findable - SEO, QR Codes, and Hiring QA
CardCore was invisible to Google. Today we fixed that with structured data, a blog, sitemaps, and a brand icon. Plus - QR code pickups and our first QA team.
Building CardCore in Public - Day One
500+ hours into building a trading card game platform as a solo founder. Here's why I'm starting to share the process.