The inventory is in and it's real

The Star Wars Unlimited singles inventory is loaded into CardCore and ready to go. Cards are in the system, prices are pulling from market data, and the store page is live. This has been weeks of work - building the acquisition tools, the pricing engine, the bulk pricing system, the inventory management UI - and now it's all running with real product behind it.

I also picked up another case of A Lawless Time. Partially because I want more inventory depth for the convention, but honestly? I want to use it to show off the system. Opening a case and entering every card through the Set Entry mode I just built (COREAPP-754) is the fastest way to demonstrate what CardCore can do. You crack a box, scan through the cards, tap the variants, and everything flows into the store - priced, categorized, and available for purchase immediately. That's the demo. That's the pitch. "I just opened this box five minutes ago and you can already buy any card from it."

On top of singles, I'll have sealed product available at the event too. Booster boxes, individual packs - the physical product that players are looking for on tournament day. Between singles and sealed, we'll have something for everyone at the booth.

Square Terminal is here

The Square Terminal arrived today and I'm ready to get it set up. This is a big deal for the convention. Contactless payments - tap your card, tap your phone, Apple Pay, Google Pay - all the ways people actually want to pay in 2026. No more "sorry, cash only" or fumbling with a phone card reader that drops the connection.

But it's not just contactless. I'm setting up all the digital payment options too - Venmo, CashApp, Zelle, PayPal - all the peer-to-peer payment apps that players already have on their phones. At a convention, speed matters. If someone wants to buy a card and their preferred way to pay is Venmo, I don't want that to be a reason they walk away. Every payment method I accept is one fewer reason to lose a sale.

The goal is simple: however you want to pay, we can take it. Card, phone, app, cash. No friction.

Magic: The Gathering - it's happening (quietly)

I've been teasing the Magic work and I want to give a proper update. There's been a lot of progress on the MTG front. We've got 111 million rows of pricing data imported, card attribute enrichment from Scryfall, browse and detail pages built, image pipelines running, and query performance tuned against a dataset that dwarfs our SWU catalog by orders of magnitude.

The recent work has been deep in the weeds - fixing LATERAL join ordering so Foil-only cards don't show blank images, rewriting queries to avoid slow scans on 111 million rows, building a feature flag system so MTG stays hidden until it's ready, and getting local image paths wired up so card images load fast. Every one of those commits represents a real problem solved against a massive dataset.

But I want to be clear about where this sits in the priority stack: Magic is side prep. The main event right now is getting the Star Wars Unlimited inventory system bulletproof for the convention. The manual work of sorting cards, entering inventory, setting prices, testing the checkout flow with real product - that's what's eating my days. The MTG engineering work happens in the gaps, early mornings and late nights, building the foundation so that when SWU is running smoothly and the conventions are behind us, we can flip the switch and CardCore becomes a multi-game platform.

That's the vision. Star Wars Unlimited first, Magic: The Gathering next. One game at a time, each one proving the architecture can scale.

What's next

Fifteen days until the April 12th Premier Qualifier at TCF Gaming Arena in McDonough. Twenty-one days until the Atlanta Sector Qualifier. The countdown is real.

Between now and then: get the Square Terminal configured and tested, finalize the booth payment workflow, keep entering inventory, and keep polishing every screen a player or store owner might see. The software is ready. The inventory is ready. Now it's about the physical logistics - making sure the booth experience is as smooth as the digital one.

Inventory loaded. Square Terminal in hand. Sealed product ready. Every payment method covered. And Magic cards quietly loading in the background. The convention countdown is on.