CardCore just got a Tools section

This one's been on the list for a while. Players love stats. They love calculators. They love knowing whether that booster box is worth cracking or if they should just buy the singles. Today I shipped a full Tools section with four calculators that pull from our live market data.

Box EV Calculator - Pick a set, enter what you'd pay for a box, and instantly see the expected value broken down by every pull slot. Low, median, and high EV scenarios with ROI percentages. It tells you exactly whether that box is a gamble or a steal based on current market prices. Every rarity and variant slot is broken out so you can see where the value actually lives - spoiler, it's almost always the legendaries and foils.

Playset Cost Calculator - How much does it actually cost to own a full playset of every card in a set? Pick the set, pick the variant (Normal, Foil, Hyperspace, whatever), and get the exact total with per-rarity breakdowns. Every card is listed with its playset quantity (x3 for most, x1 for Leaders and Bases) and current market price. Click any card to go straight to its detail page.

Market Dashboard - A bird's eye view of the entire SWU market. Per-set stats showing total market value, average price, median price, and how many cards are over the $10, $25, and $50 thresholds. Rarity distribution bars showing where the value concentrates. Side-by-side 7-day risers and fallers. And a top 20 most valuable cards list across all sets. This is the page you check when you want to know what's happening in the market right now.

Draw Calculator - Hypergeometric probability calculator. What are the odds you draw at least one copy of a card in your opening hand? What about by turn 3? Plug in your deck size, copies in deck, and cards drawn, and get exact probabilities with a full distribution table. Quick presets for common SWU scenarios built in.

All four tools are free, no login required, and live at store.cardcore.gg/tools. The Box EV, Playset Costs, and Market Dashboard all pull from our real-time TCGPlayer market data. The Draw Calculator is pure math - runs entirely in your browser.

The Tools dropdown is in the main navigation now too, both desktop and mobile. This is the kind of feature that keeps players coming back between purchases. You don't have to buy anything to get value from CardCore.

Sealed product is live in the store

Yesterday I mentioned we'd have sealed product at the convention. Today I built the infrastructure to actually sell it through the platform.

The store page now has a collapsible Sealed Product section that sits above the singles inventory. Booster boxes, displays, packs, prerelease kits - anything that isn't a single card shows up here with product images, current market prices, and add-to-cart buttons. Same checkout flow as singles. When nothing's in stock, the section hides itself automatically.

On the staff side, there's a new Sealed Product acquisition mode on the Acquire Cards page. Staff can browse all sealed products by set, add them to a cart with per-item cost tracking (what we paid), set quantities, and optionally set a store sell price that overrides the market price. Hit submit and the products flow into inventory with full cost basis tracking, ready for customers to buy immediately.

The interesting technical challenge here was that sealed products have always existed in our pricing data - TCGPlayer tracks booster box prices just like they track card prices - but they were invisible because every query in the system filtered through card attributes (aspect, rarity, card type). Sealed products don't have those attributes. The fix was elegant: identify sealed products by the absence of a card attributes row. No schema changes, no new columns, no migration. Just an inverted join.

The Porg Depot inspiration

Credit where it's due - a lot of the Tools section was inspired by what Porg Depot has built for the SWU community. Their Porgonomics dashboard, box EV calculator, and hypergeometric tools showed there's real demand for this kind of analytical content. What we're doing differently is pulling from our own live market data and integrating everything into the platform where players are already shopping, building decks, and managing collections. The tools aren't a separate site - they're part of the ecosystem.

What's next

Fourteen days until the April 12th Premier Qualifier. Twenty days until the Atlanta Sector Qualifier. The tools are shipping, the sealed product pipeline is live, and the inventory keeps growing. Every day the platform gets more complete. Every feature makes the convention booth stronger.

Tomorrow: keep loading inventory, test the full sealed product purchase flow end-to-end, and probably ship another tool or two if I can't help myself.

Four new calculators. Sealed product sales. Staff acquisition workflows. All shipped in one session. The countdown continues.