Echo started as a project to help me make fast calculations when trading on magictraders.com. In 2013 I turned it into a homepage that displayed prices. Shortly after, I released an iPhone app that searches cards and displays prices (basically I missed the iPhone app Orchish Librarian so much, i needed to replace it). In September 2014, I opened up a user system for people to track their collections. When beta opened, 40 users joined from /r/mtgfinance to test out the system, thank you brave beta users, your feedback and testing kick started what Echo is today! P.S. you have all been awarded Mythic status for life!  

Between now and then, there have been handfuls of passionate community members writing me to help grow EchoMTG. People mention everything from feature requests, to product ideas, to alerts when Echo is missing a card. These people, and all of you using Echo daily, is what pushes me to make a kickass Magic: the Gathering collection tool. Thank you all!

Listening to a growing community

The community is on the verge of 2000 people whom track over 3.5 Million dollars worth the magic cards. THREE POINT FIVE MILLION DOLLARS. Yea, that is no joke, and it is growing everyday. The exciting part is the more that gets tracked, the closer we can get to showing real stats like a true market does. Now we have all these awesome people tracking serious numbers, and I've had many of them ask if they could blog on Echo, and I love that idea.

Community forum and blogging

After a couple weeks of thinking really hard, I decided to make a hybrid of medium.com and reddit.com. I like aspects of both, but reddit doesn't really adhere to writing serious, lasting content. Reddit also doesn't integrate aspects of the great Magic:the Gathering game, which I fully intend to do here (embeddable cards, lists, and decks). On the flip side, Medium is very friendly to use, and fun to post on, but lacks community involvement reddit offers, especially the policing part. So what we have is a medium like hybrid with voting and threaded comments. The blog is open to any user, and blog posts will be removed if the blog vote count hits -5.


Start your article here