How Cardstock works

Cardstock treats your Magic: The Gathering collection like an investment portfolio. You import your cards, and it tracks what they're worth over time — then watches for the things that make a card's price drop.

The basics

Import your collection

Upload a CSV from ManaBox or Moxfield, or search for cards one at a time. Cardstock matches each card down to the exact printing — the specific set and finish you own.

It tracks prices every day

Once a card is in someone's collection, Cardstock records its price daily and keeps the history. Your dashboard shows the total value of everything you own and how it has moved.

See what's moving

The Movers strip highlights your biggest gainers and losers over the last day, week, or month, so you can see what's driving your collection's value.

Gauge reprint & ban risk

This is what makes Cardstock different. Each card gets a reprint risk and ban risk score — an experimental read on how exposed it is to the two events that most often drag a card's price down.

Keep an eye on specific cards

The Watch page collects cards flagged by risk or big price moves, and lets you build your own watchlist with buy-low / sell-high price targets.

Glossary

The terms you'll see around the app, in plain English.

Printing: A specific version of a card — a given set, collector number, and finish. Cardstock tracks value per printing, not per name, because a Rhystic Study from an old set and one from a modern reprint have very different prices and very different risk.
Finish: Whether a card is nonfoil, foil, or etched foil. The same card in a different finish is a separate printing with its own price.
Portfolio value: The total current market value of everything you own — each card's price multiplied by how many you have, added up.
Cost basis: What you actually paid for a card. Comparing cost basis to current value is how Cardstock shows your gain or loss.
Gain / loss: How much a card or your whole collection is up or down versus what you paid, shown in dollars and as a percentage. It's “unrealized” — on paper — until you actually sell.
Market price: The going price for a card, sourced from public MTG price data. It runs about a day behind the live market, so today's value reflects roughly yesterday's close.
Movers: Your biggest gainers and losers over a chosen window (1 day, 1 week, or 1 month), ranked by how much their price changed.
Market indexes: Benchmarks that show how the broader Magic market is moving, so you can see whether your collection is beating it or lagging behind. Each index is an equal-weighted basket of representative printings, set to a base of 100 when tracking began — so a reading of 110 means that basket is up 10%. Cardstock shows three: the MTG Market Index (a broad cross-section of the market), the Reserved List Index (cards that can never be reprinted), and the Commander Staples Index (cards heavily played in Commander). They're research benchmarks, not advice.
Reprint risk: An estimate of how likely a card is to be reprinted soon. A new printing increases supply and usually pushes the price down. It blends how in-demand the card is, its price, how long since it was last printed, and whether it's appeared in an announced upcoming set. Cards on the Reserved List score zero here — they can't be reprinted.
Ban risk: An estimate of how likely a card is to be banned or restricted in popular formats. Bans can sharply cut demand and price. It blends how powerful and widely played a card is, how many formats it's legal in, and official signals like Commander's Game Changers list.
Reserved List: An official Wizards of the Coast list of cards promised never to be reprinted. Because supply can't grow, these cards carry no reprint risk in Cardstock.
Confirmed reprint: When a card you own has already been spotted in an announced upcoming set, its reprint isn't a guess anymore — it's coming. Cardstock flags these at the top of the reprint-risk scale.
Watchlist: Your own hand-picked list of cards to follow, each with optional buy-low and sell-high price targets that Cardstock flags when hit.

A tool, not financial advice

Cardstock is a research and tracking tool for your own collection. It shows data and experimental risk signals — it does not tell you to buy or sell anything, and nothing here is financial or investment advice. Prices come from public sources, lag the live market by about a day, and can be wrong. The reprint and ban risk scores are estimates that are still being validated; treat them as one input, not a prediction. Magic: The Gathering is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast. Cardstock is an independent tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Wizards of the Coast.

We keep the signal honest in the open — see the live track record of what it's flagging now and how those calls turn out.