It is Valentine’s Day which means that most people are thinking about a different type of cardboard–the type that tells loved ones you love them and/or the cardboard boxes that contain chocolates. Not us! We celebrated Valentine’s day early by heading to the local card shop and buying a box of fresh wax for each other. But it doesn’t stop there. All weekend, we are going to be working on cranking out some great new features for our loyal members because we really love you guys. Here is what we have lined up for our weekend of Zistle love.

Teams! As I write this, Josh is building the infrastructure to add teams. The lists will start with current professional teams but you will be able to add old teams, minor league teams, college teams, etc… We think we have come up with a pretty great solution for adding team to a card quickly as well as adding new teams. Just like adding a new set, a new team will have to be approved before users can see it. This has been a popular feature request and we are excited to launch it.

Layout improvements: Adding teams has forced us to reconsider our layout in list view. We are improving the layout to be able to see more cards at a time in gallery view as well as be able to see the team in list view.

Trading! This is a behemoth of a project which we plan to make a huge dent in this weekend. We are working hard to get this functionality to you. We definitely need people to beta test this for us. We’ll let you know as soon as it is live!

Other Bug Fixes/Improvements: You will definitely see some small updates as well. For example, some improvements/changes to adding cards, the ability to flag sets/subsets and the ability to add a box to the box break page.

While it is entertaining, it is also informational and provides unique insight into what breaking a box of a particular brand is really like. We want information on the number of pulls and how good they are. Which is the best box for autos? What about rookies? While individual reviews are helpful, you need to read several to get an accurate picture of how that product is performing. So when we started building our Box Breaks feature, we knew we needed a tool for members to share their box breaks but we also wanted to organize the data so that it would be a useful informational resource.  

In order to achieve this, we created a uniform method to evaluate the pulls from each box. A simple rating system would be too vague to be really useful. So, in addition to a rating, we determined the most important categories for any box: total pulls, autos, relics, parallels, inserts, and duplicates. When members break a box, they enter the cards they pulled from each category and that information is averaged with all other breaks. That information is available to all members and formatted so that you can easily sort by each attribute. So you can see which box has the most rookies, the most autos or which is the highest rated. 

This system accomplishes a few things simultaneously. The most important is that it is a really easy way for anyone to share and track their box breaks. You don’t need a camera or a blog. It also creates an unbiased, aggregated source of information on boxes from the collecting community. Zistle doesn’t sell boxes and we aren’t affiliated with any particular brand so all reviews will be posted. And most importantly, it is a really useful tool for making decisions about boxes based on a variety of attributes. 

We realize that this will not replace the in-depth commentary of your favorite blogger–and we don’t want it to!  We are trying to develop a tool that will be useful to bloggers as well as readers and of course Zistle members. If you would like to be one of the first people to try it out and give us feedback, be sure to sign up for our private beta launching in January at www.zistle.com. We need you!