Last month we told you July and August would be quiet, and that there would be no newsletter until September.

 

We were wrong. Somewhere between a deck Play Tester, a brand-new scanner for phones and a full automation engine, "quiet" turned into more than 160 changes deployed in a single month. Holding all of it back for September would have meant dropping one impossibly long email on you at the worst possible time.

 

So here is an unscheduled newsletter. We are keeping it to the handful of things we think you will actually want to try this week.

You can now build a rule once and let Gestic keep a list up to date for you.

Head over to the new Automation page. An automation takes inputs — any combination of tags and existing lists — passes them through filters (also tags and lists), and writes the result into a destination list. That destination can be a normal list, a "Looking For" list or an "Offering" list, and you can either create it right there or point at a list you already have.

A concrete example: tag the cards you are willing to part with, filter out everything already committed to a deck, and send what is left to an Offering list. Set it up once, and refreshing it is a single click from then on.

You can create as many automations as you like, list them and delete the ones you no longer need. Each one records its last run date and can be rescheduled whenever you want a fresh pass. The order in which you add your tags and lists is preserved, because for some rules that order genuinely changes the result.

Every deck you own now has its own playable board, right inside Gestic. It is this month's highlighted feature — full walkthrough below.

If you have ever filed a few thousand cards, you know the real cost is not the filing. It is the deciding. Chaos sorting removes the decision completely.

The idea comes from the bulk-intake workflows used by collectors and card shops: instead of sorting cards into an order before you store them, you drop each card into the first free space you have and record where it went. Nothing ends up organised, and you never find a card by browsing — you ask the app, and it tells you exactly which bin to pull from. Because the sorting decision disappears at intake, people report roughly 500 cards an hour against about 250 for traditional sorting. It helps to think of the location as a postal code: a short identifier pointing at exactly one physical spot.

On Gestic it works like this. Give your scanner a name on the scan page — it is saved to your profile, so if you own several, each keeps its own. Tick Use chaos sorting, choose a batch size, and scan exactly as you normally would. Every card then carries a storage value in the form SCANNER-BUCKET-INDEX: which scanner took it in, which bucket it went into, and its position within that batch. You will find it in the card edit window next to condition and finish, and you can correct it by hand whenever you need to.

Two honest caveats. It works with ADF (sheet-feed) scanners only, because it depends on knowing the exact order pages came through. And without the app, you have no idea where anything is — a card filed into the wrong bin is effectively lost. Keep the physical pile and the recorded location in step, and it is the fastest intake method there is.

We have introduced keyboard shortcuts to the scanner! To duplicate the last entry, or delete it, as well as to make it as foil, no normal. All of these are becoming configurable from the configuration page, so you can turn off anything you don't use. We also fixed a papercut where pressing Space to type a card name inside the review modal would accidentally trigger a new photo capture.

The usual long tail, and it was longer than usual this month. You can now sort and pin your lists on the home page, with foldable groups by type. Commander decks use their commander's art as the page background. Decks can auto-generate their own name, description and tags from what is actually in them. A new toolbox tool highlights which cards in a list you already own elsewhere, and another empties your collection in one go. Cardmarket joined the export formats. The currency selector now offers every currency we can source a rate for, instead of eleven. Your selection stays in sync when you switch between table, grid and stacked-grid views. Probable matches in the scanner now carry the right language flag, German double-faced cards no longer come back in English, imported lists open and scroll into view, Escape closes modals on the scan page, and there are new keyboard shortcuts for condition and finish. There was also a great deal of invisible work on our deployment pipeline — which is the real reason so much of the above reached you so quickly.

Building a deck is the easy part. Finding out whether it actually works usually means sleeving up a physical copy, or exporting your list to yet another site and rebuilding it there. Neither is much fun when all you wanted to know was whether your curve is sane.

So we built a play tester into Gestic. Open any deck, hit Play Test, and you get a complete, playable board. No export, no second account, nothing to install.

You start with a proper opening hand, London mulligan included, right down to choosing which cards go to the bottom. From there you can draw one card or several at once, tutor your library for anything, scry, surveil and mill, reveal the top card and send it wherever it needs to go — hand, battlefield, graveyard, exile or the bottom of the library — and reshuffle whenever you like.

 

Cards drag freely between every zone: hand, battlefield, graveyard, exile and the command zone. The board sorts itself, keeping lands, creatures and everything else in their own rows, so it stays readable when things get busy. Click a card to tap or untap it, or reach for untap all, tap all and proliferate. Double-faced and transforming cards flip to their real back face, every card uses real Scryfall art, and hovering zooms in on any of them.

+1/+1 and −1/−1 counters, loyalty, and plenty of other types, plus custom ones for whatever your deck happens to be doing. Set a custom power and toughness, or make a token copy of any card. There is a searchable token catalog pulled from Scryfall, with real art, power/toughness and abilities, and a recently-used row for one-click re-adds. Emblems come with art, and the Monarch, the Initiative, City's Blessing and Day/Night are each a single click. You can also add any card to the battlefield by name, which is handy for copies and stolen permanents. Rotate a card 180°, dim it, or attach oracle text and your own notes.

Trackers for life, poison, energy and experience, a per-colour mana pool, a turn counter, and a running log of every single action. There are dice as well — d4 through d100, plus a coin flip — and each roll shows a large on-screen result as well as writing itself into the log. That last detail is deliberate: it makes the Play Tester genuinely usable over a shared screen, so you can goldfish against a friend on a call and have you both see the same rolls.

Commander decks are recognised automatically — command zone and 40 life, no configuration required. Beyond that there is undo, adjustable card sizes and full keyboard shortcuts. And because the whole thing runs client-side, any Gestic share link opens straight into a play test, so you can send someone your brew and let them try it without an account.

Go open your favourite deck and give it a spin. If something feels off, tell us — this one is brand new, and we would much rather hear about the rough edges now.

Thank you, genuinely. A month like this one only happens because people are out there using the platform and telling us what is broken. Very nearly everything above started as a message from one of you.

The Play Tester especially is new and has a lot of surface area, so if you find something that misbehaves, please say so. And do share the site with your friends and playgroups — Community Offers only get better as more players nearby are listing cards. We are also still growing our local store network, so if your shop is not on Gestic yet, send us the name and we will reach out. (The current list is on your configuration page.)ox is wide open for your ideas, suggestions, or questions. Don't hesitate to drop us a line!

 

First, a heads-up: we are moving the database, so you may catch the site in maintenance mode while that happens. It will be brief, and it buys us a lot of room to grow.

After that, we really are taking the rest of the summer at a slower pace. Chaos sorting still has a few open questions we want to settle with the people actually using it. And September's issue is already shaping up to be a big one — there are a couple of things we would rather show you properly than rush into this email.

 

Visit the website | Visit the blog