Last month we signed off with a tease: a couple of things we would rather show you properly than rush into an email. This is that email.

 

Ninety-two tickets closed in August. The headline is the new phone scanner — open gestic.org on your phone and it turns into a card scanner, nothing to install — and it gets the full walkthrough below. Around it: price history charts for everything you own, chaos sorting settling in nicely, a search box that speaks Scryfall, and public Gestic pages you can finally share with people who do not have an account.

 

Get comfortable. This one is dense.

The Scan link on your phone or tablet now opens a scanner that was designed for a phone from the first pixel — full-screen camera, one big button, everything else out of the way. Same recognition brains as the desktop scanner, none of the friction. Android or iPhone, Chrome or Firefox, phone or tablet.

It is this month's highlighted feature — the full tour is below.

Prices on Gestic used to be a single number: what a card is worth today. As of this month, they have a past. Every card page now carries a daily price chart, with regular and foil each getting their own line and up to a year of history already there to look at.

Lists and decks chart too: the stats header now plots the total value of that list over time, right next to the mana curve. And because pricing an entire collection every night is its own kind of problem, a nightly rollup records each list's value as of that day — so from now on, your whole collection builds a value history you can actually watch.

One honest note: the collection-level history starts counting from this release. We cannot reach back and record what a list was worth before we started writing it down — but every day from here on is in the book.

Chaos sorting shipped with a fixed idea of what a storage location looks like. You had opinions — two of you argued structure on Discord until it became clear you were both right. So the location format is now configurable: build it from the pieces that match how your shelves actually work — scanner, box, row, batch, card — with your own auto-increment rules.

Locations also stopped being trapped inside Gestic. List export now includes the storage field and import accepts it, so a full backup of where every card physically lives is one click each way. And on the home page you can filter any list by location: type the start of a location to see everything stored under it — a whole box, one row, or a single exact slot.

The search box on the home page now speaks Scryfall. Type a card name like before — or type a real query with the syntax you already use every day, applied to your own cards. Searches you use often can be saved and reused.

Filters caught up too. You can now filter a list by price with a min and a max, and while any filter is active the header tells you how many cards matched and what they are worth together — which quietly turns filtering into an appraisal tool. A Scryfall query counts as a filter like any other, and a filtered export respects it.

And when the list of lists itself becomes the clutter: folders. Group your lists into folders and fold them away — the home page and the scanner's destination dropdown stop scrolling forever.

Some months the long tail hides entire launches. Five of them, then the actual tail.

Deck tools. Commander decks now estimate their bracket on the official 1–5 scale from what is actually in the deck, so "what power level is this?" finally has an answer you can say out loud before a game starts. And when a deck's price runs hotter than its power, the new Budget alternatives panel takes your most expensive slots and suggests cheaper printings or functional stand-ins.

Gestic in public. Every card and every set now has a public page you can link to anyone — no account needed on their side. You can also claim a page of your own at gestic.org/u/your-nickname and fill it from the new profile editor: a display name, a bio and your links, an avatar taken from any card art, your decks — each showing its commander's art and its bracket badge — and whichever lists you want the world to see. You stay in charge of what appears: the eye icon next to each list on the home page decides whether it is visible, and your page is not served at all until you claim it (there is a one-click banner waiting on your home page). Have a look at gestic.org/u/demo to see the shape of it, then go make yours. The home page now also shows live site totals: as of this writing, 2 million cards tracked, over 330,000 scans, and 99.7% scanner accuracy across 2,400+ collectors.

Your own API. One of you asked to script against their inventory the way they already script against CardTrader. The foundation is live: create personal API keys from your configuration page (create, list, revoke, test), with documentation that writes itself at gestic.org/api/v1. Key management and identity are live today; inventory endpoints are what we build next — tell us what you would automate.

Name your price. Offering lists are no longer market-price-only: you can set an asking price per copy, and that is what buyers see. We promised this back in May — it took the scenic route, but it is here.

Subscriptions. Gestic now has plans — Essential, Advanced and Elite — with proper checkout and a manage/cancel portal, replacing the old donation link. To be plain about it: nothing you use today is being taken away, and nobody's collection is getting capped. If Gestic earns its keep for you, this is the way to keep the servers fed.

Under the hood. The database move we warned you about in August went through. The new server answers about ten times faster and has four times the storage headroom — which the price-history charts above are already putting to use.

And the tail itself: the scanner can highlight any card above a price you set, the scan confirmation can open in its own window for two-screen setups, Quick Review gained a back-to-top button, a corrected scan now keeps its position in the list instead of being filed at the end, a brief server hiccup can no longer silently swallow a scanned card, batch sizes save properly, the stack view got slimmer badges and header stats, double-faced cards behave in Add by Name, and the public pages got dramatically lighter and faster on mobile.

For as long as Gestic has had a scanner, scanning properly meant a webcam or a document scanner. Phones could limp through the desktop page, but nobody would call it an experience.

So we rebuilt it from scratch. Open gestic.org on your phone, tap Scan, and point it at a card. Lining it up, cropping it, matching it and keeping count all happen for you. Nothing to install, no app store, no account juggling — it is the same Gestic, in your pocket.

The rear camera opens straight away, with a guide frame sized to a card, so lining up a shot is obvious at a glance. Tap the shutter — or do not: with Auto-scan on, the scanner notices when a card is being held steady and captures on its own, so you can go card, card, card without touching the screen. Focus assist waits a beat for a sharp frame when it needs to, the shutter answers the instant you tap, and if you switch apps or lock your phone mid-pile, the camera reconnects cleanly the moment you come back.

Your photo appears full-screen immediately, with a quiet spinner while it is matched — never a silent pause. Straightening and cropping happen on the server: it finds the card's corners and squares the photo up before matching, so you do not have to hover perfectly parallel over the table. A confirmed match resolves into the card's official art with a one-time foil-shine sweep — the only piece of animation flair in the whole app, on purpose, so that moment reads clearly. An uncertain scan shows a "?" you can fix later, and a true miss is a quiet toast: nothing ever gets added by accident.

The counter in the corner keeps score as cards fly in. Tap it and a sheet slides up with every entry, most recent first — thumbnail, set and number, price, condition and finish — with a +/− stepper and a delete button right on each row, so small corrections never mean drilling into menus. Tap any entry and you get a full edit view: live search with predictions as you type (name, set or number), and condition and finish become editable the moment a match is picked.

Pick the list you are scanning into, mirror the desktop scanner's ignore-promo-sets option, and make set, language or finish sticky so a whole pile inherits them without being asked twice. There is a toggle for the server-side autocrop, spoken card names after each match if you like scanning without looking, and prices in your currency.

Grab your phone, point it at a card, and watch it land in your collection. This feature is brand new across a very wide zoo of devices — if your particular phone does something odd, tell us. That is exactly the feedback that makes it bulletproof.

Thank you, genuinely. Almost everything above — the phone scanner, the configurable locations, the API, the sale prices — started life as a message from one of you. Keep them coming.

Two asks this month. First, the phone scanner is young: try it on your own phone and tell us what feels wrong. Second, you now have pages worth showing — claim your public profile, and share your page (and the site) with your friends and playgroups. 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.) Our inbox is wide open for your ideas, suggestions, or questions.

 

September is for sanding: card categories for deck lists (Removal, Ramp, Card Draw — assigned automatically, overridable per deck), a faster Quick Review on big pages, more scanner polish, and the API's first inventory endpoints. And if the phone scanner treats you well, show a friend — it is the easiest Gestic demo there has ever been.

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