Last month we told you that selling on eBay and on Facebook Marketplace was being tested with real accounts. Both are live. We also told you the API's inventory endpoints were next in line; they still are, and we say so again below.

 

Around those, October was the month Gestic went to the phone for real: 97 changes went live, and two of them are apps! Gestic itself is now an Android app in Google Play's testing programme, and a second, brand-new one called Gestic Companion prices any Magic card that appears on your screen. Both need testers, and this issue explains how to join. Also new: a whole page of cards scanned from one picture, and the price source of your choice behind every number in the app.

 

As of this writing: 2.6 million cards tracked, over 530,000 scans, 2,645 collectors. Thank you for that.

There is now a Gestic app on Google Play. It is everything gestic.org does, on your phone: your collection and lists, the card scanner, prices, decks, the Play Tester. Sign in with your gestic.org account or create one in the app, and it stays on the latest version without you ever having to update anything.

It is in Google Play's closed test, and this is where we need you. Google only publishes a new developer's app for everyone once at least twelve testers have kept it installed for fourteen days in a row. A first round was not enough for them, so the clock is running again. The test is open in Australia, Canada, Czechia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. To join: gestic.org/apps.html explains the three clicks (the testers group, Become a tester, install). Keep it installed, use it now and then, and tell us what feels wrong.

The second app is new, and it does one thing: it tells you what the Magic card on your screen is worth. A live stream on Whatnot or eBay, a listing, a photo, your camera pointed at a card: a small bar at the top of the screen names the card, its set and number, and its Gestic price for each finish. Tap the bar and the card's page opens on gestic.org. It is this month's highlighted feature, with the full tour below.

eBay first. Link your eBay account on the configuration page (eBay asks you to approve Gestic, once) and choose the selling policies eBay already knows for you. Then open an Offering list, open the toolbox and click Sell on eBay: you preview the listings and set the rules: how many of the list's most valuable cards to list, how many copies to keep back, one listing per copy or one with a quantity, and what happens to a card when it sells (nothing, delete it, or move it to a list of your choice). Turn on automatic listing and Gestic publishes the cards and keeps the prices in step with your asking prices from then on.

Facebook Marketplace has no door for programs like ours, so the path is assisted. From the same toolbox, the Facebook Marketplace button opens a selling page that prepares one listing per card, with the language and condition in the title, the lowest asking price per copy, and the quantity at each price in the description. A small helper you install once in your browser fills in Facebook's form for you, one card at a time; you check it and click Publish yourself. No helper, or on a phone? Copy and Download give you the same text and pictures to paste. We listed real cards with both ourselves before writing this.

A member asked for "3x3 image slicing": a flatbed scan of a binder page, nine cards on it, and all nine detected. Done, and automatic. Drop a picture of several cards on the scan page's Upload button, or let Folder Watch pick it up, and Gestic finds every card on the page, cuts each one out and scans it on its own, exactly as if you had fed them one by one.

The phone scanner got it too: the new grid button on its bar, "Page mode", takes a picture of a binder page with your phone's own camera and scans each card on it. A page that holds a single card simply goes through as before.

Until now every figure in Gestic came from TCGplayer's market price. Settings now has "Value my cards with": TCGplayer, Cardmarket, ManaPool or Cardsphere. Every price, total and chart in the app follows your choice, converted into your currency, and a card your source does not price keeps its TCGplayer price. If you collect in euros, you get Cardmarket's own euro price without choosing anything.

The two new sources are refreshed every night: ManaPool's lowest Near Mint price for about 117,000 printings, and Cardsphere's market index for about 83,000. Hover any price to see where it comes from.

Document scanner, stop at a valuable card. A member asked for a break point: when a card worth more than a chosen price comes through the sheet feeder, stop so it can be pulled out and sleeved. Tick "Stop at a card worth the Price alert or more" in the scanner options and the scanner stops right after that card, even in the middle of a batch; Continue goes on with the rest. It feeds the cards one at a time behind the scenes to manage it, so a batch takes a little longer with the box ticked.

Scanned a batch into the wrong list? Another request. The toolbox has a new tool, Move cards by scan time: your scans are grouped into sessions, you pick one (or an exact start and end), and exactly those copies move to the right list, storage locations and prices included.

Plans and ads, plainly. The scans per day included in each plan went up to 100 for the free plan, 500 for Essential, 2,000 for Advanced and unlimited for Elite (they were 10, 100 and 1,000). Nothing is blocked or deleted when you go over: ads come back, more of them the further over you are. And if an ad blocker keeps the ads from loading, you now get a message and thirty days to allow them on Gestic before anything changes.

Decks, lists and imports. The public deck list at gestic.org/deck now filters by deck name and mana colours, across the 250-odd decks members have shared and every official preconstructed deck. In your collection, a card you own in several languages shows one line per language, with its flag. Imports handle Archidekt text exports with their custom tags, pick the cheapest of two The List printings that share a number and say why, and match Moxfield's The List reprints. Creating a list with a name you already use now says so instead of quietly reusing the old list, and when some lines of an add cannot be read, the page shows you exactly which ones.

Play Tester and card pages. The Play Tester has a proper phone layout with touch controls, and it takes its card pictures from Gestic rather than from Scryfall, so they no longer go missing on a busy evening. Card pages show the foil and etched prices in the top price box. And a serialized card is now recognised as itself by the scanner, not as its regular printing.

Scanner polish. The printed title now decides the language when a footer is misread. A card is never filed in a finish its printing does not exist in, whatever the sticky setting or the scanner's foil guess says. A scan whose sticky set clearly disagrees with the card goes to review instead of being filed. On a Mac, the orientation and the chosen scanner are remembered. Every scan is a little faster, and a suite of hard scans now guards every change we make to the scanner. Own a TCG Verifier X1PRO card sorter? The scan page can drive it: set your rules (price, colour, rarity, set, and more) and the machine sorts the hopper into two piles.

Phones, all of them. We put every page of Gestic through twenty phone and tablet sizes, upright and sideways, and fixed about thirty things: text boxes that zoomed the whole page on an iPhone, deck names that shrank to one letter, Add pages and the Messages page rebuilt for small screens, a sign-out page that showed nothing, Settings tables that ran off the screen, and the Play Tester's bars when the phone is held sideways. A failed save now says so instead of pretending, and a save can no longer silently wipe your tags or your pricing settings.

Faster. Adding cards no longer re-downloads the whole list afterwards (that was 20 MB and six seconds on an 18,000-card list), Add by set loads a set at a third of the weight, and the eleven-second pause on the first list opened after a release is gone. Settings also gained a switch for this newsletter, and new members are told about it at sign-up.

Two outages, plainly. On October 6 the site was down from 01:57 to 05:42: the server had run out of memory because every release left the previous version loaded. The leak is fixed and the server now restarts itself if it ever happens again. And on October 30 the machine that serves gestic.org stopped answering at 02:10; our standby server took over at 05:36. About three and a half hours each, both at night. The first was our bug; the second was our provider's machine, and our job to switch away from it faster. We are sorry for both.

You are watching a live stream, a card goes by, and you want to know what it is worth before the bidding ends. Or a listing has a card you think you know. Or you are at a table, phone in hand. Until now that meant typing the name into something.

Gestic Companion is a small Android app that looks at your screen and answers in a bar at the top: the card, its set and number, and its Gestic price for each finish. Nothing to type, nothing to export. It is in Google Play's closed test, free to use while it is in testing, and it needs testers.

Open the app and it starts: Android asks you once to allow screen sharing, and the bar appears. Then open whatever has a card on it: Whatnot, eBay, YouTube, a listing, a photo, or your camera. The bar names the card and shows its prices; tap it to open the card's page on gestic.org. Two modes: press Scan on the bar when a card is on screen (the recommended one), or Auto, where it looks at each new card by itself. For live streams there is a scan frame: a gold frame you place over the card, so only what is inside it is looked at.

The app works without an account, up to twenty cards a day. Sign in with your gestic.org account and there is no daily limit, and the bar also tells you whether you already own the card: "In your collection: 3, other printings: 15". Prices follow the currency you choose in the app.

The picture of each card it finds goes to Gestic's scanner; that is how the card is priced. The rest of your screen never leaves your phone, unless you send it yourself: a card it missed, or another problem? Tap the three dots on the bar, then Report a problem. You see the picture first, black out anything personal, and send it with the app's log. Those reports are how it gets better: the first testers' messages already gave it the three-dot button, the report with black-out, and a bar that starts with the app.

Gestic Companion is in Google Play's closed test, open in Canada, Germany and the United States, on Android 10 or newer, and free to use for as long as the test lasts. Same rule as the other app: Google publishes it for everyone once a dozen testers have kept it for fourteen days, so every tester counts, twice. gestic.org/apps.html has the steps: join the testers group, click Become a tester on the Companion test page, install it from Google Play. Then put a stream on and tell us what the bar got wrong.

Thank you, genuinely. The page of nine cards, the stop at a valuable card, the move by scan time, the foil switch for the sheet feeder, the Mac fixes, the Archidekt tags, the report with black-out in Companion: every one of them started as a message from one of you, on Discord, in our inbox, or from a tester. Keep them coming.

One ask above all this month: if you have an Android phone, join the two tests (gestic.org/apps.html). Google counts testers and days, and it is the one thing we cannot do ourselves. Then, as always: share your deck pages and your profile, and if your local 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.

 

Both apps on Google Play for everyone, the day Google's test clock runs out. The API's inventory endpoints, which we have now promised three months in a row and still owe you: they are next on the list, and we would rather be late than say it is done when it is not.