I built a card collecting bot where every rare has a serial number and a full ownership history. I can't tell if that matters to anyone but me.
I've been building a TCG collecting bot for a few months and I've hit the point where I need people who aren't me to look at it.
The bet the whole thing rests on: most card bots store a collection as counts. You own `charizard: 3`, the same way you own three apples. Mine mints every Rare-or-better pull as its own object with a serial number — #0001 is the first copy ever pulled on the platform — plus an append-only record of everyone who has owned it since. So two people holding "the same" card are not holding the same thing, and a card that has passed through six collectors can show you that it did.
I think that is the interesting part. I am also aware I have spent months on something that might be a designer's fantasy: the kind of feature that reads beautifully in a design doc and that no player ever thinks about again after the first week.
So, the things I actually want to hear:
**1. Does provenance land, or is it invisible?**
If you have played or run a card bot: would you care that your card is #0047 and that you can see who held it before you? Or is a card just a card, and the serial number is noise I have talked myself into?
**2. Is the reveal too slow?**
Each card is rendered server-side and animates — spins, flips, lands face-up — and rarer pulls take longer, up to about four seconds for the top tier. It feels great on pull three. I have genuinely no idea how it feels on pull three hundred, and I am the worst possible judge of that.
**3. Cosmetics-only monetisation — naive or right?**
There is a paid season pass. It gives bonus currency, frames and titles. Pull odds are identical for free and paying players and I do not intend to change that. I would like to know whether people who have run bots think that is sustainable, or whether I am going to find out the hard way.
What is not done yet, so nobody wastes a comment on it: no leaderboards, no achievements, the admin tooling barely exists, and cross-server support is architecturally there but has hardly been tested in anger.
Happy to go into detail on any of it, including how it is built — the economy is a double-entry ledger and trades settle atomically with escrow, which was more work than the fun parts and I am happy to talk about why.
Not linking it here because I am after opinions rather than installs, but I will drop an invite in the comments if anyone wants to poke at it.