The problem
Warlord: Saga of the Storm is a 20-year-old TCG that Kingswood Games recently rereleased as "Into the Accordlands". A small, devoted community came back online, and a brand-new secondary market formed around 358 cards spread across decades of printings. None of the existing TCG pricing tools cover Warlord. The eBay listings that do exist skew optimistically high, because sellers in a thin market list aspirationally and many cards sit unsold for months.
I wanted the tool I wished existed: a single place to see what every Warlord card actually trades for, across every source, with sold-price truth instead of asking-price fiction.
I built it in a week.
What it does
warlord.market is a price-comparison aggregator for every Warlord card. Each card detail page renders the printed card faithfully alongside its current pricing across every active eBay listing and every licensed Shopify retailer that stocks Warlord. Buy links route through EPN-tracked URLs. The catalog updates daily; pricing refreshes hourly.
The home page surfaces what's trending and lets you drill into any card. Filtering, condition ladders, and per-source breakdown are all one click away.
The interesting problems
The printed card is sacred
The detail page has one non-negotiable rule: it must render the printed card faithfully. Frame color, faction badge, rarity icon, art crop. All of it should look like the card on the table, not a generic CMS template. I built a per-card override system so that any time the upstream data disagrees with the physical card, the card wins. Faithfulness is a product decision, not a backend detail.
Active prices lie in a thin market
Warlord is a market where five active listings of the same card can span $4 to $80. Showing those raw numbers without context misleads collectors. I wanted to show 30/90-day median sold prices alongside active asks, so the user sees both the aspirational and the actual.
That data lives behind eBay's Marketplace Insights API, which requires explicit business approval: first the EPN partnership, then a developer questionnaire vetted by EPN's Partner Network team, then a separate Application Growth Check. That gate is doing real work; the API is sensitive enough to deserve it. I shipped v1 with active-listing data as the foundation and the sold-price layer ready to switch on the moment access clears.
Pragmatic call, not a compromise. The site already beats every other Warlord pricing resource on coverage alone.
Condition strings need translation
A card's condition is the second most important fact after price, but eBay's condition strings come back as cryptic codes ("NM/M", "LP", "MP/HP") that mean different things to different sellers. I built a condition ladder that normalizes them into a five-tier system with consistent tooltips, and I tinted each badge to its storefront's brand color so the source is legible without reading text. Small visual move, large clarity payoff.
Refresh cadence matters
The pricing pipeline runs on tiered crons: storefront prices every six hours, eBay listings every hour, catalog every twenty-four. A foil-variant auto-create system keeps the catalog in sync when retailers add new SKUs. A "last updated" indicator on every price tells the user how fresh the number is, because in a thin market, stale data is worse than no data.
The design loop
When a UI question had three or four viable shapes (how to show eBay listings on a card with many sellers, how to render the condition ladder, how to lay out the filter sidebar), I'd ask Claude to wireframe the options in Figma side-by-side via the figma-console MCP server. I'd describe the constraints, Claude would generate four labeled frames with real layouts, and I'd pick one. The decision loop went from "open Figma, sketch four versions over an evening" to "describe the question, see four versions in three minutes."
The same MCP handled design system work after launch. Pointed at the live site and the codebase, it rebuilt the Figma library to mirror what shipped: tokens, component variants, color scoping. The Figma file is no longer a parallel-universe approximation of the site; it's a mirror of it.
What I'd do differently
If I were starting this over, the Marketplace Insights questionnaire would go in on day one in parallel with the build, not after launch. I'd flagged the same pattern in CardScan, where I went eBay-first because it was the more interesting engineering problem. I made the same call here for the same reason. The lesson is sticking now.
The design-first approach worked again: I made Figma mockups for every screen before writing any code, including the card detail page, the filter sidebar, and the condition system. Implementation stayed focused on getting the details right instead of figuring out what the details should be.
Outcomes
- Live at warlord.market
- 358 cards in the catalog, full coverage of the Into the Accordlands rerelease
- 112 organic search clicks at 9.2% CTR, average position 7.9 (Google Search Console, trailing 28 days)
- Card detail pages converting at 17–46% CTR in search results
- EPN affiliate tracking live across every outbound link
- Marketplace Insights API request through EPN Partner Network team, in progress
