What Is MTG Hunt?
MTG Hunt is a Magic: The Gathering market research and discovery application designed to help collectors, players, and card hunters find potentially overlooked opportunities across individual card printings and finishes.
By examining historical retail prices and market movements, MTG Hunt helps narrow a large card market into smaller, more manageable groups of candidates worth researching.
The application is a research assistant, not a marketplace or an automated buying service.
How MTG Hunt Works
MTG Hunt transforms historical card pricing data into organized hunting opportunities through the following process.
Hunt Scores help prioritize candidates within their respective hunting engines. A higher score is a research signal, not a prediction of future prices or guaranteed profit.
Understanding the Hunting Engines
Each hunting engine examines the market from a different perspective, helping surface opportunities that might otherwise be difficult to notice.
| Hunting Engine | Primary Focus |
|---|---|
| Everyday Finds | Potentially overlooked opportunities among ordinary card listings and price histories. |
| Price Spikes | Cards showing notable upward movements in historical retail prices. |
| Vintage Finds | Older printings with historical pricing patterns worth investigating. |
| Exceptional Finds | Unusual candidates highlighted by the application's opportunity analysis. |
| Recent Breakouts | Cards exhibiting more recent changes in market pricing behavior. |
Market Data & Pricing Sources
MTG Hunt obtains its historical marketplace pricing data through MTGJSON. Although pricing records are imported from four markets, the current hunting engines primarily use TCGplayer historical retail prices for their calculations.
| Source | Role in MTG Hunt |
|---|---|
| MTGJSON | Provides card information and historical marketplace pricing datasets used by the application. |
| TCGplayer | Historical retail pricing used by the current hunting and opportunity analysis engines. |
| Card Kingdom | Imported historical pricing retained for market research and potential future comparisons. |
| Cardmarket | Imported historical pricing retained for market research and potential future comparisons. |
| Mana Pool | Imported historical pricing retained for market research and potential future comparisons. |
| Scryfall | Provides card-image previews and card identification references. Not used as the hunting price source. |
Interpreting Market Prices
Historical pricing: MTG Hunt uses MTGJSON market data to examine retail price history. Historical prices provide research context, not guaranteed transaction values.
Card identification: Individual printings and finishes are important because different versions of the same card can have substantially different market values.
Card previews: Card images load from Scryfall when requested. MTG Hunt does not maintain its own card-image collection.
Research responsibility: Actual availability, condition, purchase cost, fees, liquidity, and resale value may differ from historical pricing data. Always verify a specific printing and finish before making a purchase.