Black Lotus Project (BLP) was a Magic: The Gathering card pricing website that collected prices from the Magic Online Trading League's (MOTL) weekly price guide. The price guide was updated once per day, and so the prices were collected once per day. BLP collected data from 2008-10-28 to 2013-10-22 after which point MOTL stopped updating its price guide.

black-lotus-project-data-2013-10-22.tgz (318MB)

The data is available for download from the link above on blacklotusproject.com.

When new sets first went on sale, cards from the new sets would quickly be sold among players and show up on MOTL's price sources. It would sometimes take MOTL weeks to update its card lists with the new sets, which unfortunately led to associating prices from new cards with cards from older sets.

The data here is unchanged from MOTL's lists, which means there are periods where old cards normally worth a few cents have short periods of inaccurate high valuations.

The archive consists of 8 CSV files that were dumped from a MySQL database.

• artists_artist.csv
• cards_card.csv
• cards_cardset.csv
• cards_dataload.csv
• cards_setblock.csv
• cards_valuepoint.csv
• pricelists_pricelist.csv
• pricelists_pricelisttype.csv

id: Primary key

name: Name of the author

website: Known site of the author (sparsely populated by hand)

id: Primary key

card_set_id: Foreign key to cards_cardset.csv

name: Name of the card

color: Color of the card ("Multicolor" if more than one)

rarity: One-character rarity of card {"C": "Common", "L": "Land", "M": "Mythic rare", "R": "Rare", "S": "Special (promotional or other)", "U": "Uncommon"}

artist_id: Foreign key to artists_artist.csv

expansion_code: Primary key; 3-character code for expansion used by Wizards of the Coast (WotC)

name: Name of the card set

set_block_id: Foreign key to cards_setblock.csv

motl_abbreviation: Expansion code used by MOTL, which differs primarily in earlier sets; (Example: "Revised Edition" is identified as "3ED" by WotC but as "RV" by MOTL)

release_date: Date expansion was made available for retail purchase

card_count: Number of cards in the set

id: Primary key

date: Date and time load started

prices_used_count: Number of card prices that matched cards in cards_cards.csv at the time of the load and were used for graphs on blacklotusproject.com.

prices_unused_count: Number of card prices that did not match cards in cards_cards.csv at the time of the load and were not used for graphing

id: Primary key

name: Name taken from WotC's Gatherer for set block

id: Primary key

card_id: Foreign key to cards_cards.csv

dataload_id: Foreign key to cards_dataload.csv

price: Average card price in USD of prices within 1 standard deviation of average

standard_deviation: Standard deviation of price set used to calculate price in USD

average: Mathematical mean of prices in price set in USD

high: Highest price in price set in USD

low: Lowest price in price set in USD

change: Change in price in USD from last valuepoint's price (can be negative)

raw_number: Number of prices in price set

date: Creation date of valuepoint

percent_change: Percent change in price from last valuepoint's price (can be negative)

id: Primary key

created_at: Creation date of pricelist

file: Absolute path to original pricelist from MOTL; Prepend "http://blacklotusproject.com/media/" to access the original file

If you do any clean up of the data, make interesting finds, or do anything cool at all, open an issue on GitHub to share: blacklotusproject/data

All data is available under a standard MIT License, which is included in the archive itself. Refer to it for full details, but the gist is: do with this data what you like but always cite your source.