Birthday Quiz Answers

Last week, we invited the Cardmarket community to play a little birthday party game with us, and the response was anything but little. Tens of thousands of you took the time to participate, which was quite a happy surprise. Thank you for this, and thank you for all your lovely birthday wishes in the comments too! Now it's time to identify the eighteen fun facts we shared on the occasion of our eighteenth anniversary.

Two Truths and a Lie

We didn't just share eighteen facts, though. Our quiz always mixed two truths with one lie and challenged participants to find the lie. So in each case the correct answer (in bold below) for the quiz was the incorrect statement.

Our Former Logos

Our site's original logo (on the left above) may look like something out of a "graphic design is my passion" fever dream meme today, but the internet of 2007 was a much less polished place. The sleeker design (on the right) is what the website started to use in 2014/2015. The mix (in the middle) is a full fabrication that I only made up last month.

Our First Four Games Included …

1. … World of Warcraft.
2. … Telperinquár.
3. … Pokémon.

You probably never heard of the long discontinued game Telperinquár, as too few people ever did, but I did warn you: "Part of the fun is of course to share real facts that no one would believe or to make up a lie that everyone expects to be true."

This question had both, as Telperinquár was truly among the first four games whereas Pokémon was not. While it has been one of our top games for years, Pokémon joined the Cardmarket family surprisingly late. By 2008 our platform only covered Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh!, World of Warcraft, and Telperinquár.

Running Total of Articles Sold

1. more than 4 million articles by the end of 2009
2. more than 33 million articles by the end of 2014
3. more than 550 million articles by the end of 2024

This was one of the questions where you simply had to guess. Even most people working at Cardmarket (more on that below) today wouldn't know which of the above is a lie. It's hard to imagine how small of a startup the company once was. Indeed, the total number of articles that had been sold by the end of 2009 just narrowly surpassed 1.7 million.

Cardmarket People

1. Up to 2015 we never had more than 10 employees.
2. In 2021 the number of our employees doubled.
3. By the end of 2025 we will have more than 100 employees.

Here's another case of solid growth. Going from ten to a hundred in ten years is funny because it is true. As someone who joined the company at less than half its current size, however, I can tell you that doubling a workforce decently in the double digits within a single year wouldn't even be funny anymore, and it never happened either. We started with 39 in January 2021 and ended with 48 in December 2021.

Play Hard. Trade Smart. Variant Art

1. This Magic video of ours featured the line: "Draw cards, win hearts."
2. The Cardmarket offices got a bicycle rack with the slogan: "Bike hard. Work smart."
3. A multibillion-dollar company from the US posted an image with three collectible cards and the slogan: "Trade smarter. Play harder."

"Draw cards, win hearts" would have been a great line. When I thought of it, I initially wanted to claim it for "one of our Magic videos" rather than specify "this Magic video of ours." But we can't be sure that nobody ever used these words across the several hundred hours of material on our YouTube channel. It just didn't happen in this video.

Thus B and C are 100% true. Of course we don't know how they came up with "Trade Smarter. Play harder." It's well possible it had nothing to do with Cardmarket's "Play hard. Trade smart." But the mere idea that by 2021 our small company may have earned a shoutout from this corporate giant (remaining unnamed here) gave some of us a little chuckle. It is just one of those things   people   love.

The First Order on Cardmarket …

1. … included & .
2. … included {c=Dark Ritual} & {c=Grove of the Burnwillows}.
3. … included & .

Elves plus Wrath doesn't make the best match, and neither does Grove plus Ritual. But all of them were part of the first order that came through the Cardmarket system, along with and {c=Glittering Wish}. Notably, both Wish and Grove only released a week before the site's launch.

As a contrast, I picked two generic older cards that can literally work with anything for my lie. However, note that any hint could just as easily have been a red herring, so this question didn't put Magic experts at any appreciable advantage.

The Most Expensive …

1. … single ever sold on Cardmarket was a {c=Black Lotus} for €57,500.
2. … single ever sold on Cardmarket was a {c=Mox Sapphire} for €62,000.
3. … non-Magic single ever sold on Cardmarket was a for €41,000.

The cards and sums listed are in fact all true, but of course only one can be the number one. 62,000 is higher than 57,500, so A is the lie. By itself this was a fifty-fifty question, but it also served as a test run. That C must be true whenever A and B contradict each other was a valuable lesson to learn.

The Most Sold Singles of 2007

The final two questions together formed a logic puzzle that one could solve without guesswork or magic. One merely needed to look at both sets of options, keep in mind that each set (A, B, C and D, E, F below) consists of two truths and one lie, and then do a bit of mental gymnastics.

1. The Top 10 most sold singles of 2007 included just one card that was originally a rare.
2. The Top 10 most sold singles of 2007 included no card that was originally a rare.
3. The Top 10 most sold singles of 2007 included no white card.

4. Among 2007's most sold singles that were originally rares, the white card {c=Glorious Anthem} and the blue card {c=Lord of Atlantis} tied for first place.
5. 2007's most sold singles overall were the black card {c=Dark Ritual}, the blue card {c=Counterspell}, and the white card {c=Disenchant}.
6. 2007's most sold artifact single was {c=Tormod's Crypt}.

A and B contradict each other, so one of them must be the lie in the first set. This means C must be true. C contradicts E, so E must be the lie in the second set. This means D and F must be true. D contradicts A, so A must be the lie in the first set. Et voilà, A and E are the lies.

If you worked all this out in your own head, without talking to a second head or taking notes, congratulations! And condolences. It cost most of my brain power, half a day, and help from multiple other brains to break up the 2007 data into such suitable puzzle pieces. The only question trickier to answer then came in the evening: "How was work today?"

Bonus Magic Trivia: Top 23 and Me

One of my headaches concerned the clunky reference to cards "that were originally rares." Alas, in 2006, Time Spiral had reprinted both Lord of Atlantis and Disenchant as well as Tormod's Crypt and {c=Gemstone Mine} at the exact same kind-of-rare special rarity. A minor secondary consideration, most other cards on the following list have since been reprinted as rares too. For example Strixhaven's Mystical Archive alone gave us a rare Dark Ritual, Counterspell, {c=Brainstorm}, {c=Lightning Bolt}, and {c=Swords to Plowshares}. No thanks to Secret Lairs, we even have rare basic lands nowadays.

I made sure that none of this affected the puzzle, which remains fully self-contained as listed above and last week. It's just more context for anyone more curious about 2007's best sellers:

As you can see, the top of our single charts has always been dominated by commons and basic lands, even all the way back to the very beginning. Cardmarket: allowing you to find the very cheapest cards at the very cheapest prices since 2007!

Winner Announcement

We hope you enjoyed this challenge. We know it was no piece of cake, but that's part of the appeal of games, after all. "Play hard" as I may have read somewhere. Not least we hope that you enjoyed the quiz because we really couldn't bring enough birthday cake for everyone. (Our website may still offer you a cookie.) However, if you had a bit of fun, you should count yourself as a winner. You could also count the number of lies you got correct in the quiz and let everyone know in the comments here!

Meanwhile, our shuffler looked at all points all participants got and decided that these lucky four should receive a €180 slice of the prize cake:

• Blooodyx3
• KiteHoshi
• massizanatta
• TheCardSlapper

And it picked out the following eighteen for a slimmer €18 slice of the cake:

• AlbinosMou
• Anti-Collector
• Cedrico96
• Dervix
• FakeRobbert
• ferry66
• GaelGames
• HoJo78
• isabellairlelo
• Kaileur
• Louneri
• LucasGG
• MadOrk
• Mih55m
• Nive85
• Sinthoras951
• Snake76
• Solidus91

All funds should be on the respective accounts by now. Whether you got any money or just some insight and welcome distraction out of this, congratulations!