Chris Mansfeldt

Wildex turns the world into a deck. Photograph any animal — your dog, a pigeon, a snow leopard — and Claude Opus 4.7 identifies the species, generates lore in the animal's first-person voice, and turns it into a collectible playing card. Build decks, battle five themed Trainer challenges or your friends online, with MTG-inspired mechanics (life totals, summoning sickness, type-effective battlefields, signature legendary abilities), and watch your player cards translate into projected square meters of habitat protected via World Land Trust math donating Ad revenue to their "Buy an Acre" program. The goal of this project was to create a positive way to talk, educate and raise money for conservation through the World Land Trust, by using the innovation of AI, in a fun and engaging way. That was achieved on all metrics. Three Anthropic-native moments anchor the experience: Vision capture — Opus 4.7 identifies the species, returns structured JSON with stats / habitat / IUCN tier / lore / conservation note. Cached forever by image SHA-256. Generated species — for any animal outside the curated 33, Opus generates a complete game-ready playing card (clamped to the cost-curve so it can't break balance) and the player can immediately play with it. Unlimited collection size, no manual curation needed. Chat — tap "Talk with this Animal" on any discovered card and Opus 4.7 streams a conversation in the animal's first-person voice, mixing natural-history facts with conservation reality. The Snow Leopard tells you about its blue mountains; the Vaquita explains why there are 10 left in the wild etc. Built solo in 6 days with Claude Code as primary collaborator. React Native + Expo SDK 54 + TypeScript strict + Vercel Edge Function proxy + Upstash rate-limit + budget cap. 33 hand-painted card illustrations + 5 painted load screens + 7 ability VFX. Conservation framing cites WLT "Buy an Acre" math as projected impact at scale when it would be implemented with AD revenue (not donations made — explicit disclaimer in README). Disclaimer: There are several issues that I have solutions for but that are not in the current build. Ofcourse Ad revenue and the automatic fund raising is one of them. The second is photo-detection. At the moment it is possible to take a photo of a photo, and it will register as a card. Although I dont see that as a huge issue because the goal is not "taking photos of the animal" but rather the other side of the loop; learning and raising money for conservation. We would nonetheless build in some failsafes for this like; Claude Geodetecting vs habitat (does it match habitat range of animal), Claude Photo Detection; does it have any elements of being a photo/screen, maybe implementing video mandatory as this is harder to fake etc.