MTG CB Limited Edition Alpha preview is live for patrons!

The MTG CB Limited Edition Alpha preview is live for patrons to use and give feedback on! The link is at the bottom of this update. :) 

It's been quite a journey of designing and re-designing the backend architecture several times, but we're finally here! 🎉 And we're just getting started.

State of the Alpha

The Limited Edition Alpha build is still having functionality copied over from the old MTG CB, one feature at a time. While things like the importers and exporters still need to be transferred over, there's plenty for you to get your hands on and play around with. :) 

This includes the new Browse interface -- this lets you browse all of Magic outside of the context of a collection, even if you're not logged in. Think of it like a live version of Scryfall search. A lot of work has been put into it feel snappy and quick, without requiring full page refreshes. Let me know how that feels for you!

The Collection interface is also largely in place -- it's temporarily in a read-only mode until I wrap up a database migration and some new interfaces. Once I switch it away from read-only mode, you'll be able to either your collection on either the old MTG CB or the new MTG CB and they'll stay in sync!

I still need to port over some elements of the Collection interface, like navigation between sets, some collection-specific filters, and so on. These will be coming soon as updates will be happening multiple times a week.

I was originally hoping to have it all done by the end of the year, but as promised, nothing was going to prevent an Alpha from being released by the end of this month. :) My release schedule was specifically designed to allow for this kind of flexibility -- anything that would delay an Alpha release gets deferred as fast follower or gets pushed to the Beta build, and so on.

Personal side note: I also lost a few weeks of development due to an insane workload at my day job (14+ hour days) and one of my cats being diagnosed with cancer (although I'm happy to report that cat chemotherapy is a miracle and she's back to her happy kitty self). But I was able to make up for this lost time by working through the holiday break -- it's been a fun programming montage!

The Alpha feels like a pretty good start to me, although there are little bugs everywhere -- I count at least a dozen. See if you can spot them all. :) There are some areas that need better loading indicators, better error handling, and so on -- we'll get there.

The Road to Beta and Unlimited

As the Alpha is finalized, it'll eventually be at feature parity with the current MTG CB, including some new features and interfaces.

We'll then move on to the Limited Edition Beta in March, which will include as many of the following features that can be completed in time: Tokens, Custom Collection Goals, and Foreign Cards.

We'll then move on to the Unlimited release in June, which will have Tokens, Custom Collection Goals, and Foreign Cards, and will be the official release of the new MTG CB and a shutdown of the old (don't worry, though -- your collections transfer over automatically.)

That's the plan, and I'll turn the dial to adjust accordingly. (Maybe we go live with just Tokens  if the site feels ready for the wider public and have the other features follow, for example.)

From there, we'll have smaller releases with single new features being added one at a time. Things like Card Locations, Card pages, and so on.

We're also going to need a new release called:

Combo Winter

This will be a boring release to my users but exciting to software engineers -- the new MTG CB needs to upgrade a few of the libraries it's using behind the scenes. (Keystone, Material UI, and several others.) 

This is necessary because the version of the Keystone library I'm using is missing some features that I had to hack into it myself. The new version also uses Prisma which will make managing my databases a lot easier.

It'll be a bit of work to migrate over to these new library versions, and the changes will be mostly invisible to my users, aside from performance optimizations and enabling easier implementation of some new features.

I'll most likely do this after the Unlimited release since I don't want anything slowing the train. :)

Site Stability

Something is up with the old MTG CB host that is causing periodic latency spikes -- the site either works perfectly smooth or takes forever to load. It's intermittent and only lasts a few minutes, but I'm communicating with my host to see what they can do about it.

Keep this in mind when testing the Limited Edition Alpha -- if the old MTG CB site goes down, you'll temporarily be unable to see your collection on the new site since they're sharing the same data source. (Browse mode will still work fine though.)

This won't be an issue when the site fully launches. It'll all be on the new host.

Working Tempo

I've definitely been burning the candle at both ends these last few months -- even with a 14+ hour workday, I'd still work on MTG CB afterwards late into the night. 

Unforgivably, I skipped some Friday Night Magic events and haven't hosted board game nights in a while. While it's always fun working on MTG CB and I daydream about being able to do it fulltime instead of a "real job", I need to make sure that I maintain a healthy life balance.

I'd say I've been working at an 11 on a scale from 1-10. I'm going to dial it back to an 8.5 and catch my breath, which the timeline allows for me to do thankfully. :) (Hosting a game night with the board game Rising Sun tomorrow, woohoo!)

I'll be dividing my focus as follows:

• Around 50% of the time working on the new MTG CB
• Around 40% of the time working on the old MTG CB, keeping up with new sets and fixing issues (I still owe you guys the 1996 World Championship Decks and a non-ending onslaught of surprise Secret Lair Drop Series bonus cards)
• Around 10% of the time handling miscellany (custom binder requests, mailing out Patreon goodies, etc.)

I anticipate the podcast will be back after the Unlimited release in June. :) 

Link to the Limited Edition Alpha

Here it is at its temporary home! https://alpha.mtgcollectionbuilder.com/ (Update: The URL has changed from its previous value.)

While this link is for patrons only, if you have a significant other or close friend interested, that's fine. Just don't post it anywhere public -- thank you!

Some things to remember:

• The Collection view is in read-only mode right now until I finish migrating some collection data and revising the collection updating interface. This will be coming soon.
• Please keep your testing to desktop and tablet devices for now. I'll be making mobile views after I finalize their interfaces in desktop mode. (Some are responsive and work fine already, but others need tweaking.)
• If a link doesn't do anything when you click it, it just means it hasn't been implemented yet. :)
• Other important updates will be visible on the site's home page.

The experience should feel snappy and more like a tool that tries to get out of your way -- you can collapse the navbar, customize which table elements and card grid elements you see, how many cards or sets you see on the page at a time, and so on. Searching is real time and never requires a page reload. Images only load as needed as you scroll down.

You can log in with the same account that you use for the old MTG CB. It'll copy everything over the first time you log in. You can also navigate to anyone's collection by using the same URL pattern that the old MTG CB has. (https://alpha.mtgcollectionbuilder.com/collections/1337 is my collection for example.)

Note that updating your username (new feature!) or password will only affect the new MTG CB account and these changes may be wiped when the site goes live.

Feedback Welcome

There's no wrong feedback, even for a tool in an alpha state, so please feel free to share any and all of your thoughts. 

• What do you like?
• What do you not like?
• What feels missing? (Do you want ads back already? :P)
• Any bugs? There's about a dozen ones that I'm already aware of, but send them all my way!

Together we'll make MTG CB a perfect tool to manage our collections. Thank you for everything. :)

You can reach out to me via Patreon, via brian@mtgcb.com, via Facebook, or via our dedicated Discord channel, #limited-edition-alpha.

Even without directly feedback, I'm using some tools (including Sentry.io) to automatically detect and report errors to me. So try to break it!

P.S. Opting Out Of Emails

If you're like me and suffer from email Inbox fatigue, you can always opt out of these emails notifications for any Patreon creators that you support by heading over to https://www.patreon.com/settings/email