The One With Release Plans™

Hey collectors! This is the update many of you have been waiting for. :)

Site Growth

Since our last update MTG CB has added 2887 cards spanning 5 major sets and about a dozen variant sets. I've made some improvements to my tooling for adding some of the more complex cards (looking at you, Promo Packs), which has saved me a ton of time.

We've also added 2061 new registered users, bringing the total count of MTG CB collectors to over 37000!

The growth in Patreon support, alongside TCGPlayer and ad revenue has been incredible. :) I can now easily support all server costs with room to grow! MTG CB was operating at loss for years beforehand so this is super awesome. ♥

Side Project: 17 Lands Visual Comparison

My wife and I draft Magic a lot on Magic Arena, and we loved using 17Lands.com to help us decide between tough picks. We found their tables hard to read, however, so I spent half a weekend building a quick visual tool that lets you compare 17Lands data during a draft.

You can check it out here: https://17lands.mtgcb.tools/

It's one of many little side tools that I'll be building in the MTG CB network as time goes on.

New Site Progress

With the unauthenticated basic card browsing and searching experience complete, I'm focusing on the new interfaces for collectors while they're logged in. This includes all of the user stories for adding and removing cards from a collection.

I'm also working on a Conflux of related features required for feature parity with the current site, including important items like rewriting the import/export engine, better password reset flows and user account management,  and so on. 

This is all coming together and starting to feel like a complete experience, which brings me to...

Release Plans! 🎉

Here's the deal: I want to get the new site into Patron's hands as soon as it's a functional replacement for the current MTG CB, even if it's just feature parity with new features in development. That way you get a smoother early experience and we flush out any bugs as the new features are added.

We'll do this in phases! The planned releases are:

• Alpha (December 2021) - This will be at least feature parity with the current MTG CB, shared to patrons only. This will use the same collection that you currently track in the older MTG CB experience.
• Beta (March) - This will be open to everyone and will include as many of the new features that make it by this time (tokens, custom collection goals, and foreign cards being candidates among them, in that order of priority)
• Unlimited (June) - This is the official v1.0 release of MTG CB to the world with the core new features.
• Revised (TBD) - This is the v1.1 update adding a new requested feature, to be determined. (It may be card locations, or sealed product tracking, or deck/cube creation, for example. Whatever I and the community prioritize!)
• Future Updates (TBD) - Future updates will follow the same pattern of v1.2, v1.3, and so on, each adding a single new feature in focused iterations.

Risks

If I run into a serious time sink, I'll just bump it down from the Beta release to the Unlimited release. It's possible that I could run into unforeseen complexity with gathering data for all foreign cards and mapping them to different pricing vendors online that will just take a bit of gruntwork to get through. We'll cross that bridge when we get there. :)

Anything that would impact the Alpha release will get pushed down to the Beta release.

My availability is pretty open, with my day job now settled down into just taking up the usual 40 hours a week. 

There's one other risk, which brings me to:

Personal Life

It's totally not a big deal, and it's going to sound worse than it is, but I believe in being 100% open and upfront in this Patreon, so I wanted to let you know that I was diagnosed with a benign brain tumor last year.

It's not life threatening or cancerous, promise! It's just on my pituitary gland and messing with my body's ability to produce hormones. My main symptoms have been fatigue and the risk of blacking out if I stand up too quickly or sneeze too strongly (lol).

I've been getting non-surgical treatment and it's been going very well, with the fatigue mostly gone already and hormone levels starting to go back to normal. I'm just in and out of doctor's offices a lot.

In many cases the non-surgical treatment is enough to get rid of the tumor, but there is a chance I would require surgery. If so, the recovery time is approximately a month. That's why I'm letting you guys know, just in case that would impact any timeline. :)

If that winds up being a factor, I'll keep you up to date! I'm feeling super positive about it all.

2021 Q3 Giveaway

This quarter's giveaway is for a Borderless Foil Jace the Mind Sculptor!

The giveaway will happen toward the end of the month, and it's open to anyone as per Patreon rules. Patrons are automatically entered, but any listeners of the podcast or users of MTG CB can just leave a comment below before the drawing to be eligible.

Speaking of which:

The Podcast

The podcast will definitely be coming back once the new site is live. :) I miss it as a vehicle for communicating with my users and as a way of keeping up to date with the wider collecting community! I was pleasantly surprised at all of the positive feedback it got and it will be coming back when I'm ready.

Site Stability

You may have noticed MTG CB had a few brief outages recently. (Anywhere from 7 to 19 minutes at a time, usually late at night or early in the morning California time)

I'm working with my web host to resolve these. We believe we eliminated the root cause of the main recurring outage, but we'll keep at it. You'll be happy to know MTG CB will have a new host for the new site. :)

Merchandise

I'm looking to get some playmats and t-shirts designed for MTG CB. Right now I'm experimentally ordering custom shirts from different vendors to hone in on the best quality material. Stay tuned!

Update Tempo

I felt that monthly updates were too spammy in people's inboxes, at least during this phase of development. I'll update with bigger chunks of information when there's cool stuff to share, although you can always reach out to me directly for a one-on-one update. :) You can do so via Patreon, by emailing me at brian@mtgcb.com, hitting me up the official MTG CB discord, or via MTG CB's Facebook page.

Conclusion

Thank you so much for your support! Working on MTG CB is the most fun I have with software engineering and I can't wait to track my tokens!

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