June 2021 Update

Hey collectors! Welcome to the June 2021 update for MTG CB.

Current Site

The month of June saw 781 new cards added to the site, including Modern Horizons 2, its hundreds of variants, new Secret Lair Drop Series cards, and a new WPN Promo.

I'm still waiting on Prerelease Cards for Modern Horizons 2 to pop up online so I can add them as well. This has really slowed down due to COVID since less players are engaged with the physical cards. I can always add these on my own with placeholder images, although it's a little more manual than using my import script. I'm going to invest some time in improving my tooling so that I can have these sets up ahead of Scryfall and even TCGPlayer if possible.

Amazingly, we gained 1057 new users on the site, bringing the number of accounts to past 35,000!

This is triple the growth since the last quarter. I don't have an explanation for this since there wasn't a noticeable spike in traffic patterns.

New Site

I've continued to work on the new image gallery and table views for collection management in the new site. I've added oracle text searching, a set selector, dynamic card stat searches for attributes like converted mana cost, power, toughness, loyalty, along with the ability to sort the rendered views by most available card attributes.

During this process I've had to hack the framework I'm using, Keystone.js, since it didn't support some features that I needed for sorting. I've gotten pretty good at hacking this framework. :) 

An interesting challenge with projects like is the friction you get sometimes between a framework that's meant to help you and what you're trying to accomplish, especially if that framework changes or evolves over time. In two prior redesigns of MTG CB I ended up throwing the project out and starting over due to the frameworks not working out.

In this case, though, Keystone.js has been mostly smooth and has greatly improved my productivity. We're going to the finish line with this one!

The new table design is almost ready to share. :) Putting a few finishing touches on the Material UI design, although I may pivot to card pages (new!) and the new set view and breaking sets out into linked subsets. The new site is approaching feature parity, although I'll need to work on the improved importers soon.

I can probably have an alpha build online soon™, but I don't want it to be too early and to not have enough features for people to play with.

Personal Life

I haven't had as much time for gaming due to my work-life balance being pretty brutal (I do sometimes have to work until midnight), but that should pass soon. Looking forward to the three day weekend for the Fourth of July!

I did manage to squeeze in playing Spirit Island for the first time -- this is a very impressive board game. 

The asymmetry between the different spirits you can play reminds me of the different colors in Magic. It's cooperative, so great to play with your significant other or even by yourself!

I also scheduled a Modern Horizons 2 draft at home which should be awesome. That set is great for Sealed play too. Probably the best Sealed experience I've ever had! The cross-color pair synergies means you always have something powerful to build and a lot of room for creativity.

Conclusion

The most fun I have in a day is typically between 5 AM and 8 AM when I work on my first shift of MTG CB coding before my work day starts. Being in that zone of productivity and flow state, often with my cat purring beside me, is just so rewarding, and I'm incredibly lucky to be able to do it with your support and feedback. :)

As always, feel free to reach out with any questions, comments, feature requests, board game recommendation requests, whatever! You can do so via email at brian@mtgcb.com, via Patreon, the Facebook page, our Discord, however works best for you.

Thank you for your support!

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 -- I keep updates once a month in order to not spam you. :)