April 2021 Update

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

Current Site

As always, I've been balancing my time between maintaining the current database of cards while working on the website revamp.

Strixhaven: School of Mages and its related sets hit MTG CB about halfway through April, introducing over one thousand cards to the site. While I've written tools to automate adding these increasingly complex sets with variants cards, the process can still take about half a day! No wonder I've been seeing other similar tools shut down.

Prerelease cards, Promo Pack cards, and The List cards should be added soon -- COVID has slowed down my sources of scans and card data for these.

I've also been catching up on older miscellaneous sets, like 2018 Lunar New Year. Feel free to reach out to me if there's one you think I should prioritize!

In April, we gained 400 new users, bringing the number of fellow collectors past 35000! My mind is still blown by the sheer quantity of registered accounts. It's so amazing that we all share the same love for tracking and organizing our collections.

New Site

This month's focus has been on performance enhancements to the new MTG CB's backend infrastructure (Side note: I actually had to hack the framework I'm using, Keystone.js, in order to allow for some new features that I wanted in the Browse page!) along with completing the Live Search components and card image gallery interface that will be central to the new MTG CB experience.

Here's an extended video showing off some new widgets on the page, including card sets and full oracle text search: http://manath.com/previews/card-sets-and-oracle-text-preview.mp4

This interface is super important since it will be re-used throughout many sections of the site, including just Browsing magic or actively managing your collection. The fact that this new image gallery is paginated means that my users can finally live the dream of seeing their entire collection on one page, instead of being forced to view their cards from the context of a set.

I'm happy that my vision for a "live search" instead of a traditional search that required full page reloads is coming to fruition. It feels super smooth and I feel like I can explore Magic cards much better now.

"Smooth" is the operative word for these designs. I'm running through user stories trying to minimize the number of clicks and hunting around that you have to do.

You can even search for mana symbols in the oracle text pretty easily: http://manath.com/previews/special-symbol-search-preview.mp4

Once I add a few more widgets to the search tool (filtering by rarity, CMC, power, toughness, artist, and so on), I'll be working on the Table View alternative. Like the image gallery, this view will be used in both browsing and collection editing contexts.

Rough Roadmap

v1.0 of the new MTG CB will be complete when:

- The site is at feature parity with the old site, including new interfaces and structural changes, like breaking out sets into subsets (in progress)
- Tokens have been added to the database (coming soon)
- Foreign cards have been added to the database (and hooked up to MagicCardMarket's prices) (coming soon)
- Custom collection goals have been implemented (coming soon)

With the new infrastructure online for both the website and its backend infrastructure, development is going very smoothly for the above. I'm putting a lot of love into every interface decision.

I'm also looking at releasing an alpha to my beloved Patrons as soon as I can so you can play around with individual pages and components as I flesh them out. It's just a matter of taking my local development environment and putting it in the cloud. I'll get that done when I'm at a good point for it. :)

A beta release will be done once the new site's core features are mostly functional.

I don't have a concrete date for this yet, and given how disruptive COVID has been I wouldn't want to even if I had one! But as I get older and experience things like Blizzard's flopped, rushed release of the Warcraft 3 Remaster, I've begun to value more and more when a company declares that the release date is Soon™ or When It's Done™ instead of having an Isochron Scepter held to them by investors.

With that said, development speed is at an all-time high since the boring infrastructure stuff is out of the way. :)

Personal Life

My day job has finally started to settle down -- I'm averaging nine hours a day instead of 11 to 14. This improved balance has given me much more time to work on MTG CB (and sleep!).

I've also been dealing with some medical stuff, but the treatment has been going pretty well. I'm hopeful this won't have an impact on MTG CB or my day job, but if it does, I'll be sure to send out an update. It's not life-threatening or anything, but it's possible I could require surgery with a 6 week (!!!) recovery time. 

Now that I'm fully vaccinated, I was able to host a mini-Prerelease at home for Strixhaven: School of Mages. Prismari dominated!

In the board gaming world, the Street Fighter Miniatures Game has really impressed me as a light skirmish game!

Conclusion

Alright, back to coding for me! I'll update as many of the missing Strixhaven cards on MTG CB as I can over this weekend, depending on which data sources and scans are available.

I can't convey enough how much I appreciate my Patrons and your support. This project is so much fun to work on and it's amazing to be able to share it with all of you. Thank you!

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.

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. :)