March 2021 Update

Hey fellow collectors! 

Today I'll be launching a new monthly update format. 

Introduction 

I've decided to start sending out monthly updates via Patreon since not all of our patrons are in the Discord channel (which is a pretty sweet community, by the way!).

While I'm personally sensitive to receiving too many status emails from all of the Patreon content creators I support, a once-a-month cadence should be palatable even for prolific Patreon supporters. If you want fine-grained control of which emails you receive from each Patreon creator you follow, you can visit https://www.patreon.com/settings/email and do so there.

Current site

While I'm mostly focused on coding the new version of the website, for the current version, I've recently added:

- The ability to accurately add cards into TCGPlayer's cart including their exact set for the very first time -- this makes it way easier to buy draft cubes.
 - I had been begging them for this feature for years so it's a huge deal!
 - The ability to filter quantities of cards by foil or non-foil.
- Added a new TCGPlayer App import format that is nearly 100% accurate.
- Split a few more sets away from their variant sets so folks could reach 100% completion for the main set cards.
- 3998 more cards from 26 new sets
- Numerous bug fixes, including a price sync issue with TCGPlayer that impacted the site for a few days

And thanks to Patreon, I've been able to upgrade image quality across the board, pay for hosting it myself (remember when Gatherer outages would bring down our images?), and start splitting the infrastructure into smaller microservices with separate and modern hosting platforms.

As of this writing we're almost up to 35,000 users tracking over 160,000,000 cards. It's so mind-blowing!

New site

Work on the new website has been going super well. I recently shared a video of the new "Live Search" interface I'm working on in our Discord channel (which you get access to by being a Patron) -- think of a Scryfall search but instead of reloading the page your search results update live as you type in the card name and choose additional filters.

The technology stack and infrastructure for the new website has matured and is set in stone now -- I spent quite a while writing and rewriting it in different frameworks until I found the ones I liked.

For any nerds out there, I've begun to open source them too:

Front-end application: https://github.com/brianchuchua/mtgcb-web
Pricing microservice: https://github.com/brianchuchua/mtgcb-price-service
API: Not yet open sourced, but coming soon

The pricing microservice is currently being used by the live MTG CB website, which is great since it's improved price accuracy to over 99% -- most cards missing prices just aren't on TCGPlayer yet.

I'm now in a great flow where I am creating new pages, updating the backend and database to support them, and modernizing the experience.

The current aim is to bring the new website to feature parity with the current one, making improvements along the way, including adding these three new core features:

- Tokens (the #1 requested feature of the site)
- Custom collection goals
- Foreign cards

The focus for the next few weeks is to perfect the "Live Search" interface, which will be both usable in the context of managing your own collection and for just browsing Magic cards, even if you're not logged in. I think it will be a fun way to discover new collection goals -- being able to see "all legendary blue dragons" with just a few clicks will feel super smooth.

After that I'll be continuing to iterate on existing functionality as I improve the interface for common use cases.

Here's a new video of some interface changes to "Live Search" for pagination and controlling the number of cards and layout -- over on the left you'll be seeing many more filtering options popping up soon:

http://manath.com/previews/live-search-alpha-second-preview.mp4

The future

Once the new MTG CB starts to have usable modules, it will be opened up for alpha and beta testing within our Patreon community. :) I look forward to hearing your feedback and taking your ideas and suggestions to heart.

After v1.0 of the new site launches, we'll be doing smaller, more frequent updates, where the Patreon community will get to vote on the next thing I work unless there's an obvious choice to tackle next. (I've received hundreds of feature requests over the years!)

I'm also excited to have extra breathing room to pick the podcast back up and start streaming Magic Arena casually -- I love to draft!

Once COVID is behind us, I look forward to meeting some of you at Grand Prixs! I'm always at every GP in Vegas, Anaheim, San Diego, and Los Angeles. I may have some t-shirts and playmats to give away at that point.

Personal life

While COVID has increased my working hours to 50+ hours a week at my day job, I've still found time to both work on MTG CB and continue to enjoy Magic Arena and have continued to explore the world of modern board gaming.

If you haven't heard, board games are amazing now. Catan led to a golden age of board game designs and Kickstarter has created some really cool things. 

You can see my board game collection here: https://geekgroup.app/users/manath/collection?expansions=0&sort=rating.bgg&sortReverse=1

And games I've recently played here: https://geekgroup.app/users/manath/plays

And here's a picture of my game room, with the classic Magic collection alongside the board game sprawl:

Collecting is so cool. :)

Conclusion

And that's it for the first monthly update!

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.

Happy collecting,

Brian, MTG CB