Introduction: What is Squee, the Phyrexian Assistant?
Squee is my laboratory assistant, an all-purpose cards inventory manager, price checker, and forum poster. Squee's primary purpose is recognizing typed cards, you might be able to just copy/paste somebody else's list (or your own) into the app, parse for prices if you have a non-regular version, and have all the card name/set/price/color/type etc. automatically filled out, assuming you stored it correctly. Then, Squee is able to automatically create MTGS trade lists in the same format as my sales/trade thread (I can add more formats if desired, but so far this seems to be the best I've seen) based on the collection contents, which includes AUTOMATIC HAVES/WANTS tags! That's right - for all you people who don't even know what they are, if you use this app to create your trade/sales lists, everybody can now find your lists easily and trade/buy your stuff!
Depending on the version, pricing data is retrieved by MOTL, via Magiccards.info by way of GathererExtractor. As of 7.0.0.72, real-time TCGPlayer prices are available now as well.
Sets - Squee supports every single set via MOTL and every single set on Magiccards.info.
Spelling - Squee encourages proper spelling, and refuses to recognize misspelled cards at the moment (Did you know that "Vendillion Clique" is not a card?). Maybe a spellchecker will be restored in future versions.
Item formats - Squee supports a variety of price quantity formats, including but not limited to
1x Angelheart Vial 0.25
1 Serra Avenger (Russian) - $8
1 Goblin Guide 3.25
Brainstorm
1 Leyline of Anticipation - $0.50
Sword of War and Peace (NPH)
Timetwister (P3K) (SemiPower)
Timetwister (U) (SemiPower)
Timetwister (Unlimited) (SemiPower)
Revised
Fork (Unlimited) (LEGACYSTAPLE) (Red)
Venser, the Sojourner (Multi) (T2STAPLE)
Gatekeeper of Malakir (Black) (PROMO)
Trikelion (Artifact)
(White) Serra Angel
Prognostic Tutor
1x Gemstone Mine
2 Karakas
x6 Icy Manipulator
(Beta) Icy Manipulator
Yawgmoth's Will
Savannah
Kuldotha Phoenix
Pernicious Deed
Mishra's Factory (SOM)
Mishra's Factory (4th)
Oran-Rief, the Vastwood ($0.17)
Emeria, the Sky Ruin
Blackcleave Cliff
Gilt-Leaf Palace
BACK TO BASICS X 2
01 Crucible of Worlds (5DN) - $10.86 ea
01 Darksteel Forge (DST) - $7.68 ea
6x Eternity Vessel (1.00)
1x The Abyss (English) $50
4 Primeval Titan $30 ea.
(2) Fastbond NM
2x Revised tundra Near mint 50$
Arena (X2) (Promo) (NM)
Berserk (X1 Beta) (X1 Unlimited) (NM)
Grozoth NM $0.24 62
-Alara Reborn-
Mishra's Factory - Antiquities - NM - Very hard to find and valuable WINTER picture
Lake of the Dead - 3x - All NM - Alliances
3x Jace, The Mind Sculptor - 70 each
2 Halo Hunter .25
Sedris, the Traitor King Mint $0.49 2
1 x taiga
Fastbond Unlimited
1 Sylvan Library 4th
Panther Warriors (x2)
1 Wasteland (TE) 22.91
Flash Flood 1
Powerstone MineField
Alpha Mox Emerald (NM)
Alpha Mox Emerald -NM-
Howling Mine (revised)(fine)$1.00
$800 Time Walk (Beta, PSA 8)
Land Tax - NM English Legends
Thunder Spirit - NM English Legends
Balance - 2x Revised NM
Ratchet Bomb x3 - $7
Icy Manipulator - 2x - NM - Unlimited
Masticore - 2x - NM - Urza's Legacy
Windseeker Centaur (Promo) (Excellent)
Angelic Voices (Legends Italian) (NM)
Strip Mine - Antiquities - NM - Tower picture
Urza's Lands - Antiquities - All 12 NM - All 12 variations
Lux Cannon x1 - $4
x4 Honor of the Pure 2.00
Becon Of Destrucation x2
$450 Time Walk (BE G/VG) Front Back
Fauna Shaman
5x Underground Sea EX $85
1x Livewire Lash
1 Liliana Vess(Foil) 8.00
Grim Monolith - $14.00
Ivory Tower (Antiquities) - $3.00
1x Door of Destinies - $1.25
4x Inexorable Tide - $0.25
Probably a lot more can be written about this but I'm lazy at the moment
Windows, preferably Windows 7. If you're not running 7 and want to test, lemme know!
Squee runs off Microsoft's .NET 3.5 framework. You must have the latest version in order to properly run Squee on your system. Download the latest version HERE.
Screen resolution at least 1280x1024
Execution as Administrator for Windows Vista and Windows 7.
Once you have that installed, you can download Squee.
and create. then extract to the "C:\Program Files (x86)\SqueePhyrexianAssistant" directory, such that the files:
C:\Program Files (x86)\SqueePhyrexianAssistant\Latest.xml
C:\Program Files (x86)\SqueePhyrexianAssistant\ExampleCollection.xml
etc. exist
7.0.0.96+: INN, DKA and future support for AVR sets added
7.0.0.94+: I believe I fixed the error resulting in a hang when parsing via tcgplayer prices (i.e. when tcgplayer.com fails to respond). I'll update the master cardname database (courtesy of chaudukah) as soon as it's available, a new version with a fix for split cards is coming out so I'll just use that when available.
7.0.0.81: Several bugfixes in between, updated code to fix loading of collections as well as hopefully remove the .NET datagridview red X bug for good.
7.0.0.72: Incorporated real-time TCGPlayer prices so you can use dynamic prices instead of loading from the static database file.
7.0.0.70+: So, I forgot that not everybody has GathererExtractor installed As such, I have updated my setup.exe as of 5pm CST on 10/11/2011 to include a critical piece. If your installation was not working before, try removing the entire contents of the "C:\Program Files (x86)\SqueePhyrexianAssistant" folder, uninstalling and reinstalling the setup.exe. My apologies, this is hopefully the last version that will require such manual manipulation.
To get INN, DKA, etc. new data, upgrade to V7.0.0.96, close the app, delete C:\Program Files (x86)\SqueePhyrexianAssistant\Latest.xml, and restart the app. When the app restarts, it should download a new file with the latest info from GathererExtractor, with updated card info, prices, etc.
If it's not a regular card, or regular foil, just put (promo) on it and let the software do the work
Please watch the demo video, or at least skip through it, I believe I cover much of the functionality in the video, in lieu of creating a user manual or something like that If you're still stumped, just post on the thread and I'll get back to ya
Notes
Nearly one year ago, I started on the MOTL/MTGS forums, interested in buying/trading cards and reliving a childhood hobby. I saw the requirements for creating a list, adding prices, sorting it, and god forbid you want to categorize the cards within, ye gods, that's starting to sound like real work! So I hacked together a program over a coupe of weekends and kicked off my mtg trading career. Nearly a thousand trades later, I've acquired most of my wants, and when browsing some trade threads recently I came upon a few that no doubt required some massive manual effort (Props to Divisionbyzer0). I can't comprehend actually putting together and maintaining something like that manually, so after I upgraded Squee to produce better-looking lists, I thought to provide some of its functionality to the MTGS community, and here it is.
i'm interested in helping out. i can't profess to having a lot of technical knowledge (i'm a *former* programmer) but i do have a desire to help you out, as i've been looking for a program like this forever.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Now playing Transformers: Legends. 27-time top tier finisher and admin of the TFL Wikia site.
Heya Malacoda, mmm I'd have to say right now not really. I could make it web-based I guess, it's one of the things I thought about initially, then it'd be usable by anybody with a browser.
When I start it, it does the verifying application requirements, then goes to the squee splash. Then it crashes, giving the option of close, or search for a solution.
under more info it lists a problem with ionic.zip.
I got it - can you do the manual downloading for the MTGSExample.zip file per the instructions? I think that might be the issue, or maybe you didn't install it as Administrator?
If you're not running Windows 7, you probably need to download this file manually: http://www.mtgtrader.net/SqueePhyrex...TGSExample.zip
and create. then extract to the "C:\Program Files (x86)\SqueePhyrexianAssistant" directory, such that the files:
C:\Program Files (x86)\SqueePhyrexianAssistant\Latest.xml
C:\Program Files (x86)\SqueePhyrexianAssistant\ExampleCollection.xml
etc. exist
When I start it, it does the verifying application requirements, then goes to the squee splash. Then it crashes, giving the option of close, or search for a solution.
under more info it lists a problem with ionic.zip.
Dresdon, have a some questions about the program and wanted to share some thoughts from an end user perspective. I want to emphasize that I am not complaining, rather expressing what I intuitively wouldve liked to have seen when certain events happened. I believe of all the card cataloging programs out there, this is the best one out there for those of use who currently or would like to trade on these sites.
I have never created a have/want list before. Part of my quest in creating one was to adopt an application that would make management easy. As I mentioned it seems like yours is the best since I primarily want to use it with MOTL and MTGS
-I am a new user, I have no preexisting list. My first instinct to get started on creating a list flows like this: See a master list of all magic cards, sort by set, scroll down and select cards + quantity then add to my collection. This doesnt seem to be an option? It would be good to explain that this program assumes you already have a working have/want list that youre importing.
Pulled out my eternal binder and went to work on creating a list in notepad. Here is the list I created:
Beta
1x Copy Artifact (beta)
1x Two-Headed Giant of Foriys (beta)
1x Word of Command (beta)
1x Blaze of Glory (beta)
2x Ankh of Mishra (beta)
1x Ice Storm (beta)
1x Juggernaut (beta)
unlimited
2x illusionary mask (unlimited)
1x mox ruby (unlimited)
1x Chaos Orb (unlimited)
1x Cyclopean Tomb (unlimited)
1x Wheel of Fortune (unlimited)
2x Sol Ring
Revised
2x Wheel of Fortune
3x Volcanic Island
4x Tropical Island
5x Tundra
3x Plateau
3x Savannah
1x Taiga
1x Fastbond
4th Edition
3x Sylvan Library
2x Land Tax
Arabian Nights
2x Mountain
2x Elephant Graveyard
1x Old Man of the Sea
1x Shahrazad
1x Ring of Ma'rûf
1x Singing Tree
Mirrodin
1x Duplicant (foil)
2x Chrome Mox
5x Tooth and Nail
Darksteel
1x Sword of Light and Shadow (foil)
6x Sword of Light and Shadow
1x Sword of Fire and Ice (foil)
6x Sword of Fire and Ice
1x skullclamp (foil)
1x Sundering Titan (foil)
4x Arcbound Ravager
8x Darksteel Forge
Fifth Dawn
1x crucible of worlds
6x Vedalken shackles
3x Engineered Explosives
4x Mycosynth Golem
Champions of Kamigawa
1x Godo, Bandit Warlord (foil)
1x Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker (foil)
5x Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
1x Myojin of Night's Reach (foil)
8x Kokusho, the Evening Star
1x Glimpse of Nature (foil)
5x Glimpse of Nature
Betrayers of Kamigawa
4x Umezawa's Jitte
5x Kira, Great Glass-Spinner
1x Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni (foil)
1x Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni
Ravnica: City of Guilds
5x Life from the Loam
1x Doubling Season
1x Overgrown Tomb (foil)
Guildpact
3x Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind
Dissension
Pillar of the Paruns (foil)
Time Spiral
1x Lotus Bloom
Lorwyn
3x Sower of Temptation
Morningtide
4x Bitterblossom
Shadowmoor
7x Painter's Servant
Shards of Alara
Empyrial Archangel
Portal
4x Personal Tutor
1x Sea Drake
I had a lot of issues parsing ..
Errors .... I had cards in different languages, some foil some not, was unclear how to get the program to recognize this at first. Watching the video again, it became clear that to give it a special designation of () ie: (foil) (japanese). Once the parentheses were in place, I had much more success.
Something that would be nice is if there is an error because the program doesnt understand what was typed in, a text dialog box popup with something close to what you wrote or allow you to correct?
For example Ring of Ma'ruf. I cannot get this name to parse to save my life. Ive tried Ring of Maruf, Ring of Ma'ruf, Ring of Ma'rûf. Nada
Set / Edition .. the parse made a lot of wild assumptions as to where my cards came from. This part of the video needs more detail and explanation. For those reading this and dont understand:
The round up round down feature isnt just used for setting the price of cards on your collection. If you do not remove the check box from Price Round up/down, it will auto-select the first edition available of the card. So for example type in Brainstorm, without removing the check it will assume its from the Beatdown set.
I believe for the benefit of the user this part of the interface needs to be reworked as it is very confusing.
When selecting the edition, it would go faster if I could just hit the number on my keyboard and it would move to the next card instead of hitting the number then Enter for every card.
Is there a way to add a tag to the set name that will tell the program where the cards come from so I dont need to manually tell it?
For example:
Legends
1x Land Tax
1x Sylvan Library
1x Concordant Crossroads
On every one of those it had to ask me, Legends or 4/5th edition or Chronicles. If I could put something like:
:Legends:
1x Land Tax
1x Sylvan Library
1x Concordant Crossroads
.. and it would know everything after that is from the Legends set until the next :x: that would be awesome. This would also alleviate a problem for sets like Cold Snap, Future Sight or Visions that share a name with a card.
Once I had my list parsed, I moved it to my collection.
From here I wouldve liked to have been able to edit the collection manually. For example if I sell or trade a card away, it would be nice to be able to edit the quantity. Full editing features in the collection section would be highly desirable.
If I can edit it, I couldnt figure out how to do it. Double click, right click, highlight + enter. Didnt see any way to do this.
With the cards in the collection. I moved to Output the data. When I chose by set it got all my cards in right. But it created titles for every set in magic regardless if I had any cards from that set on my list. Is there an option to ignore set titles where no cards exist?
Last question. When copying other people's list in to parse have / wants if their list isnt formatted perfectly it appears like it will yield a lot of parse errors?
Re selecting cards:
I consciously chose not to implement a mechanism where you click on a set, click on a color, click on a card, etc. since I assumed everything types Brainstorm (IA) faster than looking for the Ice Age set among dozens, and then the Brainstorm card. Putting in this feature would require a good amount of time, and I think only a very select minority would use it but hey I could be wrong.
Parsing issues, foil, languages, etc.:
If you put every single description of a card within parentheses, like so (all of the following will work properly):
Brainstorm (FOIL)
Brainstorm (Russian)
Brainstorm (Ice Age)
Brainstorm (IA)
Brainstorm (Russian) (FOIL) (IA)
It should always work assuming you didn't misspell the card, the language, and the edition you put in is exactly the full name of the edition or t he shortened name via magiccards.info, or the MOTL edition.
Re: Ring of Ma'Ruf, no idea - this is probably due to the u, but I distinctly remember putting something in for that, i.e. lim-dul's vault should work but I can work on it.
Set/Edition
The assumptions made on which edition a card comes from is quite simple - either pick the lowest priced one or the highest priced one if you didn't type one in. This is not a wild guess - it's the only possible one. How else are you going to assume where everybody's cards come from - unless you created a master list of all cards, their precise number in existence, and applied some statistical probability analysis on that, and even then it'd be a toss-up. So this is the way it is now and it can't be changed. If you want to choose a specific edition, please just enter it in parenthesis after the name of the card, see above.
Regarding the number-keyboard thing, I could change that I guess, you're the first one to bring it up Again, I think most people just type in the editions, it's usually faster than choosing from a list.
Regarding this idea
:Legends:
1x Land Tax
1x Sylvan Library
1x Concordant Crossroads
I had this implemented at some point in time but it disappeared somewhere within the last 30 editions somehow
Regarding manual collection editing
Just uncheck the collection read-only checkbox and you should be able to edit many cells in the collection grid.
Regarding not outputting empty sets
Yup I can remove empty sets.
Regarding your last question: When copying other people's list in to parse have / wants if their list isnt formatted perfectly it appears like it will yield a lot of parse errors
Yes this is true. I've made a number of allowances for different formats but I can't (and don't want to!) cover them all. Natural language recognition is a huge problem that many corporations are working on, with large financial backing and teams of researchers. This being mtg and squee being just a tool I created to help myself, I'm sure you can understand that what you're asking for is not feasible
If everybody were willing to pay say, $1k to use Squee, I could probably increase the format recognition rate by 25% but after a reality check, it's not worth my time to improve this. I will say this though - if you know how to use notepad++, and can apply some advanced usage of the search/replace function, there shouldn't hardly be any single major list you can't convert to a format recognizable by Squee. In the past year that I've been trading, Squee (with the help of Notepad++) has been able to parse any major list on MTGS/MOTL with a tolerable number of parse errors.
Oh and in closing, if the parse error is 'can't find motl price' or something like that, it's not an error per se, it's that MOTL's price list doesn't cover every single card. If the card isn't found on the tcgplayer database though, that's a no go. No cards from DKA have been added just yet so if you're parsing any single card from DKA it won't be recognized.
Ive been working with your program for the past few evenings and made a lot of adjustments on how I built the list based on the parameters of the application.
For the benefit of those who have zero or minimal programming knowledge (save that comp sci class you took in highschool a decade ago) you might find this helpful.
If you have your list in a text file, import all your data from txt to excel using the import function. You can use the options when importing to separate out the data into columns. For example, I told it to create a column after the 'x' for quantity, then another before the first '('. This easily separated the data into 3 columns to get my started; quantity, name and description
Once you cleanup the data, Ive found this method to work pretty well. It allows for you to quickly copy down descriptions for the cards while maintaining visual organization, plus it keeps everything uniform.
In excel I have my columns setup like this
Column 1: Set name (this is for my visual benefit)
Column 2: Quantity
Column 3: Name of card
Column 4: Set abbreviate in parenthesis
Column 5: Language in parenthesis
Column 6: Foil in parenthesis
I would highlight + copy Column 2 through 6 on down and paste the data in. But I ran into a problem, the copy function likes to retain the data as a table and the parse doesnt seem to like tabs. So I would first copy it into Word, edit the table to convert everything to text and the tabs into spaces. There were still parse errors on the extra spaces but thats irrelevant.
The instruction video, made even more sense after I had a better understanding of how to work with the program, what it does and doesnt do; I like it a lot.
There were a couple of times when this scenario would happy: "Huh? What is .. oooh I see .. very clever". Id like to try and play with the more advance features, i will pm you.
Another way to deal with this is that if you have your list in an excel file, you can export it as a delimited file (don't use comma's, since card names have commas), perhaps delimited by the pipe "|" character.
Then in Notepad++ or word, you can search/replace the | with )( or something like that so you end up with parenthesis around all the data formerly in columns. Then do another search/replace to put the opening parentheses and closing parentheses into place and it should be good to go from there.
I'm typing all this out right now with no access to the program so I don't remember what does and doesn't work but I seem to remember this mangling wasn't usually necessary, will investigate when I have more time.
Ive been working with your program for the past few evenings and made a lot of adjustments on how I built the list based on the parameters of the application.
For the benefit of those who have zero or minimal programming knowledge (save that comp sci class you took in highschool a decade ago) you might find this helpful.
If you have your list in a text file, import all your data from txt to excel using the import function. You can use the options when importing to separate out the data into columns. For example, I told it to create a column after the 'x' for quantity, then another before the first '('. This easily separated the data into 3 columns to get my started; quantity, name and description
Once you cleanup the data, Ive found this method to work pretty well. It allows for you to quickly copy down descriptions for the cards while maintaining visual organization, plus it keeps everything uniform.
In excel I have my columns setup like this
Column 1: Set name (this is for my visual benefit)
Column 2: Quantity
Column 3: Name of card
Column 4: Set abbreviate in parenthesis
Column 5: Language in parenthesis
Column 6: Foil in parenthesis
I would highlight + copy Column 2 through 6 on down and paste the data in. But I ran into a problem, the copy function likes to retain the data as a table and the parse doesnt seem to like tabs. So I would first copy it into Word, edit the table to convert everything to text and the tabs into spaces. There were still parse errors on the extra spaces but thats irrelevant.
The instruction video, made even more sense after I had a better understanding of how to work with the program, what it does and doesnt do; I like it a lot.
There were a couple of times when this scenario would happy: "Huh? What is .. oooh I see .. very clever". Id like to try and play with the more advance features, i will pm you.
Introduction: What is Squee, the Phyrexian Assistant?
Squee is my laboratory assistant, an all-purpose cards inventory manager, price checker, and forum poster. Squee's primary purpose is recognizing typed cards, you might be able to just copy/paste somebody else's list (or your own) into the app, parse for prices if you have a non-regular version, and have all the card name/set/price/color/type etc. automatically filled out, assuming you stored it correctly. Then, Squee is able to automatically create MTGS trade lists in the same format as my sales/trade thread (I can add more formats if desired, but so far this seems to be the best I've seen) based on the collection contents, which includes AUTOMATIC HAVES/WANTS tags! That's right - for all you people who don't even know what they are, if you use this app to create your trade/sales lists, everybody can now find your lists easily and trade/buy your stuff!
Demonstration Video
Features
Prequisites
Installation
C:\Program Files (x86)\SqueePhyrexianAssistant\Latest.xml
C:\Program Files (x86)\SqueePhyrexianAssistant\ExampleCollection.xml
etc. exist
Version History
Instructions
Notes
Nearly one year ago, I started on the MOTL/MTGS forums, interested in buying/trading cards and reliving a childhood hobby. I saw the requirements for creating a list, adding prices, sorting it, and god forbid you want to categorize the cards within, ye gods, that's starting to sound like real work! So I hacked together a program over a coupe of weekends and kicked off my mtg trading career. Nearly a thousand trades later, I've acquired most of my wants, and when browsing some trade threads recently I came upon a few that no doubt required some massive manual effort (Props to Divisionbyzer0). I can't comprehend actually putting together and maintaining something like that manually, so after I upgraded Squee to produce better-looking lists, I thought to provide some of its functionality to the MTGS community, and here it is.
***BEGIN REGULAR***
darkray16
picnicboy
twinner
thecheeseisblue
ChaoticFox
Mr.C
gnuhouse
baator
Soupa Joe
enzie
wickawack
DSSCRA
twbird18
mistercakes
GriMTriAd
F3n1x
pwvliet
captainusopp
Valorale
alyu314
Tanarin
Storch
Kronos Kronos
juzamdjinn
Mkipps
TheAirborneMoxenEvent
Qwerty
the_cardfather
lossy
Dakarai
Faulk_Wulf
Dresden
PsiJet
Juicy_J
Quantum
god of cyanide
elaugus
itfeltsoweird
csoda301
Divisionbyzer0
r3d d09
***END REGULAR***
***BEGIN PREMIUM***
Dresden
***END PREMIUM***
***BEGIN PRO***
Dresden
Divisionbyzer0
***END PRO***
The MirroCube - 420 card Mirrodin themed cube
And if I've offended you, I'm sorry, but maybe you need to be offended. But here's my apology and one more thing...
Starcity Games, ABU Games, etc... lol
Other than that, it's a good program. Now I just need the one that has the TCGPlayer function.
Windows 7
Mac OS X Lion
I am definitely technologically capable and have a basic knowledge of a few programming languages. Let me know if you're interested in my help.
Sales Thread
Lands WUBG
EDH:
Doran WBG
Lands WUBG
EDH:
Doran WBG
Also, it works fine in XP.
Thanks to Rivenor for the art.
Edit: Downloaded and installed, program fails out every time I start it.
under more info it lists a problem with ionic.zip.
I can provide the complete error after work.
If you're not running Windows 7, you probably need to download this file manually: http://www.mtgtrader.net/SqueePhyrex...TGSExample.zip
and create. then extract to the "C:\Program Files (x86)\SqueePhyrexianAssistant" directory, such that the files:
C:\Program Files (x86)\SqueePhyrexianAssistant\Latest.xml
C:\Program Files (x86)\SqueePhyrexianAssistant\ExampleCollection.xml
etc. exist
I have never created a have/want list before. Part of my quest in creating one was to adopt an application that would make management easy. As I mentioned it seems like yours is the best since I primarily want to use it with MOTL and MTGS
-I am a new user, I have no preexisting list. My first instinct to get started on creating a list flows like this: See a master list of all magic cards, sort by set, scroll down and select cards + quantity then add to my collection. This doesnt seem to be an option? It would be good to explain that this program assumes you already have a working have/want list that youre importing.
Pulled out my eternal binder and went to work on creating a list in notepad. Here is the list I created:
1x Copy Artifact (beta)
1x Two-Headed Giant of Foriys (beta)
1x Word of Command (beta)
1x Blaze of Glory (beta)
2x Ankh of Mishra (beta)
1x Ice Storm (beta)
1x Juggernaut (beta)
unlimited
2x illusionary mask (unlimited)
1x mox ruby (unlimited)
1x Chaos Orb (unlimited)
1x Cyclopean Tomb (unlimited)
1x Wheel of Fortune (unlimited)
2x Sol Ring
Revised
2x Wheel of Fortune
3x Volcanic Island
4x Tropical Island
5x Tundra
3x Plateau
3x Savannah
1x Taiga
1x Fastbond
4th Edition
3x Sylvan Library
2x Land Tax
Arabian Nights
2x Mountain
2x Elephant Graveyard
1x Old Man of the Sea
1x Shahrazad
1x Ring of Ma'rûf
1x Singing Tree
Antiquities
3x Power Artifact
2x Mishra's Factory (summer)
4x Mishra's Factory (spring)
2x Argivian Archaeologist
Legends
6x Karakas
2x Karakas (italian)
1x The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale
2x Reset (italian)
1x Invoke Prejudice
1x Invoke Prejudice (italian)
1x Sword of the Ages (italian)
1x Gravity Sphere
1x Sylvan Library
1x Concordant Crossroads
1x Hellfire
1x All Hallow's Eve
2x Hazezon Tamar
1x Hazezon Tamar (italian)
1x Thunder Spirit (italian)
1x Willow Satyr
1x Willow Satyr (italian)
1x Angus Mackenzie (italian)
1x spinal villain (italian)
1x Adun Oakenshield (italian)
The Dark
1x Maze of Ith
1x Maze of Ith (italian)
4x Blood Moon
1x Blood Moon (italian)
1x Ball Lightning
1x Goblin Wizard
1x Preacher
Chronicles
4x City of Brass
Ice Age
3x Pox
Alliances
5x Force of Will
Cold Snap
2x Dark Depths
Mirage
8x Lion's eye diamond
9x Phyrexian Dreadnought
Visions
3x Undiscovered Paradise (korean)
1x Undiscovered Paradise (japanese)
4x Natural Order
2x Vampiric Tutor
Weatherlight
4x Peacekeeper
1x Null Rod
Tempest
9x Grindstone
4x Reflecting Pool
4x Earthcraft
6x Ancient Tomb
3x Intuition
Stronghold
5x Mox diamond
1x Sliver Queen
1x Volrath's Stronghold
Exodus
2x Recurring Nightmare
1x City of Traitors
Urza's Saga
1x Voltaic Key (korean)
2x Serra's Sanctum (korean)
1x Gaea's Cradle
4x Show and Tell
1x Gilded Drake
1x Exploration
1x Yawgmoth's Will
Urza's Legacy
1x Defense of the Heart
Urza's Destiny
1x Metalworker
1x Phyrexian Negator
1x Replenish
Mercadian Masques
1x Rishadan Port
2x Misdirection
Invasion
1x Darigaaz, the Igniter (foil)
Odyssey
1x Tarnished Citadel (foil)
6x Entomb
2x Terravore
Torment
3x Llawan, Cephalid Empress
Judgment
3x Mirari's Wake
1x Genesis
Onslaught
1x Flooded Strand
2x Windswept Heath
1x Goblin Piledriver
1x Enchantress's Presence (foil)
1x Riptide Laboratory
Scourge
1x Stifle (foil)
4x Stifle
Mirrodin
1x Duplicant (foil)
2x Chrome Mox
5x Tooth and Nail
Darksteel
1x Sword of Light and Shadow (foil)
6x Sword of Light and Shadow
1x Sword of Fire and Ice (foil)
6x Sword of Fire and Ice
1x skullclamp (foil)
1x Sundering Titan (foil)
4x Arcbound Ravager
8x Darksteel Forge
Fifth Dawn
1x crucible of worlds
6x Vedalken shackles
3x Engineered Explosives
4x Mycosynth Golem
Champions of Kamigawa
1x Godo, Bandit Warlord (foil)
1x Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker (foil)
5x Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
1x Myojin of Night's Reach (foil)
8x Kokusho, the Evening Star
1x Glimpse of Nature (foil)
5x Glimpse of Nature
Betrayers of Kamigawa
4x Umezawa's Jitte
5x Kira, Great Glass-Spinner
1x Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni (foil)
1x Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni
Ravnica: City of Guilds
5x Life from the Loam
1x Doubling Season
1x Overgrown Tomb (foil)
Guildpact
3x Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind
Dissension
Pillar of the Paruns (foil)
Time Spiral
1x Lotus Bloom
Lorwyn
3x Sower of Temptation
Morningtide
4x Bitterblossom
Shadowmoor
7x Painter's Servant
Shards of Alara
Empyrial Archangel
Portal
4x Personal Tutor
1x Sea Drake
I had a lot of issues parsing ..
Errors .... I had cards in different languages, some foil some not, was unclear how to get the program to recognize this at first. Watching the video again, it became clear that to give it a special designation of () ie: (foil) (japanese). Once the parentheses were in place, I had much more success.
Something that would be nice is if there is an error because the program doesnt understand what was typed in, a text dialog box popup with something close to what you wrote or allow you to correct?
For example Ring of Ma'ruf. I cannot get this name to parse to save my life. Ive tried Ring of Maruf, Ring of Ma'ruf, Ring of Ma'rûf. Nada
Set / Edition .. the parse made a lot of wild assumptions as to where my cards came from. This part of the video needs more detail and explanation. For those reading this and dont understand:
The round up round down feature isnt just used for setting the price of cards on your collection. If you do not remove the check box from Price Round up/down, it will auto-select the first edition available of the card. So for example type in Brainstorm, without removing the check it will assume its from the Beatdown set.
I believe for the benefit of the user this part of the interface needs to be reworked as it is very confusing.
When selecting the edition, it would go faster if I could just hit the number on my keyboard and it would move to the next card instead of hitting the number then Enter for every card.
Is there a way to add a tag to the set name that will tell the program where the cards come from so I dont need to manually tell it?
For example:
Legends
1x Land Tax
1x Sylvan Library
1x Concordant Crossroads
On every one of those it had to ask me, Legends or 4/5th edition or Chronicles. If I could put something like:
:Legends:
1x Land Tax
1x Sylvan Library
1x Concordant Crossroads
.. and it would know everything after that is from the Legends set until the next :x: that would be awesome. This would also alleviate a problem for sets like Cold Snap, Future Sight or Visions that share a name with a card.
Once I had my list parsed, I moved it to my collection.
From here I wouldve liked to have been able to edit the collection manually. For example if I sell or trade a card away, it would be nice to be able to edit the quantity. Full editing features in the collection section would be highly desirable.
If I can edit it, I couldnt figure out how to do it. Double click, right click, highlight + enter. Didnt see any way to do this.
With the cards in the collection. I moved to Output the data. When I chose by set it got all my cards in right. But it created titles for every set in magic regardless if I had any cards from that set on my list. Is there an option to ignore set titles where no cards exist?
Last question. When copying other people's list in to parse have / wants if their list isnt formatted perfectly it appears like it will yield a lot of parse errors?
Re selecting cards:
I consciously chose not to implement a mechanism where you click on a set, click on a color, click on a card, etc. since I assumed everything types Brainstorm (IA) faster than looking for the Ice Age set among dozens, and then the Brainstorm card. Putting in this feature would require a good amount of time, and I think only a very select minority would use it but hey I could be wrong.
Parsing issues, foil, languages, etc.:
If you put every single description of a card within parentheses, like so (all of the following will work properly):
Brainstorm (FOIL)
Brainstorm (Russian)
Brainstorm (Ice Age)
Brainstorm (IA)
Brainstorm (Russian) (FOIL) (IA)
It should always work assuming you didn't misspell the card, the language, and the edition you put in is exactly the full name of the edition or t he shortened name via magiccards.info, or the MOTL edition.
Re: Ring of Ma'Ruf, no idea - this is probably due to the u, but I distinctly remember putting something in for that, i.e. lim-dul's vault should work but I can work on it.
Set/Edition
The assumptions made on which edition a card comes from is quite simple - either pick the lowest priced one or the highest priced one if you didn't type one in. This is not a wild guess - it's the only possible one. How else are you going to assume where everybody's cards come from - unless you created a master list of all cards, their precise number in existence, and applied some statistical probability analysis on that, and even then it'd be a toss-up. So this is the way it is now and it can't be changed. If you want to choose a specific edition, please just enter it in parenthesis after the name of the card, see above.
Regarding the number-keyboard thing, I could change that I guess, you're the first one to bring it up Again, I think most people just type in the editions, it's usually faster than choosing from a list.
Regarding this idea
:Legends:
1x Land Tax
1x Sylvan Library
1x Concordant Crossroads
I had this implemented at some point in time but it disappeared somewhere within the last 30 editions somehow
Regarding manual collection editing
Just uncheck the collection read-only checkbox and you should be able to edit many cells in the collection grid.
Regarding not outputting empty sets
Yup I can remove empty sets.
Regarding your last question: When copying other people's list in to parse have / wants if their list isnt formatted perfectly it appears like it will yield a lot of parse errors
Yes this is true. I've made a number of allowances for different formats but I can't (and don't want to!) cover them all. Natural language recognition is a huge problem that many corporations are working on, with large financial backing and teams of researchers. This being mtg and squee being just a tool I created to help myself, I'm sure you can understand that what you're asking for is not feasible
If everybody were willing to pay say, $1k to use Squee, I could probably increase the format recognition rate by 25% but after a reality check, it's not worth my time to improve this. I will say this though - if you know how to use notepad++, and can apply some advanced usage of the search/replace function, there shouldn't hardly be any single major list you can't convert to a format recognizable by Squee. In the past year that I've been trading, Squee (with the help of Notepad++) has been able to parse any major list on MTGS/MOTL with a tolerable number of parse errors.
Oh and in closing, if the parse error is 'can't find motl price' or something like that, it's not an error per se, it's that MOTL's price list doesn't cover every single card. If the card isn't found on the tcgplayer database though, that's a no go. No cards from DKA have been added just yet so if you're parsing any single card from DKA it won't be recognized.
Ive been working with your program for the past few evenings and made a lot of adjustments on how I built the list based on the parameters of the application.
For the benefit of those who have zero or minimal programming knowledge (save that comp sci class you took in highschool a decade ago) you might find this helpful.
If you have your list in a text file, import all your data from txt to excel using the import function. You can use the options when importing to separate out the data into columns. For example, I told it to create a column after the 'x' for quantity, then another before the first '('. This easily separated the data into 3 columns to get my started; quantity, name and description
Once you cleanup the data, Ive found this method to work pretty well. It allows for you to quickly copy down descriptions for the cards while maintaining visual organization, plus it keeps everything uniform.
In excel I have my columns setup like this
Column 1: Set name (this is for my visual benefit)
Column 2: Quantity
Column 3: Name of card
Column 4: Set abbreviate in parenthesis
Column 5: Language in parenthesis
Column 6: Foil in parenthesis
I would highlight + copy Column 2 through 6 on down and paste the data in. But I ran into a problem, the copy function likes to retain the data as a table and the parse doesnt seem to like tabs. So I would first copy it into Word, edit the table to convert everything to text and the tabs into spaces. There were still parse errors on the extra spaces but thats irrelevant.
The instruction video, made even more sense after I had a better understanding of how to work with the program, what it does and doesnt do; I like it a lot.
There were a couple of times when this scenario would happy: "Huh? What is .. oooh I see .. very clever". Id like to try and play with the more advance features, i will pm you.
Then in Notepad++ or word, you can search/replace the | with )( or something like that so you end up with parenthesis around all the data formerly in columns. Then do another search/replace to put the opening parentheses and closing parentheses into place and it should be good to go from there.
I'm typing all this out right now with no access to the program so I don't remember what does and doesn't work but I seem to remember this mangling wasn't usually necessary, will investigate when I have more time.