I might add a "Clear Search" option to the "Add Cards" form for that purpose, and I'll definitely be making it clear the selected / quantity fields in the search results once it's added the cards. It's much quicker to add your cards by set than by searching for each individual card by name, though, although it requires a bit of initial sorting of your collections.
Here's how I do it when I get a new batch of cards:
Separate the cards into different piles by set, or sometimes by block
Separate each Set / Block pile into Colors (for spells) and types (for Lands, Artifacts and Planeswalkers)
Sort each color pile alphabetically (I usually make a pile for each letter, then sort each pile separately before combining them again)
Lastly, I open up the app, and filter by Set / Color / Type, going down the list and entering the quantity for each card on the list, and hitting "Add Cards" at the end of each page of search results (when i enter a card, I put it face down in another pile to show I've entered it)
I can get through a booster box in about an hour that way
I'm also hoping to add a feature at some point that lets you type up all your cards in a list with quantities and set codes. I need to ponder a few things first, though, such as providing an easy way to identify card names with spelling mistakes, special characters, etc.
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Another thing, I did a mistake putting 2 copies of a card, I have only one.
I have tried to remove 1 (by removing both, seems to be the only option??), without any luck.
Am I doing something wrong? (Clicking "manage coll." - "CARDS under manage" - REMOVE under remove"!
Tried both with and without checking the square to the left of the cards name
without any luck)
Quick query about this - did you select a quantity to remove in the Collection Cards screen? The "#" on the "Remove #" refers to the number you enter in the "#" column with the arrow icons
I should probably update the help pages for the app at some point - I can see how it would be ambiguous.
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Fellow developer here, what solution did you find to replace mtgimage's card images? It really sucks for everyone that it was taken down, and the solution to this problem has been eluding me. I would love a poke in the right direction.
There's another API that has most of the images - http://api.mtgdb.info/. Hopefully they'll stick around for a while without suffering a similar fate. There's also another tool in this thread for pulling down images from assorted sources, if you don't mind preloading them.
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Status Update: The new version of the deck builder is almost complete. It makes the current one look like a child's toy
I'm just tidying up a couple of the features, tweaking some other areas of the site that it effects and fixing a couple of cross-browser issues (I think I hate Firefox now :P). I'll then be doing some exhaustive testing of the database upgrade scripts (against a nightly backup, to make sure I don't screw everybody's existing decks), and will hopefully upload sometime next week
There will be an outage for a few hours while I update - I'll schedule it for the night after I complete the tests. Just letting you know. Actual dates TBD.
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Alrighty - time to roll this new deck builder out to the public
I'll be taking the site offline for a couple of days, to allow for the latest database backup to take place prior to the upgrade without any subsequent changes to user data.
Offline time will be from 17:00 (5:00pm) 29/04/2015 until approximately 07:00 (7:00am) 01/05/2015. (Times are in my best understanding of PST, which we don't use here, so bear with me if the times are slightly off ;))
Update 1: Few technical difficulties arising from my webost no longer allowing remote connections, which is making running large queries before the PHP timeout somewhat tricky ^.^ Got it in hand though.
Update 2: Finished the database updates. Queueing the new source code to upload. Then testing. Gulp!
Update 3: Okay, it looks like we're all good to go! Big info dump in next post
This is a pretty major update - a complete rebuild from the ground up. I'll talk about the new features one at a time.
First, some basic stuff:
1. It's now public, and no longer tied to cards in your collections
Look at the menu bar, and you'll see a new option - "Deck Builder". This will appear regardless of whether you're logged in or not.
A practival upshot of this is that you're no longer constrained to build decks only out of cards that you own, or have in your
wishlist. The only time you need to be a registered user is if you want to save a deck to refer to it later.
Because cards in your deck are no longer tied to a particular card in your collection, each card of a particular name is only
shown once - no more deck listings with four different Forests in them, because you only happen to own a certain number of a
particular printing. That was clumsy as hell, and so now it's gone.
2. The layout has improved
The new version had a lot more options I wanted to include, and with that came an extended toolbar and info bar. Now, instead of a
toolbar at the top of the editor under a bunch of text boxes, there's a panel off to the left containing all that stuff. It's designed
to look a bit like 3DS Max, since I always liked that inerface
The "Add Cards" feature has changed quite dramatically. Instead of a floating window with a multi-page wizad that needs to be started
from scratch whenever you add more cards, there's now a fixed window at the top of the Cards view containing a scrollable folter pane in
one tab, and a card list in the other. This can be collapsed to make room for viewing cards.
The informational highlights on the cards have been tidied up, and can now show multiple messages and alerts.
For a better iew of your deck composition, cards can now be displayed in a categorised view, and are sorted by name.
Last, but not least, to make life a bit easier I've introduced an implicit "Full Screen" mode, which hides the top menu and title bar,
whilst simultaneouly chucking the browser into Full Screen mode. This can be activated either using the "Full Screen" button on the
toolbar, or using the F11 key on your keyboard
3. Stats are now updated in real time
The deck stats from version 1 are still there (plus some more - I'll address that later), but now they no longer update only when the
deck is saved - not only are they updated whenever a card is added, removed or changed, but the charts update automatically without
requiring a refresh.
4. Activation now locks decks against editing
Activation was always intended to notify the user if they didn't have enough copies of a card to build a deck, but this fell over if
an activated deck was edited whie the deck was still assembled and in play. This has now been circumvented by locking decks that are
activated so that they can't be edited.
Now some cool, new stuff:
1. The whole thing is now mana aware!
I think this is one of the coolest new features The whole system is now capable of undertanding not only the mana requirements
of cards, but also their potential mana production.
In the deck builder, this is used thusly:
Alerts are shown on card frames if you don't have the mana sources in your deck
Card frames have a chart showing how much mana of each type a card uses, and how much mana of each type that card produces
A new stat has been added to the charts window, and stats panel (more on that below) showing the mana consumption and mana production of the deck as a whole.
This makes it much easier to define the land base of a deck Parsing of mana production goes from something as shallow as understanding
the mana produced by basic lands to as deep as understanding Fetchlands and Mana Elves (and all types in between!)
2. Native Commander Support!
If you select a deck type of "Commander", you'll notice a couple of cool new things:
A new "Commander" panel will appear in the toolbox, with a "Select Commander" button
Any legendary creatures in your deck will have a "Commander" radio button on their frame
Any cards (aside from basic lands, of course) with more than one copy will show an "Invalid Quantity" error
If you select a Commander (either by clicking the "Select Commander" button, which will open the "Add Cards" panel with some extra filters),
or ticking the radio button on a legendary, the selected Commander will be shown in the "Commander" panel, along with that card's color identity,
the color filters in the "Add Cards" panel will be locked to your Commander's color identity, and any cards in the deck that violate the
color identity will be highighted with an "Invalid Colors" error. Also, your Commander (in the main deck view) will be surrounded by a classy
golden glow
This update also includes the groundwork for supporting Tiny Leaders
3. New Stat Charts, and Stats Panel
The new toolbox contains a panel showing a number of important stats - namely, the number of cards in your deck, mana consumption / production,
and percentages of cards by type.
The "cards in deck" stat also shows a target number of cards for your selected deck type. The number of cards you have will be highlighted in green, orange
or red - green if you have the optimum number of cards for the format, yellow if you have to many, and red if your deck contains an illegal number.
The old stats charts have been rebuilt and expanded. The window now has multiple sub-tabs per tab, showing:
Mana
Mana Curve
Mana Usage / Production
Power
Combined Power / Toughness
Separate charts for Power and Toughness
Types
Main types pie chart
Sub types by type (Creatures, Lands, Planeswalkers, etc)
4. Sideboard support
This one's a litte rudimentary, but I expect to expand it in future. Card frames now have a "Sideboard" checkbox to move them to the sideboard. Sideboard cards are
not counted towards deck stats (including card count) and are shown in their own category. The only downside is that moving a card to the sideboard is an "all or nothing"
thing - you can't have some copies in the main deck, and some in the sideboard - yet. Emphasis on the "yet"
5. Deck Copying
You can now copy decks - either your own (if you want to make modifications to an activated deck, for example, or experiment with a deck without affecting the original),
or somebody elses.
6. Assorted speed improvements across the whole site
Some of the features of this deck builder would have been impossible with the data structures I had in place originally, so I've reshuffled some thing in the database
to make them possible. This had the practial offshoot of making lots of other parts of the site run faster - the main one being the Collection Cards screen This screen
used to take exponentially longer to load the more cards you have in your collection... This is happily no longer the case
I'm sure there's some stuff that I've forgotten to mention - it's been a busy few months. These are all the main enhancements, though.
As always, I welcome bug reports. In the meantime, enjoy!
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Tempest Remastered and Modern Masters 2015 have been added to the site
I'm on a little vacation from development for a while, since both work and home are super busy right now (I haven't even had time to build any decks in my own app yet :P). When I return, my first priorities will be bugfixes, particularly the ones regarding imports and the login widget mentioned previously in this thread.
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Card images now load properly, finally, and at a decent speed. It turns out that caching in a database is a chump's game, performance-wise. My solution for obtaining images without flooding my file system with 3gb of image files, or murdering a third party site with a huge scrape is slightly more elegant than before, too - developers can PM me if they want the boring details
I've fixed a problem with cards with non-ASCII characters vanishing during the big deck builder update.
There were a few problems with some of the searches - namely, searching by name within a collection from the main search page, and filtering by rarity on the collection cards page. Those problems have been fixed.
Now go have fun with your "Origins" pre-release cards. I know I am
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Another minor enhancement: When you add cards to your collection via the search screen, the "Add" button becomes disabled until it's finished. When it's finished, it clears the "selected" checkbox and quantity from the search results.
This prevents accidental double-adding of cards.
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I've given the collection import function a bit of an overhaul, to allow it to import large collections, which it was failing on before, and to address some bugs that were reported to me.
Some site exports import slower than others - if your data includes MultiverseId then you're sitting pretty. If not... It's slower. But it works more reliably than before I'll hopefully come up with some speed improvements before too long!
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Quick enhancement - the deck builder now allows you to do test opening hands and draws (including mulligans) for your deck. As far as complexity goes, it was pretty much low hanging fruit to implement
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First, I was having trouble tracking the cards I'd assembled for an EDH deck, so I added a checklist. You can track the number of copies of a card you've gathered, or just hit the checkbox to indicate that you've got the all, and save the checkist between sessions. I'm still thinking of new things to add to it (eg, tying it into deck activation somehow, adding sorting, etc), but it's a start!
Second, I added an "Advanced" window to the card editor. This will eventually contain a few different things but for now the most significant feature is the ability to define custom tags and add them to your cards. These are shown on the card frames. You can add as man or as few tags to a card as you like Then, to make them a bit more useful for analytics, I added a table to the deck stats panel, and a chart to the stats window:
Hope you all find them useful My next task is updating my indexer to use MTGJSON's new API, so that I can upload FTV:Angels
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Minor, under-the-hood change: I've ported all the dialogs on the site over to a new window manager library.
The main difference this makes is being able to open more than one dialog at the same time - it was getting on my nerves that I was occasionally losing my checklist or tag changes when I accidentally clicked a card in the background and replaced the window I was in with the card details window
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New feature! The deck builder can now print out proxies for your decks Proxies are based on real card images, but are watermarked, and have a different (and rather vivid) border so they can't be used as counterfeits.
You have the options of either printing all cards in the deck, omitting basic lands (because most of us don't need proxies of basic lands), and of only printing proxies of cards you either don't have or that are being used in other decks.
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Zendikar Expedition and Battle for Zendikar have been added
I'm doing some fiddling with the database at the moment, which is slowing up other development. Hopefully, by the time I'm finished, the data on the site will be easier to update, and will be able to support promos. Touch wood
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Here's how I do it when I get a new batch of cards:
I can get through a booster box in about an hour that way
I'm also hoping to add a feature at some point that lets you type up all your cards in a list with quantities and set codes. I need to ponder a few things first, though, such as providing an easy way to identify card names with spelling mistakes, special characters, etc.
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
Quick query about this - did you select a quantity to remove in the Collection Cards screen? The "#" on the "Remove #" refers to the number you enter in the "#" column with the arrow icons
I should probably update the help pages for the app at some point - I can see how it would be ambiguous.
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
Fellow developer here, what solution did you find to replace mtgimage's card images? It really sucks for everyone that it was taken down, and the solution to this problem has been eluding me. I would love a poke in the right direction.
-Spinaldash
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
Oops.
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
I'm just tidying up a couple of the features, tweaking some other areas of the site that it effects and fixing a couple of cross-browser issues (I think I hate Firefox now :P). I'll then be doing some exhaustive testing of the database upgrade scripts (against a nightly backup, to make sure I don't screw everybody's existing decks), and will hopefully upload sometime next week
There will be an outage for a few hours while I update - I'll schedule it for the night after I complete the tests. Just letting you know. Actual dates TBD.
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
I'll be taking the site offline for a couple of days, to allow for the latest database backup to take place prior to the upgrade without any subsequent changes to user data.
Offline time will be from 17:00 (5:00pm) 29/04/2015 until approximately 07:00 (7:00am) 01/05/2015. (Times are in my best understanding of PST, which we don't use here, so bear with me if the times are slightly off ;))
Update 1: Few technical difficulties arising from my webost no longer allowing remote connections, which is making running large queries before the PHP timeout somewhat tricky ^.^ Got it in hand though.
Update 2: Finished the database updates. Queueing the new source code to upload. Then testing. Gulp!
Update 3: Okay, it looks like we're all good to go!
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
This is a pretty major update - a complete rebuild from the ground up. I'll talk about the new features one at a time.
First, some basic stuff:
1. It's now public, and no longer tied to cards in your collections
Look at the menu bar, and you'll see a new option - "Deck Builder". This will appear regardless of whether you're logged in or not.
A practival upshot of this is that you're no longer constrained to build decks only out of cards that you own, or have in your
wishlist. The only time you need to be a registered user is if you want to save a deck to refer to it later.
Because cards in your deck are no longer tied to a particular card in your collection, each card of a particular name is only
shown once - no more deck listings with four different Forests in them, because you only happen to own a certain number of a
particular printing. That was clumsy as hell, and so now it's gone.
2. The layout has improved
The new version had a lot more options I wanted to include, and with that came an extended toolbar and info bar. Now, instead of a
toolbar at the top of the editor under a bunch of text boxes, there's a panel off to the left containing all that stuff. It's designed
to look a bit like 3DS Max, since I always liked that inerface
The "Add Cards" feature has changed quite dramatically. Instead of a floating window with a multi-page wizad that needs to be started
from scratch whenever you add more cards, there's now a fixed window at the top of the Cards view containing a scrollable folter pane in
one tab, and a card list in the other. This can be collapsed to make room for viewing cards.
The informational highlights on the cards have been tidied up, and can now show multiple messages and alerts.
For a better iew of your deck composition, cards can now be displayed in a categorised view, and are sorted by name.
Last, but not least, to make life a bit easier I've introduced an implicit "Full Screen" mode, which hides the top menu and title bar,
whilst simultaneouly chucking the browser into Full Screen mode. This can be activated either using the "Full Screen" button on the
toolbar, or using the F11 key on your keyboard
3. Stats are now updated in real time
The deck stats from version 1 are still there (plus some more - I'll address that later), but now they no longer update only when the
deck is saved - not only are they updated whenever a card is added, removed or changed, but the charts update automatically without
requiring a refresh.
4. Activation now locks decks against editing
Activation was always intended to notify the user if they didn't have enough copies of a card to build a deck, but this fell over if
an activated deck was edited whie the deck was still assembled and in play. This has now been circumvented by locking decks that are
activated so that they can't be edited.
Now some cool, new stuff:
1. The whole thing is now mana aware!
I think this is one of the coolest new features
of cards, but also their potential mana production.
In the deck builder, this is used thusly:
This makes it much easier to define the land base of a deck
the mana produced by basic lands to as deep as understanding Fetchlands and Mana Elves (and all types in between!)
2. Native Commander Support!
If you select a deck type of "Commander", you'll notice a couple of cool new things:
If you select a Commander (either by clicking the "Select Commander" button, which will open the "Add Cards" panel with some extra filters),
or ticking the radio button on a legendary, the selected Commander will be shown in the "Commander" panel, along with that card's color identity,
the color filters in the "Add Cards" panel will be locked to your Commander's color identity, and any cards in the deck that violate the
color identity will be highighted with an "Invalid Colors" error. Also, your Commander (in the main deck view) will be surrounded by a classy
golden glow
This update also includes the groundwork for supporting Tiny Leaders
3. New Stat Charts, and Stats Panel
The new toolbox contains a panel showing a number of important stats - namely, the number of cards in your deck, mana consumption / production,
and percentages of cards by type.
The "cards in deck" stat also shows a target number of cards for your selected deck type. The number of cards you have will be highlighted in green, orange
or red - green if you have the optimum number of cards for the format, yellow if you have to many, and red if your deck contains an illegal number.
The old stats charts have been rebuilt and expanded. The window now has multiple sub-tabs per tab, showing:
4. Sideboard support
This one's a litte rudimentary, but I expect to expand it in future. Card frames now have a "Sideboard" checkbox to move them to the sideboard. Sideboard cards are
not counted towards deck stats (including card count) and are shown in their own category. The only downside is that moving a card to the sideboard is an "all or nothing"
thing - you can't have some copies in the main deck, and some in the sideboard - yet. Emphasis on the "yet"
5. Deck Copying
You can now copy decks - either your own (if you want to make modifications to an activated deck, for example, or experiment with a deck without affecting the original),
or somebody elses.
6. Assorted speed improvements across the whole site
Some of the features of this deck builder would have been impossible with the data structures I had in place originally, so I've reshuffled some thing in the database
to make them possible. This had the practial offshoot of making lots of other parts of the site run faster - the main one being the Collection Cards screen
used to take exponentially longer to load the more cards you have in your collection... This is happily no longer the case
I'm sure there's some stuff that I've forgotten to mention - it's been a busy few months. These are all the main enhancements, though.
As always, I welcome bug reports. In the meantime, enjoy!
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
I'm on a little vacation from development for a while, since both work and home are super busy right now (I haven't even had time to build any decks in my own app yet :P). When I return, my first priorities will be bugfixes, particularly the ones regarding imports and the login widget mentioned previously in this thread.
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
Now go have fun with your "Origins" pre-release cards. I know I am
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
This prevents accidental double-adding of cards.
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
Some site exports import slower than others - if your data includes MultiverseId then you're sitting pretty. If not... It's slower. But it works more reliably than before
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
- The login form will now log you in when you press the "Enter" key
- The deck builder can now display decks as text, the the style used by MTG Salvation. You can optionally show:
- Categories
- Sideboard
Here's a sample:1 Aerie Worshippers
2 Archetype of Imagination
2 Battlewise Hoplite
4 Cavalry Pegasus
1 Daxos of Meletis
2 Ephara, God of the Polis
4 Loyal Pegasus
2 Ornitharch
2 Sphinx's Disciple
4 Ephara's Enlightenment
Instants:
4 Crypsis
2 Divine Verdict
4 Mortal's Ardor
Lands:
12 Island
11 Plains
1 Temple of Enlightenment
2 Rise of Eagles
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
First, I was having trouble tracking the cards I'd assembled for an EDH deck, so I added a checklist. You can track the number of copies of a card you've gathered, or just hit the checkbox to indicate that you've got the all, and save the checkist between sessions. I'm still thinking of new things to add to it (eg, tying it into deck activation somehow, adding sorting, etc), but it's a start!
Second, I added an "Advanced" window to the card editor. This will eventually contain a few different things but for now the most significant feature is the ability to define custom tags and add them to your cards. These are shown on the card frames. You can add as man or as few tags to a card as you like
Hope you all find them useful
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
FTV: Angels has been added to the site
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
The main difference this makes is being able to open more than one dialog at the same time - it was getting on my nerves that I was occasionally losing my checklist or tag changes when I accidentally clicked a card in the background and replaced the window I was in with the card details window
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
You have the options of either printing all cards in the deck, omitting basic lands (because most of us don't need proxies of basic lands), and of only printing proxies of cards you either don't have or that are being used in other decks.
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
I'm doing some fiddling with the database at the moment, which is slowing up other development. Hopefully, by the time I'm finished, the data on the site will be easier to update, and will be able to support promos. Touch wood
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!