deckcheck replacement

[emidln]

For what it's worth, I wrote half of a deckcheck replacement already. I don't have a very good theme or style, but searching and browsing decks works. More importantly, I found a zip file online of a textual dump of some 37k magic decks from the past few years (it appears to be a dump of deckcheck from a web crawler). I had some trouble normalizing the data, but I did get everything imported and searchable. The database is online at www.deckdb.com for the time being, although I'd like to ship the final code to someone else to host (it's running on a 1.2Ghz G4 Mac Mini atm). I'll be improving the searching, navigation, etc over the next few days. If anyone wants to help, I'll be updating http://code.google.com/p/ccgresultsapp/ with source code periodically. Right now it's written in a platform neutral Python/Django/Mysql combination so it would run on Linux, Windows, Solaris, etc. If nobdoy else steps up, I'll move it to a VPS when I'm satisfied that it's ready for the public. I have a script that pulls MTGO daily and premier event data as well, and I'll be integrating that into formats where it makes sense to do so (Standard, Block, Extended) and create separate formats for the other formats (Various Peasant, EDH, MTGO Legacy, MTGO Classic, etc). It has a full admin interface if I can find some moderators to help eventually, since the current way of submitting deck is through moderators and moderators will eventually be required to "publish" incoming events once they've been verified.

Currently to do:

Better Navigation between parts of the site
Export Deck to MWS/Apprentice/MTGO/Cockatrice
Non-Moderator Event/Deck Submission
Advanced Search Form
Find someone better with CSS to make a better visual layout and design
Clean up code to make it a true modular django app and submit it to python.org

The site is currently sitting at www.deckdb.com. It's running on an ancient slow machine with a custom web server that I'm using for fast development (source is in twisted_httpd.py) so please be kind.

Edit:

Exporting works, submission works, and the code is fairly clean at this point. We moved to a final site, www.deckdb.com, hosting on a machine more capable of being a server.

[Vacrix]

Thanks for this. I was a little pissed that Deckcheck went down.

[dontbiteitholmes]

For what it's worth, I wrote half of a deckcheck replacement already. I don't have a very good theme or style, but searching and browsing decks works. More importantly, I found a zip file online of a textual dump of some 37k magic decks from the past few years (it appears to be a dump of deckcheck from a web crawler). I had some trouble normalizing the data, but I did get everything imported and searchable. The database is online at www.emidln.com for the time being, although I'd like to ship the final code to someone else to host (it's running on a 1.2Ghz G4 Mac Mini atm). I'll be improving the searching, navigation, etc over the next few days. If anyone wants to help, I'll be updating http://code.google.com/p/ccgresultsapp/ with source code periodically. Right now it's written in a platform neutral Python/Django/Mysql combination so it would run on Linux, Windows, Solaris, etc. If nobdoy else steps up, I'll move it to a VPS when I'm satisfied that it's ready for the public. I have a script that pulls MTGO daily and premier event data as well, and I'll be integrating that into formats where it makes sense to do so (Standard, Block, Extended) and create separate formats for the other formats (Various Peasant, EDH, MTGO Legacy, MTGO Classic, etc). It has a full admin interface if I can find some moderators to help eventually, since the current way of submitting deck is through moderators and moderators will eventually be required to "publish" incoming events once they've been verified.

Currently to do:

Better Navigation between parts of the site
Export Deck to MWS/Apprentice/MTGO/Cockatrice
Non-Moderator Event/Deck Submission
Advanced Search Form
Find someone better with CSS to make a better visual layout and design
Clean up code to make it a true modular django app and submit it to python.org

The site is currently sitting at www.emidln.com. It's running on an ancient slow machine with a custom web server that I'm using for fast development (source is in twisted_httpd.py) so please be kind.

Hey, any chance I could get a link to that file dump? I'm not looking to make another DeckCheck clone or edge in on your work but I program on the side and if the data is easy enough to work through I might write some short code to calculate things like most popular cards in top 8's or most successful color combinations and stuff like that. Of course if I do ever end up actually mining such data I would release it to the community.

[menace13]

Emidln is mah hero.

[Zlatzman]

This looks promising, just hope you get some good web-designer on board to make the visuals pleasing.

[miko]

This page is good as well. Needs to ad Block though:
http://www.thecouncil.es/tcdecks/

[emidln]

News:

I paid for hosting today and registered deckdb.com. I'll be migrating everything to that site as soon as my host gets me the password to my VPS.

Deck submission works! There is currently a bug if you're trying to submit an event without exactly 8 decks. In theory, we could support sealed deck/drafts, but my validation on decks currently makes sure that at least 60 cards and either 0 or 15 sideboard cards are in each deck.

Features that I plan on adding today (already written, just need to be exposed to the public):

- Deck and Event Tagging
- RSS feeds by Format, Archetype, and Tag (particularly 5k, gp, ptq, pt)
- Download deck as Apprentice and MTGO (I believe MWS will import Apprentice .dec files, if not, I'll look into exporting to MWS directly; I'll support Cockatrice and maybe OCTGN at a later date).

I'm still working out how I want search to function. I'll clean up the search functionality a little today as well. Advanced search in line with what deckcheck supported will be available in the next couple days.

I'll try to get a more recent code dump (I've been cleaning up the directory layouts and individual files) into the google code SVN for anyone interested.

[ivanpei]

Great Job on this! Much respect for the good work!

[Phoenix Ignition]

News:
Deck submission works! There is currently a bug if you're trying to submit an event without exactly 8 decks. In theory, we could support sealed deck/drafts, but my validation on decks currently makes sure that at least 60 cards and either 0 or 15 sideboard cards are in each deck.


It might be a better idea to not have the strict card numbers on sideboards. I know I've seen quite a few decks that didn't have their sideboards completely filled out (13 or 14 cards total but not exactly 15) from events that were big enough to want to know which decks placed.

[K1LO]

I´ve also seen this today and really like it, as it contains almost the complete db from the original deckcheck.net: www.deckcheck.org

[The Pharmacist]

Here's a crazy idea! Come up with your own decks.

[alphacat]

Here's a crazy idea! Come up with your own decks.

Well, people use these sites for stuff other than netdecking. You can research meta, look for SB techs, compare builds, etc. Also, what's wrong with running a deck that's completely optimized?

[Cabal_chan]

Here's a crazy idea! Come up with your own decks.

Ok. Come up with a unique Legacy deck that does fairly well over several tournaments that's not currently an established deck. Lead the way.

[The Pharmacist]

Ok. Come up with a unique Legacy deck that does fairly well over several tournaments that's not currently an established deck. Lead the way.

Look at the team name. We do it all the time. TEAM LEFT FIELD

[emidln]

I've started adding events that have been submitted in addition to the ones I've started with.

If you go to a particular format (for example, click Legacy on the main page), an RSS feed is now available that lists that last 10 events and gives you # of players and a breakdown of all the decks, their archetype, the player, and the place, with all of this information linked back to deckdb if you want to see more.

I'll be implementing this for archetypes in a format as well (to keep track of the latest "The Epic Storm" lists for example) as well as tagging the 5k, ptq, gp, and pt events and making those available by tag.

Is there any other sort of info that would be useful to view by RSS? Let me know.

Edit: I fixed a bug where you had to have exactly 8 decks in an event. Now you're prompted to choose the number of decks you're going to submit unless you pass an extra number in the url such as:

http://www.deckdb.com/submit/16/

to submit....16 decks.

[CorpT]

Possible suggestion: Can you have it autoscrape MODO results? Tag them as MODO natch and thus not quite Legacy, but there is some value there I think. The results are always in the same place and pretty easily identified.

Just a thought.

[emidln]

Possible suggestion: Can you have it autoscrape MODO results? Tag them as MODO natch and thus not quite Legacy, but there is some value there I think. The results are always in the same place and pretty easily identified.

Just a thought.

Yes. I'm trying to figure out whether or not to keep track of the records as well.

[Amon Amarth]

Mad props for this. Now I have something to replace my deckcheck bookmark with!

[CorpT]

Yes. I'm trying to figure out whether or not to keep track of the records as well.

Awesome. I would definitely make sure it is clear that these are MODO results. DEs with 16 people in them shouldn't count as much as PEs.

I would also encourage you to make either an export or make the information easy to copy/paste. I do a lot of spreadsheet analysis of decks and it was always a struggle to work with deckcheck. Ideally, the best thing I can ask for is an easy to manipulate spreadsheet that lists multiple decks in it like this:

Deck Num______1__2__3
Spell Snare___4__3__3
Jace__________4__3__2
Counterspell__2__0__3

Or something like this. If I can get the data in that form, it makes it pretty easy to manipulate. I know I'm asking a lot here, but when you get to it, that would be much appreciated :)

[emidln]

It should actually be pretty easy to scrape programmatically in your favorite language. I also dump any deck you want to MTGO and Apprentice textual formats (click on the link on the specific deck's page or access it via appending /download/ or /download/?type=appr to the deckdb.com/deck/####/ URL) with Cockatrice coming in the future. Failing that, I am making RSS feeds available, and if you needed to, I could lift the limit I have of 20 results (you'd want to contact me about this by pm).

When I dump mtgo, I get the event name in the format MTGO Standard Daily and MTGO Standard Premier. All events come with the number of players as well as getting tagged mtgo (although I don't expose this publically, it's on the todo list and we are tagging them in the admin interface). This will be searchable and available via RSS in the future.

[joey223]

wow !!:laugh: thanks for replacing deck check! amazing.
a suggestion:fix the search feature so you can search by format.
whenever you have the chance of course.
man what a job.keep up the good work!

again thanks a million!

[marax]

Thanks for the effort!

Now for some improvement suggestions from an users viewpoint:
If I remember correctly decks on deckcheck used to be sorted not only alpahbetically but also by card type. I imagine card names would have to posess tags for this to work (are they included in the database you found on the web?). I believe such a feature makes comparisions between different builds of a decktype a lot easier (see number of lands in one glance for example). I also imagine it is a crazy amount of work when having to start from scratch though...:frown:. Maybe it would just be a start to tag all the common lands used in Legacy (10 Duals, 10 Fetchies, 5 Basics, Wasteland, and a couple of other decktype staples) so one can split up lists between land and nonland cards.

When clicking on Format the uppermost Constructed format is Kamigawa Block and then Block: blabla and so on. I would prefer to have the important formats upfront (1 Legacy :tongue:, 2 current Standard,3 current Extended, 4 Vintage) and after that all the old formats. Does anybody seriously look at Kamigawa BLock decks nowadays?

[RogueMTG]

Thanks for the effort!
Now for some improvement suggestions from an users viewpoint:
If I remember correctly decks on deckcheck used to be sorted not only alpahbetically but also by card type. ...



This is a good idea! Seems like when the system pulls list information it would also need to reference a database of all cards and group the cards in the list by type. (With some kind of priority based handling for cards with multiple types.)

I don't know if this kind of functionality is already set up? It seems like it would also be useful for list input validation by making sure the cards exist.

I don't know if anyone else has offered yet... but if not, when I get some free time I can work up a design & style-sheet.

Great progress with this! I really like where it's headed.

[emidln]

Importing a gatherer-like database and linking to it wouldn't be that hard. The issue is that wizards has all of that info copyrighted and I don't really want C&D letters from large corporations.

I can still do comparisons by card name, which is something I'm planning on. This would be something like: Deck A is +4 Swords to Plowshares, -4 Path to Exile from Deck B. (ala StarCity comparisons).

I'm working on integrating mtgo data right now. I actually will need moderators pretty soon. I'm importing the last month or so of mtgo data and I know nothing about standard. This makes sorting decks into archetype names difficult for me. Not to mention, this is really time-consuming (all I'm doing is selecting an archetype out of a drop down box, and sometimes hitting a + sign next to the box and typing in a name if the right archetype isn't there) since there are 100+ mtgo decks from this time period.

Integrated into their appropriate Formats:

Standard
Extended
Block

Separate Formats:

Classic
Legacy

Is there a demand for Highlander/Peasant/misc Challenge formats? If so, I can create Formats for those as well and list them. I have that data available to me.

The formats page currently lists all formats. Perhaps it should be a visible formats page (like the index) with a link to all of the formats.