What it is


The "2.0" release of deckbox is not 100% complete, but we're getting there :). To show you what is coming, and to allow people to provide feedback on the changes before they go live, we have set up a testing deployment of deckbox, at:


http://alpha.deckbox.org (the password is let me see)


It's not yet a release candidate, so it's still a bit slow and probably a bit buggy, as we're working on polishing the remaining issues.


The database is copied from deckbox.org on Monday, 26th of November. You can sign in with your user, and all data should be there as it was on monday.


Important: this is a copy of the official data. Any change you make on alpha.deckbox.org will not be present on deckbox.org, and vice-versa.


No emails are sent from alpha.deckbox.org, so if you try out proposing trades or messaging other users they will not be notified of this.


Now let's see what's changing in this release.


MtG Collections


The biggest focus and challenge was to allow easier import and management of detailed cards in MtG collections. The old "Edit details" dialog was not cutting it.


You will find in the Add Cards dialog that we have merged the simple card input with the advanced one, bringing - we hope - the best of both worlds.


We now have "defaults" selectors for edition, condition and language, so you can set them once and have them applied to all cards you add from then on. Defaults can be set to empty if you do not want to have extra information about your cards. The defaults are present also in the add card list input.


A new input option is the CSV import. The CSV file format is conveniently the one we export, so exporting your collection works as a backup too, since you can import it again with one click, with all the card information, like editions, conditions, foil etc.


Some other related changes, in no particular order:

• aside from foil, textless and promo, we now have a new flag: signed
• card languages are now written in english
• we have added 2 new card conditions, as described here: http://alpha.deckbox.org/help/card_conditions
• as an effect of the collection changes, trades now show detailed cards, with edition and condition, if you have selected them in your inventory
• Inventory has now the option to Mark all cards as tradeble
• You can now sort and filter by the edition you set on cards, and by foil status
• Cards in your inventory that are used in decks or are present in current ongoing trades are marked with an icon (a clickable icon :P)

Pricing


There has been much discussion about pricing in deckbox, and for good reason. The average price over all printings of a card was not accurate or useful enough. From now on, in all cases where you specify an edition for a card, we will show the price for that edition. (The card tooltip should also show the proper printing for that edition).


Also, in all cases where you do not specify an edition, the card price becomes its price in its last main set (i.e. not in Duel Decks, Commander packages etc). Estimated values for decks and collections will go down a bit because of this.


Trades


There are some changes to users' trade pages and individual trade pages to accomodate the new detailed cards collections. But we are not yet finished with the changes, the final version will be modeled by this post: http://deckbox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=26094#p26094


We have some bigger changes to trading rules and policies which deserve their own post in Announcements, and we will prepare that for next week.


Other features

• Facebook login - You can now login with your facebook account if you connect it from your profile page, or just by using the Facebook button in the login dialog. Be advised though that you should have your deckbox email identical to the one you use on facebook for the login button to work. This does not work on alpha.deckbox.org yet, but it will once the release is live.
• Terms and Conditions - We now have a first draft of more legalese-language Terms and Conditions 1 and Privacy Policy2. Second drafts coming next week with the trade changes mentioned above.
• Infrastructure - last but not least, we have a very large number of infrastructure changes on all levels of the stack - database migrations, programming language version upgrades, web framework upgrades and structural changes. You guys don't see all that, but you have to take our word for it that all this makes it easier for us to deliver faster, stabler, nicer features in the future. :)

Whew, that was a big wall of text :). As always, looking forward to your feedback, positive or negative, it really helps us build a better website. There's issues we already know about, but probably there are more issues that we don't yet know about, so if
something crashes, we'd love to know :)

1. http://alpha.deckbox.org/help/legal
2. http://alpha.deckbox.org/help/privacy

Cheers,
Sebi

As always, great work. And if you ever need any help, just let us know.

I'll be poking around in the alpha for a while now.....

Edits for feedback:
Seriously, some AMAZING changes, and a lot of the stuff that we've all been asking for.
I love that you can now search on whether you have a certain edition of a card in your inventory, and that I can finally find all of my foils.

Tooltips are a problem for me right now, partially because they overlap a lot of things, especially in the popup dialog, which makes it hard to interact. But I think the bigger issue, which also might solve the first problem, is that thetooltips don't disappear on mouseout, and that is because on line 14949 of the main.js you have a missing function parameter.

This:
Deckbox._.addEvent(document, 'mouseout', function() {

Should be:
Deckbox._.addEvent(document, 'mouseout', function(event) {

Additionally, I think that tooltips should be used a bit more sparingly. I don't think I need a tooltip when I hover over every one of my deck names, I only need one if it doesn't fit in the allocated space.


I'm assuming that this is part of it not all being finished, but the decks don't actually link up with your inventory, so it says that I own 0 of the cards in every deck. Just in case though, I figured I would point it out.

Thank you Sebi! I, too, will be taking it all in over the next few evenings.

NullParameter, you are right, we kind of went overboard with the tooltips, we'll tone it down a bit. The tooltip mouseout bug you mentioned is fixed now (was not happening in chrome that's why we didn't see it, firefox is a bit more fussy :P).

Inventory and wishlist counts in decks should also be correct now, thanks for reporting.

Also fixed a crash with inventory display when filtering by owned edition and sorting by price.

The new site looks awesome!

I really like the "For each card you add to this set with this widget, one is also added to your Inventory." warning when adding cards to the tradelist. I feel it's equally important to have the mirror of that when adding cards to the inventory; I know there have been several threads about that.

When looking at my decks, the yellow and red indicators for when I don't have enough of a card is missing.

After poring over it, those minor things are all I could find. Great job!

varble wrote:The new site looks awesome!

I really like the "For each card you add to this set with this widget, one is also added to your Inventory." warning when adding cards to the tradelist. I feel it's equally important to have the mirror of that when adding cards to the inventory; I know there have been several threads about that.

When looking at my decks, the yellow and red indicators for when I don't have enough of a card is missing.

After poring over it, those minor things are all I could find. Great job!

Thanks for the feedback!

On the topic of adding cards, we thought that if you wish to add cards directly to the tradelist you could use the tradelist add. Do you mean you generally want things added to the tradelist as well when added to the inventory? Would an extra checkbox option be ok in the add widget of the inventory for that?

Fantastic job on the new site! Happy to see that with all these improvements, the site still looks nice and simple.

I have one request. Instead of marking all cards available for trade, would it be possible to mark cards that you have a certain amount of? For instance, I would like to trade cards that I have at least 1 playset of. It would be great if I can set that up easily.

Thanks for all the hard work. Looking forward to the new site!

apyrexia wrote:Fantastic job on the new site! Happy to see that with all these improvements, the site still looks nice and simple.

I have one request. Instead of marking all cards available for trade, would it be possible to mark cards that you have a certain amount of? For instance, I would like to trade cards that I have at least 1 playset of. It would be great if I can set that up easily.

Thanks for all the hard work. Looking forward to the new site!

I +1 this one. That's a feature I'd love to see, too. I'm trying to keep playsets, but am trading all additional copies.

I realize it may need to wait until the next release (or the one after that ;), but it is definitely something I'd like to see.

HikingStick wrote:

apyrexia wrote:Fantastic job on the new site! Happy to see that with all these improvements, the site still looks nice and simple.

I have one request. Instead of marking all cards available for trade, would it be possible to mark cards that you have a certain amount of? For instance, I would like to trade cards that I have at least 1 playset of. It would be great if I can set that up easily.

Thanks for all the hard work. Looking forward to the new site!

I +1 this one. That's a feature I'd love to see, too. I'm trying to keep playsets, but am trading all additional copies.

I realize it may need to wait until the next release (or the one after that ;), but it is definitely something I'd like to see.

+1 from me too, though I'm fine with it waiting until a later release.
The alpha site looks great!!! Thank you so much for the work you've done. :-)

A checkbox would be great!

sebi wrote:

varble wrote:The new site looks awesome!

I really like the "For each card you add to this set with this widget, one is also added to your Inventory." warning when adding cards to the tradelist. I feel it's equally important to have the mirror of that when adding cards to the inventory; I know there have been several threads about that.

When looking at my decks, the yellow and red indicators for when I don't have enough of a card is missing.

After poring over it, those minor things are all I could find. Great job!

Thanks for the feedback!

On the topic of adding cards, we thought that if you wish to add cards directly to the tradelist you could use the tradelist add. Do you mean you generally want things added to the tradelist as well when added to the inventory? Would an extra checkbox option be ok in the add widget of the inventory for that?

Hey Sebi -

Just recently found the site, and it is great! I have a question regarding the format for importing inventory with Deckbox 2.0. Is the layout structure of the CSV file for importing final at this point? I figure I may not be the only one that is going to start editing my collection ahead of time.

Thanks and keep up the stellar work!

Absolutely beautiful, Sebi! I can't wait until it is released!

I do want you to look at one thing. In my inventory--my Urza's Tower--four appear, each on a separate line (in the alpha), all with the same edition and condition. In my actual collection, I only have one.

@offit7 - Yep, it's final

@HikingStick - That is weird, I will definitely take a look at that Urza's Tower.

What happened to the Total Decks count column in the Inventory? That was the only place I could easily see when I had a deficit of cards owned versus ones I wanted for decks. Please don't remove that column. If anything give me a way to filter on it so I don't have to page through my entire inventory to check it. :P

ArtosKincaid wrote:What happened to the Total Decks count column in the Inventory? That was the only place I could easily see when I had a deficit of cards owned versus ones I wanted for decks. Please don't remove that column. If anything give me a way to filter on it so I don't have to page through my entire inventory to check it. :P

Cards that you have in decks are marked with a deck icon to the right of the card name. If you click that, you'll see a detailed listing of the decks and counts used per deck.

Thanks for the update! It looks very promising. A couple small critiques:

The language flag is a nice idea. However, the UK flag for cards in English? I mean, sure, they invented the language. But the cards are definitely in American Englinsh, not British English ("color", not "colour", etc...).

Also, I like that cards of different editions are split out in the tables, but it does make it somewhat more difficult to quickly skim a large inventory and see how many cards of each name you have. Is there a way you can make this easier? Some possibilities I can think of are:
* Collapse cards of the same name together, giving an option to expand them into multiple rows for different kinds of the card, OR
* Use the same background color on the rows of cards of the same name

Thanks for all your hard work!

Lots of great improvements, with the improved set and price handling being by far my favorite that I have come across so far.

The Trading Opportunities is a nice feature in Deckbox. If there was a way to filter this this it would be fantastic. Specifically being able to filter on the other person's location, feedback and "Will trade with" setting.

I have run into a few glitches using the Alpha:
1) Trying to sort my Tradelist or Wishlist by Price or Edition results in an error (or blank page in the case of Firefox).
2) In IE9 I get a Webpage Error going to any page. (Unable to get value of the property 'hide': object is null or undefined).
3) The setting of sets for cards is not working very well with lots of little issues including:
- if you have a long list of cards and are down the list and edit the cards and then click on the "split" icon, the page jumps to the top. You then have to scroll down to get to the popup.
- Often trying to set the edition doesn't work. Sometimes when you click on the edition you want the list of editions remains but the popup behind it goes away. At this point you have to try again. I played with Abyssal Specter with this a lot (lots of editions). Choosing an edition from near the bottom of the list worked well. From elsewhere it the list it usually didn't work but would work occasionally. See next problem as well.
- Sometime you click on an edition and the list does not go away. You simply cannot choose an edition.
4) In IE9 the Close button on the card edit popup is black on black. It is black on white in FF and Chrome.
5) There are lots of cards in my inventory with a price of $0. Most of them are cards from M13.
6) I got an error trying to view canceled trades.

One thing I do a lot on Deckbox is fiddle with card lists that I get from elsewhere. I currently do this by creating a new deck and adding the cards as a list of cards. These are not added to my inventory, which is what I want. The ability to add a list to a deck seems to have been removed in this release. Why? How can I add lists like this in the new release? The only thing I have thought of so far is creating a new Deckbox account just for this purpose...something I don't want to do.

Overall I'm really looking forward to this release!!

psyllogism wrote:Is there a way you can...
* Collapse cards of the same name together, giving an option to expand them into multiple rows for different kinds of the card, OR
* Use the same background color on the rows of cards of the same name

I like this one, too. Consider adding it to the list for the following release.

Outstanding job, Sebi and the Team! Thank you for making this great great service! I use it daily and recommend it to each and every mtg player I know and meet.

sebi wrote:

ArtosKincaid wrote:What happened to the Total Decks count column in the Inventory? That was the only place I could easily see when I had a deficit of cards owned versus ones I wanted for decks. Please don't remove that column. If anything give me a way to filter on it so I don't have to page through my entire inventory to check it. :P

Cards that you have in decks are marked with a deck icon to the right of the card name. If you click that, you'll see a detailed listing of the decks and counts used per deck.

Edit: was having issues seeing this in my list, until I applied a change to one of my cards to set the edition. After doing that and starting to page through my collection, the "in deck" icon appeared for some of the cards but not anywhere near all of them.

I am a little disappointed though, as this is a significant decrease in functionality for me, because the value was in being able to see without having to click on each of them individually. I would much rather just have the column back.

gmabber wrote:Outstanding job, Sebi and the Team! Thank you for making this great great service! I use it daily and recommend it to each and every mtg player I know and meet.

Same here. It's clean, simple, and useful. What every service should hope to be. :)

Good job, guys! Thanks a lot!

Now Inventory list of cards looks much better. I like default values when adding cards - that's what I wanted to have.
------
There are some questions on alpha release:
1. Seems like View - Spoiler doesn't work in Inventory. Is it a glitch, or Spoiler view will be only in Card Database? Will it have highlighting owned cards?
2. I'm Russian and I don't quite understand the difference between Edition Owned and Edition Printed in options. What is the difference? If Edition Owned is only Editions that I have, then, first, seems like it doesn't work for me, and, second, would be great only Editions I have to appear in the drop-down list of this option.
3. In Inventory Search & Filter there is no Cost column? It useful when I want to find a card in my collection with the same cost to replace weak cards in official decks.
------
And a wish about Export option:
Would be great to have a possibility to Export to CSV only checked cards and delete exported cards from Inventory (could be checkboxes for these options). For example, I want to give a bunch of my M-2013 red cards to my brother (who has an account on Deckbox, too): I just check these cards, press Export checking "Only selected cards" and "delete exported cards from Inventory" and send the file to him. Cards disappear from my Inventory. He takes the cards, comes home and just imports the file I've sent, and he already has these cards in his Inventory by only a couple of clicks.
------

What's next? :)
I think that after alpha version becomes Version 2, it would be great to think about internationalization:
- interface translates
- foreign language card search and thumbnail display (already discussed that, but it's really not very comfortable to open Gatherer (which has Russian card search, and thumbnails) to find a correct English name of the card to enter it to Inventory. The same - when building decks)

Thanks a lot for a really good job done! I'll include the link to Deckbox to my MtG Russian forums signs, maybe that will make some more people from Russia to register here and Russian interface plus Russian card search would attract even more Russians.

The ability to filter by card language appears to be missing from the Apply Filters area of the card database. In addition to searches by recorded language flag, consider including one option to search for cards with no language specified.

I really like being able to hit the "F" key to show the filters interface!

It may just be me, but on the trade interface, I liked seeing each side of the trade in a separate column, as is the case with the current site. It made it easier to view both sides of a trade. Also, with wide-screen displays being much more common these days, I have far more horizontal screen space than I do vertical. Am I the only one who likes the current two-column model?

There appears to be a problem with the pricing script/function for cards that have commas (",") in their name. Take a look at "Jace, Memory Adept" and "Chandra, the Firebrand) in the card database. Values come up as $0.00 there, and on the card details page. Values for other cards seem fine.

Names with apostrophes ("'") have proper pricing information. Cards with accented characters, like Seance, also appear to have pricing problems, but I'm guessing that's because of differences in how the name is recorded here versus at TCGPlayer.

There still appears to be a problem with the proximity filter for the Trading Opportunities area. See the attached screenshot for an example (a Canadian address appears between US addresses).

The MtG standard deck validator is still flagging decks larger than 72 cards as invalid:

"This is an incomplete Modern deck. It is not listed in the decks section and does not count towards the total decks count. A complete MtG deck contains either between 60 and 70 cards or exactly 100 (for EDH)" (emphasis added)

I'm assuming the same warning appears for any of the other formats (other than EDH) that are larger than 70 cards.

There is no upward limit on the number of cards in a MtG deck. In fact, some win conditions (e.g., Battle of Wits) require a player to have larger libraries.

Thank you guys for the great amount of feedback and reports. We're doing another deploy in a couple of days to alpha to address some of them.


For now only a couple of small things:
- english cards have the US flag now :)
- rows have zebra colours so you can easily see the same card group
- trade score for a user is now in the format "23 (100% positive)"
- drafts of the new trading rules, as explained in their own announcement post: http://deckbox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=5211 (feedback for trading policies should be posted in that topic)


Thanks again, will post some responses to your reports in a couple of days, with more updates.

First off, all other trading sites fail in comparison to what you can do and accomplish in trading. I go to other sites and each time I just say to myself "wheres the lists that compare what we both want?" I mean aside from the larger community (only because deckbox hasnt been around as long) I personally see no reason to try any where else to trade.

With that said, something that would be nice which I know helps me when Im looking for a card on my wishlist, is to hover over the little person icon that tells when a person was last online or is currently online. However it only gives the day and month they were last online, it doesnt give the year. So its hard to tell exactly how long someone has been inactive. I see it all the time (espically in new users "current trades") where they offer trades to people that havent been online in 6-8 months. Or if todays date is 12/4 for example, and a user was online 11/29 of LAST year, you might think that they were online last week when its been over a year and week. Im sure if anything this a just a small fix that can be done, its just 1 one that I though about when reading the new trading policies...

Keep up the AMAZING WORK!

I just wanted to chime in. I'm new here, and have only recently delved into the world of online trading. This site (even before updates) is better than anything else I've found, and these updates seem really awesome.

Big kudos for being able to distinguish between expansions, as I do like to hunt for specific versions/artwork of certain cards (also, it's a factor in value). So big thanks to everyone who works to make this place what it is.