Magic the Gathering: M12 and Warhammer Invasion: Signs of the Stars

I understand your frustration and I'm really sorry for this delay, but the official publishers of the game did not put out any card reference document. In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm trying to offer a bit of an explanation and disclaimer information in the following paragraphs.

In the very beginning I have got the data from wowtcgdb.com, but that was unreliable so I turned to official channels.

It is really difficult to import data that is from a 3rd party website, that gets it from user submissions, and inputs it manually. There are errors, glitches and problems that crash a parsing script if I'm just empirically parsing html. It takes hours and hours of just messing with stuff to get everything right, each time a new expansion is put out. Then people submit bugs about this parsed data, because inevitably there are errors.

Changing a card's class after I have imported it into the database is not as easy as 3 clicks. Also manual insertion of everything is really time consuming. Information about a single card is distributed in 14 tables. Changing or manually inputting things into that schema would involve a mini administrative application written specifically for that job. Mini administrative application that I did not want to have to write.

At this point in the story came cryptozoic which gave us official card reference documents which are organized and structured to a certain degree. It's not a xls, it's a pdf, and it's not easily parseable either, as my script that gets the info out of it has 600 lines of ruby code full of if conditionals and empirical regex matchings, but hey... at least it's an oficial document that looks identical with each edition (well... almost identical).

Now after 3 editions it seems they are not even bothering to do that even, as it has been a couple of months or 3 since the new edition, and they gave us nothing.

I might have to go back to wowtcgdb.com for information, as they seem to now have a csv file with that edition, but alas, for that I need to write a new script. I don't really expect anything to change in the following week, but anyway... we shall make a decision this weekend, and we'll try to have the cards up one way or another. Maybe the best way would be to create a spreadsheet online that people can contribute info into on set releases. A wiki type of spreadsheet on google docs or something along those lines....

Sorry for the long winded programmer babble, I also just vented a little bit of my own frustration with them

Thanks so much for your explanation!

I myself work for a software company and fully understand. Still, there are things that could greatly alleviate your effort of listing the cards - the best one according to me, you mentioned already - post a google docs spreadsheet that several people will have the assignment to contribute to (we can sort that out here in the forum, but I'd be happy to input data for like 20% of the cards or more if needed). I'm pretty sure there are some other folks that would love to contribute - that's the least we can do for a great site you've put up for us - the TCG junkies.

Last edited by theophanya (2011-07-13 08:06:40)

Have you guys made a decision on what you want to do yet?  With a new set coming out soon (next week!), the database will be two expansion out of date.  I know it's lot of work, and I can understand being hesitant for just one expansion, but now that's it two and it seems to be a pattern, you might want to consider it an investment into the future

Thanks again for everything you do!