Shadows Over Innistrad update is live on Decktester!
Decktester is a new site that has a catalog of all MtG Puzzle Quest cards and a terrific way to find the card or cards you’re looking for.
I used a lot of the feedback on the site another user built and the feedback from the card database that was built by the game devs to really fine tune the feature profile for the site. You can check it out here: http://decktester.com/Cards?expansions=4
See how many charges/shields a support has when you cast it (Missing most values so send me a message if you know what some of the missing values are!)
There’s still a lot more to come and any feedback or feature requests are very welcome. My current goals are to eventually add a Planeswalkers section, a comprehensive deckbuilding tools, and a collection builder so you can sort through the cards you own and find out exactly what you’re missing.
Thanks for checking the site out, and keep checking back for more updates!
Currently Working On:
Add ability to choose “Show ALL” or “Show ANY” cards that match radio/check lists
Features Planned for next Major Release:
Planeswalkers sections with full leveling details for each Planeswalker (Check out this wireframe for more detail)
Looks pretty! Unfortunately the radio button filters mostly don’t work for me (Win7/Firefox 45.0.2). When I click them the cards flash but nothing happens. If I really spam a button a bunch of times I’ve gotten it to respond a couple of times, but nothing I can replicate.
Sure is nice to have all the cards and their current versions though
The problem with the checkboxes and radio buttons is that clicking the boxes/buttons themselves doesn’t work - you have to click the words next to the boxes/buttons. Not sure how that managed to happen but that’s the bug.
Also, I found another bug: when you select “red” cards with “berserker” it doesn’t include Iroas’. (Selecting double strike does, though. I’m guessing she’s just not tagged correctly.)
The new server is much more stable, yes!
Overall I have to say it’s really impressive! Nice job, nicely done! Completely destroys the official site in utility and exceeds the other fan site in correctness. Very well done!
Here’s a suggestion: since you default to 3 cards wide on all but the smaller resolutions, you might as well show 12 per page instead of 10, just to fill the space. (It will still look nice on 2-card wide screens as well.)
Another cool trick would be to have long text (like on Animist’s Awakening) that extends past the bottom of the image automatically scroll up on mouseover. That might be particularly tricky, though, depending on how you created your images (which look like static pngs that are possibly screen shots?). EDIT: Nevermind! I just realized what the “flip” button did and how to use that - yeah, that’s good enough!
Nice catch, checkboxes and radios should now be working as expected
Fixed, let me know if you find anything other cards with mistakes in them. Also, I added the ability to stick a “Charges” value on supports, e.g. Sword of the Animist has 2 charges, Claustrophobia used to have 2 charges but now has 1. I’m missing most of these values, so it would be great if people would submit them so I can get them entered in!
Done, new items per page values are 12/24/48/96
I actually thought about doing this originally since but decided it would require a lot of work for a small benefit (since as you mentioned there are other ways to see the full card text (flipping the card or viewing the details page). They use high quality art files which I don’t readily have access to so my only real option is to go with screenshots/scraping the official card list website. It would be a lot easier if they used the exact art from MtG paper cards but they use a cropped version which means a lot of extra photoshop time.
Two more quick bugs: “Mythic” now says “Mythic Rare”, and many of the mythic cards are incorrectly showing the “common” color for their symbol (for example, Al. Archive shows a white “12 support” symbol instead of an orange one).
Still looking great overall, though! I’d say this is the best resource for cards so far. Oh, one more idea: you could have the definition of each ability appear as a small box when mousing over that ability. For example, mouseover “Deathtouch” shows “Kills all creatures blocking or blocked by this creature”. If that’s a pain, maybe just create a one-page glossary link like mtgpq.com (still can’t believe a fan nabbed that URL but anyway), as that is the second most useful thing on that site. None of this is really necessary and maybe it goes beyond your scope, but anyway just a thought.
There’s like…20 or so cards (12 of them mythic) that I didn’t have screenshots for and had to take the images from the “Official” card list page and the “white icon” is how they have all the cards displayed on their site. Not really much I can do about this unfortunately.
The glossary functionality is coming, as are tooltips for what you described. Regarding the domain name, I actually purchased a much more “mtgpq” focused name, but decided against using it since I wanted to make it clear that this is not an official site and to separate myself from the mtgbq brand in case I wanted to branch out to other games.
As a teaser, I’m also currently working on a planeswalker section where people will be able to use a “level slider” to see how powerful your planeswalker is at each level and at what level you get certain abilities. I think this will be a terrific resource for everyone. Basically I’m building all sorts of things that I want to use for myself and hope that others find them useful as well.
One other silliness: if you really wanted to be fancy, you could create a “keyword” object that created the popup each time it was mouseovered - so, even on card text and all that. Fancy.
(There’s probably a gem for that?)
Another utility that would be cool and fit with the URL you have chosen would be a deck-building “cart” where you could see all 10 cards in your deck at once, or play around with building other decks. It wouldn’t even need to save anything.
Re: cards, I thought you might be using images that overlayed the correct color based on the rarity. Like, having a little white / blue / gold / orange “creature” symbol and just put that on top of whatever card it was. That’s also a bit fancy, though.
It’d probably be faster to just photoshop the ~20 you don’t have. (Although that’s kind of tricky as well, since they are slightly different sizes and the fonts don’t match up exactly right.)
[spoiler]I tried my hand at Av. Dragon and WOW did that take way too long. I can see why you’d just skip it! Anyway, here’s one more for you, if you want.
I had already thought about doing this and I still think I might, but it’s one of those “nice to have things” where a nicely designed glossary page will fill the need without requiring so much effort. Definitely a consideration for the future though.
If you or anyone else is interested, here are the initial wireframes I did for the site a few months back when I was fleshing out the idea for the app. You can see things like deckbuilding are already in the queue and will be the next thing I work on after I finish the Planeswalker section.
I also have plans to allow people to create an online inventory of cards they own. Then, when they build their decks they can have an easy way to filter cards they own to make online deckbuilding easier without having to remember which cards they’re missing.
Hi, just wanted to check back - it works perfectly now, and it’s beautiful. By far my new go-to site for the game. You may want to be ready to have a marker for which cards are from which set for future purposes - I imagine you’ll get a lot of traffic when the new set debuts!
Speaking of which - what if you let people enter their collections so they could see (for example) how many blue mythics they don’t own yet? I did it by hand using the mtgpq card lists, but it took quite a while. Not 100% required though, since the table view (very thoughtful) even pastes into Excel properly for us to do what we want with it. (eta: I see you’ve addressed that already! Cool.)
Thanks to everyone who provided feedback so far. I think the site’s in a great place right now for the card database functionality. Once the Battle for Zendikar patch goes live there’s going to be a lot of work to get all the new information - I’ve asked for some help from the MtGPQ devs but I know they’re super busy so I’m not holding my breath. I’ll probably add a temporary upload button so that people can submit screenshots of the new cards.
I’ve just uploaded a bunch of new content and updates to Decktester in preparation for the Battle for Zendikar launch tomorrow (allegedly).
Added placeholder cards using the card art from the main Wizards site for all the BFZ cards and will fill in the art and data as it comes. If you manage to snag a card that I don’t have a picture for please take a screenshot and send it to me at mtgpq@decktester.com
Added Card Expansion and Card Patch data to cards
Added expansion selection to search form
Added comprehensive Glossary section with all of the new BFZ lingo as well as everything from Origins
Added another breakpoint for large screens (1600px)
Added better sorting of creature types (Human/Elf appears before Warrior/Soldier and etc.)
Unless the publishers are planning on publishing the new card list right away I’m going to need help from everyone to get the card data as quick as possible. Please post any new cards you have screenshots for here on the forums, on imgur, or email me directly at mtgpq@decktester.com!
I’m adding new stuff to the site all the time so be sure to check back often!
Literally 9 hours of non-stop work since the release - the full BFZ release has been loaded into Decktester! All BFZ card data is up to date and searchable.
