Introducing CubeTutor.com

[lebenski]

Good to hear! Yes, indeed, that looks like a deck from my new cube. Oh, I don't know if this is possible, but the ability to, with one click or something, classify all non-creature spells as "non-creature" or something like that could be very useful. I have a difficult time looking at the curve for different colors when things are spread across Instants, Sorceries, Planeswalkers, etc.

Either that, or perhaps some way to apply bulk modifications and selections in the cube editor?

Thanks again!

A few people have asked for something like this. I probably wouldn't allow cube authors to change the super type from Instant to Non-Creature on the Edit List page because this loses some precision, and also you are not the only person looking at your list. However making the list presentation on the View List page customisable so that you can view the list split as Creature/Non-Creature would be a good idea. That has the added benefit that you can look at other peoples cubes this way too. Will get it on my todo list!

Mass select and update on Edit List is something I've been thinking about though. A lot of people want to set all of the cards in their cube to foil for example. It should be easier to do this than it is at the moment.

 

[Lucre]

I don't know if it's useful for you for testing, but attached are my current cube files. The eldraziDomain one has everything spelled correctly, and the 360.txt one is untested with many likely spelling errors.

Jason, I found some pretty questionable picks when I decided to try drafting what I thought was your cube in cubetutor. Mark of the vampire stands out in my mind. Maybe some sort of error?

I just did a quick run through trying to pick the worst/weirdest card every pick to see if I could post that as a diagnostic but it won't let me save because I don't have an account... : (
Man did I end up with a million guildmages though.

 

[lebenski]

I think you may have got the wrong cube. I can't see Mark of the Vampire in Jason's list. Draft it here:

http://www.cubetutor.com/draft/625

 

[Peter Angell]

After using Cubetutor some more, I do have some UX type suggestions for improvements. Some of these are really nitpicky, though.

List View Page (most to least important):
- Not too wild about the light green text on the white background. The color for the headers in the White column is also very hard to distinguish.
- The text sizing: a tad small for my tastes.
- Hover image has no delay until popup. Even if only a half second, a delay would be preferable.
- Clicking on cards just shows the hover image we are already seeing. Maybe link to Gatherer?
- Seeing Planeswalker(4) and then the 4 blue planeswalkers grouped by CC with buffer spaces is unwieldy. I think for sections with ten cards or less, you can just group them all together.
- I'm viewing this page at 1680x1050 and there's tons of whitespace that isn't used.
- Cards with long names use two lines: Isamaru, Hound of Konda, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben. When almost every other card is one line, these are a sore thumb.

Visual Spoiler:
- Feels cramped. Could use some spacing between cards.
- Not using all the real-estate on a wide screen display feels much wasteful here.
- Similar to the list view page, I think there should be times where you have a "new line" of cards and extra buffer space (possibly with a text header).
- Maybe buttons at the top of the page to jump to different sections in the spoiler (and possibly "back to top" buttons).

 

[Chris Taylor]

Hmmm. Maybe "Everything in this filtered list"?

 

[lebenski]

After using Cubetutor some more, I do have some UX type suggestions for improvements. Some of these are really nitpicky, though.

List View Page (most to least important):
- Not too wild about the light green text on the white background. The color for the headers in the White column is also very hard to distinguish.
- The text sizing: a tad small for my tastes.
- Hover image has no delay until popup. Even if only a half second, a delay would be preferable.
- Clicking on cards just shows the hover image we are already seeing. Maybe link to Gatherer?
- Seeing Planeswalker(4) and then the 4 blue planeswalkers grouped by CC with buffer spaces is unwieldy. I think for sections with ten cards or less, you can just group them all together.
- I'm viewing this page at 1680x1050 and there's tons of whitespace that isn't used.
- Cards with long names use two lines: Isamaru, Hound of Konda, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben. When almost every other card is one line, these are a sore thumb.

Visual Spoiler:
- Feels cramped. Could use some spacing between cards.
- Not using all the real-estate on a wide screen display feels much wasteful here.
- Similar to the list view page, I think there should be times where you have a "new line" of cards and extra buffer space (possibly with a text header).
- Maybe buttons at the top of the page to jump to different sections in the spoiler (and possibly "back to top" buttons).

Hey Peter,

Thanks for those.

Firstly I decided to constrain the width at 1024px early on. Primarily because I'm not all that great at CSS and dealing with a fluid width is something that I would rather avoid. This width was chosen because it's the default res on an iPad and felt like a reasonable minimum for people on older systems. I agree with the sentiment though, it's called "Responsive Design" in UX circles and I definitely wish that I was better at it.

With that in mind you've touched on the two key constraining factors for the text size. Being too small so you can't read it, and being too large that a lot of the cards end up on two lines. I've ended up in a place that is a compromise in both respects!

The fact you can even click on a card at all is kind of a side effect of the popup library I'm using. It puts the response from the href into a popup. Clicking on them is weird I know. Maybe i'll have a fiddle around with the JS and move the card image url to a different attribute so that I can specify something better in the href. The delay is an interesting point, I assume the fact that it starts to load the popup in the fraction of a second that you hover over a link is annoying for you?

I know what you mean about the spacing in small groups too. Have added an item to my list to do something like you suggest, I think it's a good idea.

With the visual spoiler I guess I just have a natural aversion to padding! For me it's all about getting as much information on to the page as is elegantly possible. I did a lot of my testing on an iPad and didn't want scrolling to be more of a chore than it already is. To that end your idea of quick links is a great suggestion and one that I will definitely implement.

Thanks again!
Ben

 

[Peter Angell]

I agree that there likely needs to be some minimum, and iPad width seems like a good place to start. If I had any idea on how to help you go wider dynamically, I'd be all over that! But I don't, unfortunately. Again, it's not a deal breaker, just something that I thought I'd mention. Maybe someday you'll figure it out and it'll make it in.

The hover delay is a fairly standard UI practice, so I imagine there's probably some property to set somewhere for it. And yes, it is slightly annoying when I am moving my mouse around (perhaps to hover over a specific card that I don't know) and now the hover popup is obstructing my view and being distracting in general.

Again, it's a very standard practice for clicking on a card name on a magic site to take you to a more detailed page about that card. Gatherer is nice due to it being official. Magiccards.info is my favorite because it'll show different languages and promo versions that Gatherer doesn't list. But this is also where you could make some extra money on the site, by partnering with a storefront and linking to their page when clicking (and honestly, as long as that store page had oracle text, that sort of "advertisement" wouldn't bother me in the slightest).

Padding between cards is perhaps just personal preference, and now that you mention ipad, I am sympathetic to that not adding buffer just for the sake of buffer.

But for the other part of my suggestion for the visual spoiler I will use an awesome ASCII graph:

White (17)
Creatures (11)
WWWW
WWWW
WWW
Instants (6)
WWWW
WW
Blue (85)
Creatures (7)
UUUU
UUU
Instants (55)
UUUU
etc...

Not to scale, as the Ws and Us represent cards. You don't even all need the section headers necessarily (though that might be a good place for navigation hotlinks); but just having a newline of cards and a minimal buffer between "sections" helps identify when there's a change in card types (or for large sections, casting cost) - a useful landmark if you are scrolling quickly.

Again, I feel compelled to thank you for this free service which is both totally awesome and free!

 

[lebenski]

Thanks Peter. The line break on the Visual Spoiler would be similar to whats on the View Cube page so from a consistency point of view it certainly makes sense. I also particularly like the idea of partnering with a store for the card links. That's something I'll have to look into.

In the meantime here is a small release:

From my dev blog: http://cubetutor.wordpress.com

Harmonize 3.1

New Features

- You can now export your cube list to .txt or .csv through My Account. I recommend keeping a regular backup. More formats to come soon!

- You can now add a profile picture for your cube on the blog page. Check out mine here: http://www.cubetutor.com/cubeblog/1

- Deck page now has a link to draft the cube and see the card list.

Bug Fixes

- Fixed “This deck has less than 45 cards” message on the Draft Deck page when drafting with a pack size less than 15.

- Fixed an error when filtering by power, toughness or cmc without providing an operator.

- Added some missing Collectors Edition and WMCQ cards.

 

[CML]

hey ben, my apologies if someone's already said this, but my main beef is that I can't sort my cube by CMC on the main page, nor can i do the same on the analysis page. the filter lets me do this, but then there are no graphs, and i can't use the filter on other people's cubes.

basically what i'd be most excited about is for all the filter functionality to be exported to the rest of the analysis pages, and for the filter functionality to be accessible for cubes that are not one's own. this would make it easier to offer criticism to myself and others.

thanks a ton!

 

[Chris Taylor]

Ooo filter on other people's cube sounds sweet!
What do you mean the "main page"? Like the cube listing?
The "View Cube" page is sorted by CMC, it's just done within the categories (The obvious one is creature, but I've set all my non-creatures to pretend to be sorceries so it just files them all under the same category of "Noncreature")
The visual spoiler is set up much the same way, but without the card type categories.

 

[CML]

right, chris, i meant maybe we could switch the hierarchies so we'd get all the 1's in a single column instead of all the whites. the sorting mechanisms and options available at tappedout.com are imo a good model for this.

the visual spoiler should also have this functionality.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Noticed something: Enter doesn't log me in on the login screen.
Chrome doesn't seem to want to remember my password, but that's just me being lazy.

 

[CML]

the new feature where i can only have 100 rows is annoying. also another keystroke is necessary to enter cards, bleh

looking forward to more sorting functionalities!

 

[VibeBox]

new analytics are pretty boss though

 

[CML]

yes, they are sweet. i'm looking forward to a holistic curve chart, i guess? everything else is so magnificent that i've long stopped updating that other site's list and now use cubetutor exclusively

 

[Jason Waddell]

I am seeing a bug in the "Decks" section, where only the basic lands are showing up. E.g. http://cubetutor.com/draftdeck/1182

 

[Chris Taylor]

You know what I'll bet is happening?
It removes cards from old draft decks if they get removed from the cube. IIRC, you purge your whole list before every upload, ya?

 

[Jason Waddell]

You know what I'll bet is happening?
It removes cards from old draft decks if they get removed from the cube. IIRC, you purge your whole list before every upload, ya?

Yes, that's what I do, but other people add and remove some cards. Presumably these are getting wiped from the decks too?

 

[Chris Taylor]

Yup (Sadly)

when I re-hauled the mana rocks in my cube a bunch of my saved wildfire decklists got shaved to 36-39 cards.
It's a storage thing IIRC

 

[Miasmir]

That seems pretty ridiculous. How much harder could it be to save the card name in the decklist, and consider decklists to be inviolate?

 

[Jason Waddell]

That seems pretty ridiculous. How much harder could it be to save the card name in the decklist, and consider decklists to be inviolate?

As somebody who does a bit of programming, I can tell you that these types of bugs pop up all over, and it just takes time to work out all the kinks. It could be that cards are drafted by card # within the cube list, and that's what's saved. Probably not difficult to fix, but it's also something that likely hasn't been an issue in most cases. Most decklists probably still have 40 cards, and a random 39'er here and there will likely go either unspotted or isn't focused on. It's just particularly glaring in my cube, where there's nothing left but basic lands.

 

[Miasmir]

As somebody who does a bit of programming...

Yeah, that's the explanation that occurred to me as well, it's just that I have no idea why it would be stored that way to begin with. The efficiency savings seems very minor, and only the barest thought would bring up the problem, which is that people change their cubes. To implement it this way requires writing the code that removes a card from a decklist when it's no longer in the cube, which is the point at which a red flag should definitely arise.

Sorry to sound so overcritical. It's still a very useful tool, and in terms of basic functionality beats out all the other online cube management options I've tried. I'm just an extremely angry software developer.

On another note, I've been making more use of the analytics recently, and I think a color filter checkbox for multicolored would be a helpful addition.

 

[lebenski]

Hey Guys,

First off sorry that I haven't been too vocal on here recently. I have been checking in every now and then and noting all of the feedback on my to-do list.

This issue with decks is an annoying one. The first this to say is that when a card is removed from a cube, the record is completely removed from the DB. This may or may not be wrong, but I didn't want to end up storing millions of redundant rows. It's possible that I shouldn't worry about this and should just flag cards as deleted and not actually delete the record. Assuming that deleting records is the correct thing to do, the next this to say is that decks are stored as a list of "cube card ids", i.e. references to cube specific instances of those cards. The reason for this is to support things like custom card images (which are currently only available for my cube). If a deck just referenced card ids then you would lose all of the cube specific data like custom images. So when querying the DB for a deck, if some of the cards are missing, they are just silently ignored by the query. I don't as Miasmir suggested actively remove the cards from the decks.

I'm starting to think that the cost of supporting custom card images is a little too great in the case of decks and should just store references to card id's instead. Either that or stop actually deleting records when cards are removed from a cube.

It requires a bit more thought on my part, but I will look at this soon. As ever I'm open to thoughts & suggestions!

 

[Miasmir]

Thanks for the extra detail!

Okay, that's a great reason to store the cube specific card id in the decklist. But you could maybe also store the card name, so that if the card id into the cube can't be found (or if it doesn't match the stored name? Not sure if ids are reused), you can still display the correct card.

It creates some additional overhead but this would also enable you to repair the id when another card with a matching name is added.

 

[theCubeMiser]

I'm going to agree with everyone and say that there's got to be a better way of storing deck data such that it doesn't get deleted when your cube changes. The decks were drafted at the time a cube was a certain way and should reflect that.