General Winnowing? aka Gatherer is still broken

spicewitch

spicewitch

The wisdom of the crowds is not very wise, but it does at least constrain your search space. We used to be able to run a Gatherer search and then sort by Community Rating. This method didn't generate any sort of precise information, but at the very least you could throw out 30% to 50% of your search results by ignoring a couple power max results at the top and a big chunk of chaff at the bottom.

Folks haven't been able to rate or comment on Gatherer cards for some time now, so that no longer works. This is part of why my aborted cube was going to be a Modern-only cube - without being able to drop the best and worst cards out of my search space, format-agnostic searches generate a glut of ancient cards, most of which are total crap.

Compare this search for green cards that care about lands with a Modern-only version of the search.

The format-agnostic version of that search is nearly twice as large. Most of the oldest cards are useless, five paragraphs long, or don't even work as intended under the current rules. Trouble is, a few of the most interesting gems are probably from those elder days, from before NWO delivered us Blands of Alara on a steaming platter.

What methods do you folks use nowadays to quickly sift through a bunch of cards?
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
I don't. That is to say, I sift through bunches and bunches of cards, but my main friend here is patience :) I usually determine what particular hole I want to fill, then search with constrained parameters like color, converted casting cost, card type, card text, etc. (magiccards.info's advanced search is really helpful here). From there it's a matter of taking the time to browse through the whole list. I reserve a lot of free time for this.

It also helps that I know a lot of cards. Like, a lot. That helps with skimming through lists, because often the name of a card is enough for me to remember what it does.
 
Jonas

Jonas

I do it the submarine way. Except not as methodical. I open up blue cards and look at all of them. Usually in a set or block where a mechanic I like exists.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Jonas said:
I do it the submarine way. Except not as methodical. I open up blue cards and look at all of them. Usually in a set or block where a mechanic I like exists.
Click to expand...

Essentially this. While there's a fair number of Joven's Ferrets in older sets there's gems too, and there's certainly effects you'd want that are still good today (Exclude > Bone to Ash and Dismiss > Contradict)

I feel your pain about the overwhelming number of cards though. Sometimes when I'm trying to make custom cards, I'm trying to process what a color can do on the whole abstractly, with no concrete examples and my brain just trails off into nothingness as I try and make punnet squares of what it's called when cards move from one zone to another, and which colors can do each of those intersections...

Makes my brain hurt. It's way easier making night's whisper better than it is coming up with the next birthing pod.
 
CML

CML

Contributor
Ask your friends, cut the bad cards. Cards you want to include should never be a problem.
 
jceddy

jceddy

In case anyone is interested here's something I've been working on in my spare time. Still a bit rough around the edges, but at least you can log in, comment and rate: http://www.ratemymagic.com

Looking for any feedback, as well. This may be temporary until Gatherer is fixed, but we'll see.
 
Eric Chan

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
Wow, that's pretty sweet! Out of curiosity, are you using something like mtgjson as your database?

Feedback:
  • Card Type and Card Set should both be multi-select dropdowns.
  • As a nice-to-have, the dropdowns for Power, Toughness, and CMC should include >= and <=.
  • More sorting options, especially in Visual Spoiler mode, especially by colour and converted mana cost.
I also created an account... but can't figure out what new things I can do while logged in. Is there a button, or...?

Anyways, this looks really promising.
 
shamizy

shamizy

Geez, how garbage is Wizard's team that works on the website? Gatherer has been shitty for nearly a year. What the actual fuck.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
shamizy said:
Geez, how garbage is Wizard's team that works on the website? Gatherer has been shitty for nearly a year. What the actual fuck.
Click to expand...

See modo, gatherer, coverage, thier website etc

WoTC outwardly looks like a bunch of game designers who had to produce a game in a different medium, a database, a live news report and a website, rather getting a programmer, a database designer, a newscaster, and a web designer
 
Jason Waddell

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
For all the years I have played Magic, Gatherer hasn't worked correctly. Set a query and tell it to "sort by user rating", and it never sorts it. You have to let it do the query, then re-sort it after that.
 
spicewitch

spicewitch

jceddy said:
In case anyone is interested here's something I've been working on in my spare time. Still a bit rough around the edges, but at least you can log in, comment and rate: http://www.ratemymagic.com

Looking for any feedback, as well. This may be temporary until Gatherer is fixed, but we'll see.
Click to expand...
Everyone rating all the cards throughout Magic's history is quite a task. Would it be possible for you to import the ratings that WotC does have as a starting point?

For instance, on a KTK card which is unrated and uncommented on Gatherer, we all vote normally. But on an Odyssey card, my vote would get added to the average vote from Gatherer, which would be weighted to count as if it was 100 or 200 votes or so.
 
jceddy

jceddy

bumbeh said:
Everyone rating all the cards throughout Magic's history is quite a task. Would it be possible for you to import the ratings that WotC does have as a starting point?

For instance, on a KTK card which is unrated and uncommented on Gatherer, we all vote normally. But on an Odyssey card, my vote would get added to the average vote from Gatherer, which would be weighted to count as if it was 100 or 200 votes or so.
Click to expand...


Yes, I have a plan to implement a bot to start importing ratings from gatherer. I'll probably start working on that next now that I added some functionality I wanted to rate and comment on sets themselves in addition to cards.
 
jceddy

jceddy

bumbeh said:
Everyone rating all the cards throughout Magic's history is quite a task. Would it be possible for you to import the ratings that WotC does have as a starting point?

For instance, on a KTK card which is unrated and uncommented on Gatherer, we all vote normally. But on an Odyssey card, my vote would get added to the average vote from Gatherer, which would be weighted to count as if it was 100 or 200 votes or so.
Click to expand...

I've now got a bot (slowly) pulling n card ratings from gatherer...it seems to be working, so I plan on increasing its rate soon.
 
jceddy

jceddy

Eric Chan said:
Wow, that's pretty sweet! Out of curiosity, are you using something like mtgjson as your database?

Feedback:
  • Card Type and Card Set should both be multi-select dropdowns.
  • As a nice-to-have, the dropdowns for Power, Toughness, and CMC should include >= and <=.
  • More sorting options, especially in Visual Spoiler mode, especially by colour and converted mana cost.
I also created an account... but can't figure out what new things I can do while logged in. Is there a button, or...?


Anyways, this looks really promising.
Click to expand...

I am pulling card data from mtgjson, yes.
Logging in should allow you to comment on and rate cards and sets.
The next big change I have planned is to make some major improvements to the card search and hopefully improve performance a bit while I'm at it.
 
jceddy

jceddy

Have now finished pulling in all ratings from gatherer. Also added more filtering and sorting options and improved query performance somewhat. Cleaned up some cruft and added code to fetch images that are missing from gatherer from other sites.
 
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