Discussion Forum

Front Page & Suggestions

First off, Bravo. Best looking deck site I've found... and before I started heavily using one I looked (Trust me!). Absolutely perfect so far.

The front page needs to be changed. Its a barrage of mediocre and crap decks and for the average player looking to get insight into whats hot, you should modify the front page to instead list a few different items;

1.) List 10 or so decks by "trending" status. Only decks with upvotes/comments get to the front page. This degrades over time akin to how Reddit showcases their own posts via "Whats Hot". You'd have to research how they manage it, but I know upvoting/comments will keep you on the front page only for so long.

2.) In addition to the trending decks, you can then have a seperate section below it that then lists "Recently posted decks". This would look as it currently does. I'd love for this area to be filterable by deck-legality (I realize your still working on deck-legality being required on deck submition...priority!). A little selection tool of some kind to pick legality (saved to profile) would allow me (who only cares about standard format) to see what I want everytime I came back.

3.) I'd love to see decks automatically grabbed from MTGO tourney results. It could be cool to see them in your sites format versus just a standard text listing. I realize this would probably lead to hundreds of duplicate decks, but afterall, most people love to copy them.

4.) The Tags section should instead list frequently used tags within the last 48 hours. This can help showcase deckbuilding trends and further provide some insight into the MTG community. Showing how many decks have been tagged right now makes your site look only moderate-barely used. Maybe require at least two tags on every deck? This would at least populate this section and make your site look like its used by more competent people.

Finally some other things I'd love to see;

*Card Commentary by site members.

*Errata/Rulings per card.

*Instead of text listings of cards, allow an optional/alternative 'full-image' view of what's in the deck. I'd make it look like the new Beta MTGO client where you see a 4-stack of one card, but the top most visible one has the image of what your looking at. Its nice to be able to quickly see what your deck looks like. Utilize full horizontal/vertical space in your design.

*Tourney results for a deck? Maybe have an option to include the results of a FNM tourney, GP, PT, or PTQ? It doesn't necessarily have to be a verified piece of information, but could be cool to see how a deck performed. Possibly room to have tourney-results-blog included with it too?

*Android App of some kind.

Thanks and keep up the great work.
Posted 01 March 2013 at 22:51

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6 replies

Thank-you very much for the suggestions!

We knew the homepage and other deck pages were not perfect when we launched but we were eager to get this version out as the deck builder is SO much faster than the old one and we wanted people to be using it. We made basic deck pages just to get the thing live with the intention of changing them later on down the line, they are making their way back up the list of importance now! ;)

I love your ideas for the front page, more of a snapshot of everything going on right now. I will keep these ideas in mind for when we finally get back to working on that page! Trending tags makes more sense on that new style of page, but you're right, we need to make sure that tags are being put in correctly first and a limit may be the best way to achieve this!

Other stuff:


* Database is already geared up for card comments, just need the interface.



* Errata/Rulings, yup, same as above!



* I like this idea. We have the proxy page at the moment, but I love the idea of stacking the cards up. I'm very visual myself so this would be perfect.



* This is an idea I had a while ago but never got around to putting it in! I would for people to record wins/losses on a deck as it gives another metric on how good/competitive a deck is.



* We're going to make an API at some point so other developers can make all sorts of apps, that's the plan anyway! ;)


Thanks again! :)
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Posted 03 March 2013 at 14:28

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You should also in some way... reward players who fill out all of the fields on deck submissions. I'd much rather read how a player wants the deck to play, then just getting a straight up text listing. Not sure what players are expecting by "publicly" listing their deck either. It seems pretty well explained on the section that allows you to change it, not sure why people public-list it but fail to fill out any details/comments on its play style/deck construction approach.

If they fail to fill out any of the details, and don't get any comments creating some sort of feedback loop would make sense. I.E: Players who submit decks with everything filled out tend to get more replies.

The site seems tough to mitigate crappy listings. I think breaking down the front page by tourney-legality would go a long ways towards breaking up the flood of decks that come in (I have to literally click into them in 99/100 cases to find out what format they are designed for).

Maybe you could promote decks with fully entered-in-info somehow? Changing the decks title font-color (on the front page) to be a highlight that draws players into it? I'm imagining every deck name that just gets posted without effort shows up in black, but any other deck name would get the full color treatment (I.E: Blue/Black decks in a left-right gradient of blue/black?)
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Posted 04 March 2013 at 23:03

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I love the idea of promoting descriptions. Sometimes, especially when the player actually NEEDS help, its hard to tell what their objective and game plan for the deck is. If the title is just "Dimir" and the deck is full of one-ofs, I don't know if they want mill, unblockable, cipher, control...and I hate to suggest something that they aren't trying for. I want to help build their own deck, not to build the deck that I push them towards. Just saying, it would be excellent if you could work that out somehow, and Scree had a really good idea. Description should also have to be more than a few words to be accepted.
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Posted 05 March 2013 at 02:58

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I like all these ideas. It's pretty obvious now we need to auto-tag legality against decks, I have been working on that, but we need to double check some card legality first.

We could do a LinkedIn style "your profile is x% complete." I love the idea of gamification (i.e reward badges etc), but obviously that's easier said than done :)
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Posted 05 March 2013 at 21:55

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Ooh, percentage completion on profile, that could work really well. If it's not too much, might be a good idea to plan out where article links could potentially go if you decide to do it that way.
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Posted 08 March 2013 at 00:54

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[QUOTE=TheScree] Maybe you could promote decks with fully entered-in-info somehow? Changing the decks title font-color (on the front page) to be a highlight that draws players into it? I'm imagining every deck name that just gets posted without effort shows up in black, but any other deck name would get the full color treatment (I.E: Blue/Black decks in a left-right gradient of blue/black?)[/QUOTE]

This would be great. Along the same lines of this thread, you should maybe just have like a little box on the side that shoes too hot decks, and have the front page be the new decks, because I know how annoying it is to not get feedback on your decks.
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Posted 10 July 2013 at 16:49

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