Introducing CubeTutor.com

[Ben Titmarsh]

DISLAIMER: Don't use Internet Explorer to check this out!  Things won't work yet.

 

I've spent a few hours this week working on a new website to help me manage my cube.  There's probably some other tools out there that do something similar, but I like building websites and wanted to create something to suit my specific needs.  It's in early Alpha phase right now, so expect a decent amount of bugs, but I'd like to get some feedback and see if it's something my fellow cube managers could use.  You can see it here

 

http://cubetutor.com

 

So from this screen you can add, delete and replace cards in the cube.  Feel free to butcher my cube to your hearts content (I have a database backup!).  When you click 'Add Card'  you'll see a popup with suggestions on possible replacements.  This compares the card you are adding with the cards in the cube in a number of ways (colour, cost, type, text...) and attempts to intelligently rank replacement suggestions.  You can either replace an existing card, or just add it as a new card.

 

Once you've got a few changes lined up you can add a title and comment to describe the changes.  Next head over to the 'Blog' page here:

 

http://cubetutor.com/cubeblog

 

I wanted to make the whole thing like a blog so you can track changes to a cube a read the authors reasoning (ala cubedrafting.com).  There will of course be commenting functionality in the near future (when I actually get around to making it multi user).  You can then check out the Analysis page to see some graphs (more to come) and load up a sample pack on the Sample Pack page.

 

So I'm looking to get some feedback on the concept.  I have the following features in mind for the near future:

 

- Blog post commenting

- Allow users to submit their own cubes

- EDH support

- Better support for multiple copies of one card (e.g. teachings cube!)

- Pimp rating.  I'm looking to foil/alter out my cube.  It would be cool to manage and keep track of my progress on some kind of PIMPOMETER.

- Lots more analysis, more graphs, Archtype detection.

- Cube upload via CSV

- 'Undo' cube changes

... loads more!

[Simon O'Keeffe]

Ben this is really cool.

As someone who is lazy about keeping track of their cube, and does so in a spreadsheet, this kind of tool seems really useful. The basic interface seems good, I wonder if it would be useful to have a list of suggestions of new cards to add when deleting a card also, or maybe that is too confusing.

A few additional things that I think would be great additions in the future:

* Colour Identity - Different cube owners do this differently, but I have started categorizing cards independently of their actual colour. For example, Azorious Chancery is in my UW section rather than land, Momentary Blink and Tin Street Hooligan could be classified as UW and RG respectively.

* Tags - Something else I started doing in my spreadsheet was adding tags to cards. For example; Spectral Procession is tagged as 'tokens', Farseek as 'ramp', Entomb as 'reanimator', Wrath of God as 'mass removal', Armillary Sphere as 'mana fix'. The idea here is not just archetype classification but also general categories of cards. In theory this should make it much easier for me to ensure that I'm supporting archetypes and required card categories fairly equally.

* Watch List - Sometimes when I look through my cube I see a card and think 'hmm, that hasn't been pulling its wait, might have to think about replacing that', but then when a new set comes out I might have forgotten. The ability to flag cards as potential cuts would be good for people with a crappy memory

* Export - Might be useful to have the ability to export your cube list into a text file, if you wanted to make a backup on Google Docs or somesuch

[Raymond Wat]

Very easy to use.  How long did this take you to do?

As for the set goes, any reason for e.g. M12 is 7E but M13 is M13?

It would be really cool (& probably quite uesful) to be able to click at the top (headings) and rearrange the list by colour(s), set or whatever you like. 

Overall, I like it.

 

ps.  what are those sideboxes?

[Ben Titmarsh]

Hey Simon, glad you like it.  These are all great suggestions..

- A popup for deletions seems really obvious now you mention it, should be able to do this quickly

- Colour Identity should be easy enough... I guess it'll just be a case of finding all of the mana symbols in the cost and text?

- With the tags, presumably you'd want to be able to just define these yourself rather than have them detected?  I worry a little about how to surface this extra info in the UI cleanly.. that table could become a monster.  Maybe I could add show/hide columns.

- Watch list seems like a great idea, I've already forgotten most of the cards I intended to remove after our post M13 games!

- Export will definitely be provided when I get around to doing import.

One thing I noticed is that in the changes you and Ray made, you only made one change at a time.  Is it obvious enough that you can rack up several changes in a group with one comment?  Also need to fix things like replacing a card with the same card.

Simon O'Keeffe said:

Ben this is really cool.

As someone who is lazy about keeping track of their cube, and does so in a spreadsheet, this kind of tool seems really useful. The basic interface seems good, I wonder if it would be useful to have a list of suggestions of new cards to add when deleting a card also, or maybe that is too confusing.

A few additional things that I think would be great additions in the future:

* Colour Identity - Different cube owners do this differently, but I have started categorizing cards independently of their actual colour. For example, Azorious Chancery is in my UW section rather than land, Momentary Blink and Tin Street Hooligan could be classified as UW and RG respectively.

* Tags - Something else I started doing in my spreadsheet was adding tags to cards. For example; Spectral Procession is tagged as 'tokens', Farseek as 'ramp', Entomb as 'reanimator', Wrath of God as 'mass removal', Armillary Sphere as 'mana fix'. The idea here is not just archetype classification but also general categories of cards. In theory this should make it much easier for me to ensure that I'm supporting archetypes and required card categories fairly equally.

* Watch List - Sometimes when I look through my cube I see a card and think 'hmm, that hasn't been pulling its wait, might have to think about replacing that', but then when a new set comes out I might have forgotten. The ability to flag cards as potential cuts would be good for people with a crappy memory

* Export - Might be useful to have the ability to export your cube list into a text file, if you wanted to make a backup on Google Docs or somesuch

[Ben Titmarsh]

Cheers Ray!  Took me about 8-10 hours over a few nights this last week.  I've built so many magic based websites now that I have all of the infrastructure and it's just a case of sticking a UI and some business logic around it.

Not sure what you mean about the 7E, M13 thing?  Is there a card in there with the wrong set?  When adding a card to the cube you can choose the set so it might just be that I added the 7th Edition version of a card that is also in M12?

With the rearranging, you can type in the boxes underneath the headers to filter the cards, for example if you type 'ISD' in the set box, you'll just see Innistrad cards.  Would definitely be useful to be able to sort by mana cost so i'll add this to the list!

I haven't quite decided what to do with the sideboxes yet.. might remove them, might stick some small graphs/data there.  Any suggestions?

Raymond Wat said:

Very easy to use.  How long did this take you to do?

As for the set goes, any reason for e.g. M12 is 7E but M13 is M13?

It would be really cool (& probably quite uesful) to be able to click at the top (headings) and rearrange the list by colour(s), set or whatever you like. 

Overall, I like it.

 

ps.  what are those sideboxes?

[Simon O'Keeffe]

I didn't realise you could make multiple changes.

The colour identity and tags I was imagining they would be manual as different people will sort things differently.

[Thomas David Baker]

Cool stuff Ben.  Totally minor nit that you probably know about is that clicking Add on an empty box gives an error.

I never know how to create UI for manipulating cards.  This seems fairly intuitive.

[Kieran Symington]

This looks great - trying to remember what random cards do on a spreadsheet is a nightmare. This might even inspire me to finally make a real cube.

[Ben Titmarsh]

Cheers Guys! This will be down for a while today. Should be back up and running soon.

[Ben Titmarsh]

EDIT: Fixing a bug, will repost when it's done!

[Ben Titmarsh]

Ok... let's try this again!

I've completed some more work on this and it now allows you guys to sign up and create/manage your own cube!

http://cubetutor.playworks.cloudbees.net/

There's still loads of small issues, like Tom's leaving the Add Card field blank and it blowing up, but for the most part things are working.  I would suggest that you don't put a lot of effort into putting a list together just yet as i'll probably be wiping the database again soon, but I'd really like it if you guys could have a play around again.

The focus of my efforts has been on supporting multiple users.  I like the idea that each person has access to a blog for their cube like this:

http://cubetutor.playworks.cloudbees.net/cubeblog/1
http://cubetutor.playworks.cloudbees.net/cubeblog/3

It should no longer allow you to modify the contents of any cube that you do not own, so I'd be interested to see if anyone can break this (as it was a little tricky to do with the url structure/lightbox/ajax interactions) and modify someone elses cube!

Once I've got multi user support solidified I will work on some new features.

[Simon O'Keeffe]

Hey Ben,

Just added all my green creatures in one go. One thing that quickly becomes really annoying is the overlay after you click Add Card. You have to click Just Add to continue. Might be nice if you could enable an "input" mode via a checkbox or something that suppressed the overlay. Would make it much quicker to enter a lot of cards in one go.

[Ben Titmarsh]

Hey Simon.. yeah I can understand how that would be annoying.  What you mention should be quite easy so I will look at doing it soon.