Discussion Forum

Deck Comparator

if i would upload a deck, when the "Finished Deck" flag is selected, or in some other menu in the user profile allows for Deck comparison, beginning with the deck(s) that has(have) more cards in common, and so on. Right now there are nearly +12000 decks and many simply are repetitions with some single addition.

For heavy magic users that identify a deck, combo, style of play and deck name with just a glimpse, this system may be a little boring, but since the idea of the site is to comment on deck ideas, hence, -learning-, it may be more appropriate for the average user.

The pros and cons (for installing and running) are the following (which may not be necessarily true. I'm not making "educated guesses" but neither am I 100% sure about any of the following):

-Once installed, the database can be flushed completely and start again (or something similar) since so many of the decks are the same concept with some single odd card.( This is also speculation. Although 3 weeks have been enough to see that recently there is a finite number ((don't dare say which)) of deck concepts that just keep repeating themselves over and over).

-Cost. Not only the monetary cost of installation, obviously the process of getting/comparing the information takes a lot out of the bandwidth. Then again maybe PHP has an easier super efficient implementation for communicating with the database.
Posted 15 October 2009 at 05:20

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Hi ebichu,

Thanks for your suggestion. We are looking at revamping parts of the site in the future and deck comparison is something we are going to look at. But rather than it selecting the closest decks, we are going to let the user select. Maybe we could write a simple tool to find the closest decks, I'm not sure at the mo! As you say, there are thousands of decks and the process of finding the closest matches would be more CPU intensive rather than b/w, which could cause a knock-on effect of the efficiency of the site.

We are looking at implementing some changes to the card search page which will enable users to search for cards within decks, which will enable you to find decks using a similar hand selection to yourself.

At the minute, I guess you could choose tournament quality as the deck type and then on the deck search page, if you click the "DeckType" heading, it filters the column. But then it's still a pain to goto page 50+ to get to the Tournament quality decks.... :)

On the database flushing - we can't do that, as many of those decks are indexed within the search engines and that is where a lot of traffic comes from :-)

Also, the site isn't written in PHP, it's using .NET :)

Anymore questions, let me know!

Ian
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Posted 15 October 2009 at 08:20

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