In celebration of its remarkable 10-year journey, EchoMTG has unveiled a new website that promises to redefine the user experience. This monumental project, initiated in January 2022, has seen a year and a half of diligent work, resulting in an impressive 46,477 lines of code—an endeavor equivalent to writing 1,859 pages of a novel. Special thanks are extended to the EchoMTG Discord community, whose unwavering support and motivation were instrumental in this transformation. The new website boasts numerous enhancements, including expanded functionality, dynamic user dashboards, and even the addition of other card games, such as Disney Lorcana. With an exciting roadmap ahead and a commitment to smooth functionality, EchoMTG's new website marks a milestone in its mythical history.

Kicking it off and Special Thanks

The goal of this website overhaul was to deliver an experience that was 10x better then the current website, and to build a platform which the EchoMTG community can contribute to and grow on for the years to come. This Project started on Jan 2022 with Teeg's Pledge commit 3999af9, which is a year and the half in the making. 46,477 lines of code can be seen on this pull request update, which is the is equivalent to writing 1,859 pages of a novel. For context the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Hobbit combined are ~1,495 pages of text. In short, this was quite the undertaking as an after-hours side project.

I have a very special thanks to the EchoMTG Discord community. It was the community who motivated me to make this new system, and I'm grateful for them. Special thanks to William @roker for being my muse, holding down the fort in times of my absence, and being there to help people with missing cards, support, and using the import tool. Tyson @pratfall who is a database BEAST who almost single-handedly keeps Echo's data up-to-date! The @wiki-team who has guided me with ideas, feedback, and community issues with special shout out to @opusnut and @squillis. The beta website feedback team @pug (you can drive me nuts but I truly appreciate you), @OldManMagic, @CriticalError, @MaxDes, and the many others involved I failed to mention! Thank you thank you thank you!!!

New Website Screenshots

Sets and Expansions

New filters, quick adding, expandable rows with list and inventory controls.
Sets and Expansions

Card Page

New list and inventory management.
Card Page

Inventory / Collection App

Expanded functionality, expandable rows, list control, bulk edited of types, note taking, add to earnings update.
Inventory and Collection App

Sealed App

Expanded table feature, add to sealed area.
Sealed App

Types Pages

100+ Pages made specially to highlight cards types
type pages

List / Deck App

A straight port from the legacy website, this area will be getting a large improvement coming up.
Lists and decks app

Dashboard

Dynamic user dashboard that changes based on collection size and subscription level.
User Dashboard

Trades

New application that have a public shareable link to share your trades. Add Earnings earning features, and management buttons.
Trades App

Statistics

Improved statistics app for mythic subscribers, with more to come.

Expanded Card Games: Disney Lorcana

No longer just magic, our first addition is Disney Lorcana, with plans for Flesh and Blood and others based on demand.
Disney Lorcana

New API Documentaiton

Interactive, searchable, JSON supported, API documentation
image

Notable New Features

Notable new features are trades, new card games, types pages, and dozens of user experience upgrades.

  • All Tables are supercharged, they can be filtered, searched, and rows can be expanded
  • Table rows have an expanded inspector to reveal inline graphs, deck locations, and inventory management.
  • Global search now has an press "enter" option to quick add to inventory
  • Inventory states sync and update everywhere when cards are added
  • Set pages live live update when adding cards
  • Disney Lorcana card game added added
  • Trades expanded beyond 100 trades
  • Trades are searchable, filterable, more trade features coming
  • Types pages for all magic types
  • Dynamic group pages for power9, reserve list, and others, with dynamic filtering
  • Light/Dark Mode User Options
  • Improved billing, account management pages
  • New interactive API documentation

Roadmap

Roadmap will be monitored on Github: https://github.com/orgs/EchoMTG/projects/4 and will be driven by community, teeg's ideas, and voting on issues (bugs, feature, and requests) submitted to the public website repository: https://github.com/EchoMTG/website/issues

Major Roadmap Updates to Come

Before making any new features, my goal is to knock out reported bugs and make the new web experience smooth first. When that is complete, the list of next new features are so:

  • @pratfall's set completion collection % ideas
  • Trade Inquiries that send an email, trade picks, and calculation to the user with open trades
  • BIN tracking for inventory to declare and identify locations
  • List / Decks Updates to support different styles of deck lists
  • Streamer features

The Goals of the Website Revamp

This is a list of ideals I wanted to achieve when rebuilding the old website.

  • Decoupled PHP inline logic views
  • Community Open Source (Github)
  • Easy to use Code (Vue)
  • Fast to work UI Framework (Buefy)
  • Dynamic Server (Nuxt)
  • Fully API Driven (Separate backend from frontend)
  • Auto deploys on Github PRs with elastic scale (GCP Cloud Run)
  • Independent scalable databases (GCP SQL8)
  • Independent memory store for caching (Redis)

History of EchoMTG

EchoMTG.com was purchased on May 14th, 2014, it was bought to replace the original app name EchoMage (bought on April 28th, 2012), which MARO told me not to use being a copyright infringement. EchoMage started as price listing site to help me with online and in-store trading. I started by scrapping website like StarCityGames and Card Kingdom for prices. After StarCityGames blocked my price reader, TCGplayer awarded me partner API access to build out the original iPhone iOS app. After the iOS app launched, the website gained, local storage features to support tracking favorites. This quickly blossomed into a login user system to store and manage favorites, which was launched by awarding the first 150 users signups with free lifetime account, this post was made on Reddit. Since it grew to over 40,000 user managing close to $1 Billion dollars in combined user collections.

Legacy Website

The original “legacy” website is a custom framework built on PHP, MySQL, and HTML/Javascript/CSS. It was all built on a single dedicated server using apache. It was refactored to use nginx, then the database was split off to handle larger consumer load in 2018. Around that time, Vue, a javascript framework, was introduced to replace the antiquated JQuery javascript framework. It has a development and production environment, and was all edited on the cloud.

The legacy site will remain available and be backwards compatible for at least 6 months: https://legacy.echomtg.com

Wrapping it Up

In conclusion, the EchoMTG's 10-year anniversary marks not only a significant milestone but also a testament to dedication, innovation, and community support. With the launch of the new website, the stage has been set for future with more community involvement and exciting updates. Here's to the next decade of card collections tools in the cloud!

Thank you all and cheers!
—Teeg