It has been just over a week since Out Of Cards was officially launched and I wanted to showcase the stuff that has been happening since then.

We've been hard at work getting out new features, fixing bugs, and making sure the site stays fast and reliable. Here's all the stuff we've been working on that you may have missed.

New Card and Deck Listings

When we first opened up shop our listing pages for cards and decks needed serious love. The biggest two issues were that they could not be sorted and the class filters only accepted one class. That's been changed and although they're not perfect yet, things are looking up! Here are some other changes related to cards and decks.

  • Decks now get properly flagged as Standard and Wild.

What is next for cards and decks?

  • Animated Cards - Much of the past week has been working on these.
    • Card pages will display png normal cards and webm golden cards in an update coming soon. 
    • Thanks to some feedback on card images from content creators, we've got the cards using the exact same template/sizes we had on HearthPwn.
  • Card listing gallery mode - Don't see text, see images.
  • Seeing related deck content on deck pages - Super important for discoverability.
  • Revamped homepage deck content - We want to get more decks out there to everyone. Expect a dedicated spot for WILD decks. I want to push Wild more here on OOC than HP ever did.

 

Card Back Gallery

Last night I pushed up a card back gallery. The card back gallery on HearthPwn was one of my biggest annoyances in my time there. There were plenty of times images just never got rendered for it meaning I couldn't update it, and updating it was an absolute chore to begin with. Well, now we've got our own card back renderer and can render them every time a patch hits. That combined with actually storing card back data in a database means we've got easy imports of new data.

Expect it to be updated every patch. It may not happen the exact second a patch drops, but depending on how big a patch is, new card backs (and cards) could be live within an hour.

Oh yeah, it's also worth pointing out that each card back has their own page. You can comment on each card back and in the future we'll let you either rate them or favourite them which will let us rank card backs by their awesomeness.

Patch Listings

One thing I was never a fan of was not having a very easily accessible list of patches for Hearthstone. We pushed out an update that gave us a patch listing page for all the Hearthstone patches ever created and on those pages you will find a list of card changes and their patch notes. Thanks to the team for helping populate the pages with ancient information and although there's still some patch pages that need some love, many do!

Links to patch pages will be added to other spots on the site where we make note of a particular patch.

In the Pipeline: Deck Tracker Plugin & Collections

One of the big features any Hearthstone focused website should have is user collections and the ability to sort decks on the site with that collection information. We've been discussing exactly how we want to implement this on Out Of Cards so it will remain fast, scalable to tens of thousands of users on expansion launches, and pain free to use.

We're confident in our approach and although we do not yet have a timeline to share, work will start on collections soon. We're also looking into creating a plugin for Hearthstone Deck Tracker that will allow you to easily upload your collection and in the future, other Hearthstone game data to the site. Running our own dedicated piece of software is a waste of precious time, there's no point in recreating Hearthstone Deck Tracker, an awesome program that works very well, is stable, and isn't an electron mess.

Of course, manual entry of collections will also be possible.

More Upcoming Features

No exact timeline but I just wanted to let everyone know what we're working on now and what you can expect next as far as big features are concerned.

  • Notifications
  • Site Search
  • Private Messages
  • Card Pack Opener
  • Quest Trading System
  • Site Supporter Ranks and Flair

It's also now a great moment to remind you that if you encounter and bugs, they should be reported on our Bug Report and Support forum. If you have a ideas for new site stuff, we have a dedicated Feedback and Ideas forum as well.

Giveaway Winners

We've had a couple of giveaways since launch and we never posted names up in a news post.

Both winners have been contacted and Valord has already received their Rise of Shadows packs.

We've got a June giveaway going on right now which you may want to get yourself entered in. The prize is 40 Rise of Shadows packs, or 40 packs from an expansion of your choice.

Supporting Out Of Cards

Thanks to the community for believing in us and the support we've seen already. Your support is helping us keep the site online which is super awesome and we're looking forward to continuing our ad-free experience for everyone. If you are able to, here are all the ways you can support the site.