Updates

Our wintery event returns! 

The event runs from December 13, 2023 until January 31, 2024.

Live Now

• Snowflakes earned randomly while browsing the website.
• Snowball fight!
• New wintery shop goodies
  • Older items have had their prices increased to make them slightly more difficult to obtain from previous years.
• New premium shop goodies
• New gold shop goodies
  • This is just a start, featuring fresh avatar borders.

Live Soon

• Regular festive content drops throughout the event.
• New ways to explore the site through revamped scavenger hunts.

Christmas Day

• Presents begin and run through to New Years

January

• Super Secret

General

• Re-enabled account registration.

Known Issues

• The account registration page says registrations are disabled. This is incorrect.

Hearthstone

• Hearthstone card data no longer tries to reload on non-deckbuilder and non-collection pages.
  • Dev Note: A previous site update caused card data to be stored local to users to improve the speed of certain tasks on the site. This was a net-positive for many users with a few exceptions: slowdowns on some devices and connections throughout the day as fresh data was pushed onto clients and folks using locked-down firefox installs would have issues loading the card data at all. The result of this is that the deckbuilder takes additional time to load than it has in recent times but it should work for all users in all scenarios.
• Fixed an issue where the Festival of Legends icon was failing to load for some users.

General

• Removed Snow 3 from the navigation.
  • Dev Note: The event has only been over for 3 months.

Additions & Changes

General

• Redeployed all our static assets.
  • This was done to make sure that we don't have any old assets cached anywhere.
  • Members may experience slightly longer load times when they first visit pages due to static assets needing to be cached locally, though this is not likely to be disruptive to the end-user experience.

Hearthstone

• Added Death Knight Icons across the site.
• Added March of the Lich King Icons across the site.
• Updated Navigation for new expansion.
• Expansion pages will no longer display classes if no cards have been revealed for that class.
  • The exception to this new rule is if we have "placeholder cards" which we haven't used in a while due to significant bulk early in a reveal season that doesn't add much to the guides themselves.

Bug Fixes

General

• Fixed an issue where some RSS feeds on the site were returning 500 errors.
• Our Discord bot is back up and running and is correctly giving out roles again.

Hearthstone

• Fixed an issue with card reveal notifications not going out on Discord.
  • There was a catch-up period where old notifications went out late. Shouldn't happen again.

This is an announcement to let everyone know that Out of Cards will be down on Halloween night at 11 PM Eastern. Spooky!

We're doing a major migration to new hardware to help improve site performance and make way for a large site update. This will also give us more room to grow going forward as our previous solution has been at its limits for a while now.

Estimated downtime is less than an hour, but no matter how many tests you do, real-world may take longer.

During our downtime, all services operated on Out of Cards will not be available.

Additions & Changes

General

• Moved articles to new URL paths.
  • There was a lot of work done to ensure all our old links would forward to the correct location, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone discovered a one-off issue here or there.
  • All our articles are now classified under "news" on the site now, instead of their game-specific paths.
  • Keeping things game-specific ended up being a bad design decision.
• Article themes are now gone.
  • This has been this way for a bit now with our article header overhauls, but now we're no longer serving theme information at all with our articles. This doesn't really matter for 99.9% of people.
• Added new cache functionality to our BBCode to provide speed improvements.
  • We're currently only live with this for Hearthstone as a "live beta test".
  • Other BBCodes will move over to our new internal structure in the future.

Mercenaries

• Added a new party tag for "Event".

Bug Fixes

General

• Fixed an issue where logged-out users were encountering a server error when trying to create a new thread on the forums.
• Removed references to RSS feeds in places where we don't support RSS feeds.

Hearthstone

• Fixed an issue where multiclass cards would not always appear in the deckbuilder.

Magic the Gathering

• Fixed an issue where some of our cards didn't have images.

Known Issues

• This morning we had an issue with comments on the site.
  • As of right now, this issue has been resolved though some content may take some additional time to uncache.
• FIXED Hearthstone Subportals (Duels, Mercs, Battlegrounds, Fan Creations) are currently erroring.
• Firefox users who have private browsing permanently enabled cannot use the Hearthstone deckbuilder.
  • Due to how we load data for the deckbuilder, Firefox's private browsing mode doesn't let you use IndexedDB.
  • There is an incredibly tiny percentage of people that might have this enabled. I don't currently plan to offer a workaround.
  • Firefox has had an open issue to support it for 10 years now, all the other browsers support it in their private browsing modes by using an in-memory version that doesn't persist data to disk, losing the data on exit.

Been a while since we've posted a set of update notes, though we haven't done anything super crazy for a while so it hasn't really been needed. I figured there may be some questions also I'm looking for targeted feedback so this thread will hopefully help with that.

Additions & Changes

General

• New Out of Cards Logo!
• Removed some advertisement slots.
  • I needed to test some new slots recently to see performance and have ultimately decided to remove our left side rail. The site felt a little too "boxed in" with it and overall, it wasn't a major change in revenue.
  • Mobile users will no longer see the static header advertisement.
  • The homepage no longer displays an advertisement at the top of the sidebar. (This has effectively been replaced by the right siderail.
    
    • There is a chance that the top sidebar ad gets removed across the site, I'll be paying attention to performance metrics over the coming weeks to make an informed decision.
• Video ads are now served by a new provider.
  • If you notice anything funky compared to before, please let us know.
• The homepage no longer displays deck lists.
  • This is one of the first steps we're taking to clean up the homepage.
  • I know this is going to be controversial, but the homepage is not the primary way our community members are clicking into decks.
    • The game portal pages are more relevant for deck lists.
  • Not all our users care about all the games we have coverage for and because of this, decks takes up a lot of scrolling space on the homepage.
  • Our homepage should be more of a portal into our different titles that are covered, and this will become more apparent in future site updates.
• Portal links have been removed site-wide.
  • This may sound counter-productive to our overall goal with sending people towards portals, which they are already going, but the next site update will be bringing back a portal switcher. It will instead be found in a new menu at the very top of the site, and not be a part of our navigation.

Hearthstone

• Deckbuilder Changes
  • How we load and organize card data in the deckbuilder has changed.
    • Please report any issues you find with the deckbuilder so they can be investigated.
  • Everything should be much quicker and subsequent uses of the deckbuilder are much faster.
• Collection Manager Changes
  • How we load and organize card data in the collection manager has changed.
    • Please report any issues you find with the collection manager so they can be investigated.

Bug Fixes

General

• RSS feeds have been fixed for all games.

Hearthstone

• All collectible cards now properly appear in the deckbuilder.
  • There was an issue during the Throne of the Tides mini-set update that prevented us from showing certain cards.
  • Our redeveloped internals make this a non-issue going forward.

Known Issues

General

• If you have ads disabled on the site due to having a Premium membership, the top of the site looks a little out of place with its wider header.
  • A solution will be implemented, however, if you are using ad-block you will be stuck with the wide header. Surprise, we don't support blocking our ads, which feed our content creators =)

Hearthstone

• Deckbuilder shows all Duels heroes, powers, and treasures regardless of class.
  • This will be "fixed" in a larger deckbuilder update.
  • Our intention is to allow Duels players to correctly create decks that are not tied to a single class.
  • We've still got some UI work to do before this will be finalized, but this is temporary measure to let it work.
  • We still need to flag Duels Heroes so we know which powers and treasures they work with, which is why we just dump them all out at you instead of filtering.
• Some Duels content is not appearing in the deckbuilder.
  • We're a little behind on flagged data. This won't require a new site update to fix, we just need to go through and get our data up to date.

Bugfixes

General

• Comments
  • Fixed cache issue which would sometimes leave "in reply to" under comments.
  • [STAFF] Fixed issues with unspamming comments.
  • [STAFF] Fixed issues with undeleting comments.

Hearthstone

• Deckbuilder
  • Fixed issue with the search field not working.
    • This was caused by an issue with our importers and spell schools.
    • Underlying importer issue is fixed and we also handle additional errors in the deckbuilder on the front-end now.

Not pushing anything else out today so here's our changelog.

A special thanks NerdyMcNerd for pointing out I've been putting 2020 in the titles. Gotta love a fantastic copy-paste job!

Additions & Changes

General

• Improved loading of our custom Fonts for a small speed increase.
• Added additional lazyloading across the site.
  • Chrome users, this doesn't help you as much as Firefox because of how ridiculous Google is with considering how far "the fold" is. Morons.
• Removed unused JavaScript.

Hearthstone

• Decks
  • Deck pages now display a fourth button in the sidebar to allow you to copy a deck's image.
    • Please note that when you first save a deck this will not display.
    • Please note that when you update a deck, the new image will not immediately be available.
    • Images are queued up for processing after your deck has been saved. We can't render them during the web request - that isn't a good idea!
    • If no one else is creating decks, your image is usually created with 15 seconds of your deck being saved.

Bugfixes

General

• Forums
  • Threads will now correctly update again when community members reply to them.

Today's update includes a large upgrade to our underlying site framework so patch notes are thin as most of the work is backend related.

New Features

Hearthstone

• Decks
  • Changing a deck's cards now saves a changelog and displays it inside of a spoiler on the deck details page.
    • This is NOT retroactive, only deck changes after the update will add this.
    • This tech will be applied to other game decks on the site in the near future.

Additions & Changes 

Magic

• Updated symbols for Mana and Sets.

Bug Fixes

General

• Fixed an issue where we were spamming Twitter.
• Forbidden pages on the site now indicate they are Forbidden in the page's title.
• Forums
  • Threads are correctly sorting again by most recently updated first.

Hearthstone

• Decks
  • Dust calculation JS now properly excludes dust costs for free cards.

Happy Easter!

Additions & Changes

General

• Pagination
  • Added First and Last pages to our base-level paginator.
    • This was previously only a feature on our table listings.
    • You will only see skips to first and last if you are more than 5 page numbers away from them.

Runeterra

• Importer
  • Updated card database for 2.5.0
    • This happened on Friday and was accidentally delayed due to incorrectly importing older patch data.

Hearthstone

• Decks
  • Generated deck list thumbnails are now JPEGs to save bandwidth (and storage!)
  • API
    • is_free bool added to expansions API.

Bugfixes

General

• Twitter Recaps
  • Fixed an issue where we were not correctly associating posts with their parent statuses in some scenarios.
  • Fixed a rare crash that could occur, preventing us from getting some conversation data.
• Profile Links
  • Fixed an issue where the site would error if we passed a None value to our profile link generator.
    • This fixes some very old forum problems that could only be seen if you went back far.
• Avatars
  • Pins no longer display in places where we don't want to see them.

Hearthstone

• Decks
  • Fixed an issue where generated deck list thumbnails would not contain all cards.
  • Dust calculations no longer count core cards as having dust costs.
    • We're flagging expansions now based on being "free" or not so we won't have to run a code update in the future when sets change up.
    • All decks have had their dust calculations redone on the site.
• Collection
  • JSON Importer no longer errors on the site.
  • Web page for collection management now says "My Hearthstone Collection"

Known Issues

General

• Avatars
  • Cache takes longer than normal to break when you change your avatar image.

Additions & Changes

Hearthstone

• Deckbuilder
  • Removed the "Only Wild" option because of lack of necessity.
  • Modes filter now filters cards properly in all cases using new tech.
  • Added the ability to filter cards by spell schools.
    • This comes in the form of a dropdown AND the "search" text field.
    • Dev Note: The filters are a bit crazy on the deckbuilder and I hope we can make it nicer.
• Decks
  • Archetypes below a deck's title are now linked to the deck listing for that archetype.
• Expansions
  • New internal method for flagging game modes.
    • This is going to help us so much going forward since expansions get flagged for every mode that exists now.

Bug Fixes

Hearthstone

• Homepage Deck Widgets
  • Fixed an issue where modes selection was not working due to internal changes.
• Deckbuilder
  • Fixed an issue when editing a deck's cards where it would tell you a tag was not selected even though one already was.
  • Duplicate cards will no longer display for Core Set cards.
  • Fixed an issue where Duels info would not remove itself after switching from Duels to another mode.
• Decks
  • Removed type from the deck listing columns because we are no longer using it.
• (NEW) Cards
  • Made changes behind-the-scenes to improve API response time on cards endpoint to improve the deckbuilder loading times.

(NEW) Site

• Changed background color to prevent white flashes when bg image is loading.

I hope everyone is enjoying Forged in the Barrens so far! Pushed something exciting so I decided to put up a changelog.

I know people love to see these and I regret not posting them more frequently. A lot of the stuff that ends up being deployed is boring stuff that isn't user-facing though so it would be weird to post about it :P

New Features

Hearthstone

• Deck list images!
  • Decks now generate images when they get created (or shortly after based on site load).
  • These images display in embeds when linking to decks on Discord, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
  • The image will be recreated when your deck is saved with new cards.
  • TODO: Let you grab these images easily on the deck pages themselves for sharing easily.

Bug Fixes

General

• Fixed an issue where comments would remain cached after editing. The cache now correctly clears on save.

Hearthstone

• Classic icon uses Hearthstone's new classic set icon instead of the old one.

Known Issues

Hearthstone

• Deckbuilder is showing some invalid cards for standard.
  • We have a long-term fix for this that should be out on Wednesday and will make dealing with formats much easier for us.

Just putting up a thread here to keep track of archetypes we're adding to the site.

If you would like to suggest an archetype addition, you can leave a comment here. If you do that though, please provide us with a deck to look at!

Archetypes Added

• Hero Power Mage (Wildfire, Reckless, Mordresh, etc.)
• Push Ups Warrior (Handbuff)
• Watch Post Druid
• Watch Post Rogue
• Watch Post Mage
• Watch Post Priest
• Burn Warlock (Neeru, Altar of Fire)

Hey all,

Bringing in another incident report, yeah! we had a couple hours of downtime this morning due to issues with our hosting provider.

What makes this scary was when I went to sleep the night before knowing that OVH's SBG-2 data center burned down to the ground. Not kidding, it caught on fire and is a total heap of trash now. It also took out a part of SBG-1. SBG-3 and SBG-4 which are the other two parts of that deployment were taken offline and OVH is currently working on getting what is left of SBG-1 and 3+4 back online over the next 9 days.

Now, this fire didn't occur where we host Out of Cards so that wasn't an issue. But when your host is OVH and you wake up to a dead server, what do you think my first thought was?

Event Log

All times in Eastern.

7:52 AM - Alarms sound that the site is offline.

7:52 AM - Automated notification of a hardware fault on our server from our data center.

10:31 AM - Site is back online.

What Happened

It turns out your server goes offline when they decided to re-cable all the gear! 

OVH went through and replaced "a large number of power supply cables" due to a potential problem with their insulation. The maintenance required was critical and also took out networking for some time on the rack our hardware is in which extended our downtime.

In an ideal situation, we'd have better failover protocols and hardware in place if something were to happen at our primary data center. Unfortunately, it isn't justifiable at this point in time to have that with the costs involved. We keep regular multi-location backups so that we can be up and running somewhere else if disaster strikes within a fairly short time frame, having containerized infrastructure helps quite a bit with the agility here, but there will always be some downtime if that happens. We lost some ad revenue and I know it was an inconvenience for people trying to access the site. I think we'll all live though!

Today's downtime gave us an opportunity to confirm our disaster recovery situation and that our backups work properly. If you were to learn something from this situation its that you shouldn't wait until a potential disaster strikes to make sure you have stuff in working order. Your backups are only good if they actually work!

I feel bad for everyone who lost critical information in the fires today. Sometimes it isn't even the fault of developers or the IT department for having poor backup practices. Sometimes your CEO just doesn't think it is necessary to spend money on a backup solution elsewhere to keep your data synced to at least one outside source. It's always fun when that same person who said it wasn't needed starts screaming and asking why there aren't backups in place when something really goes wrong and puts the blame back on them. We call those people assholes.

I don't recommend torching your data center as a method to wake up though.

Something about how we don't release patch notes enough. Yup, that's what this line should be. Anyway, onto it!

New Features

Hearthstone

• Navigation Revamp!
  • Cards now has a mega menu instead of the original list.
    • This element now is clearly defined into 3 different areas - the current year, special, and more.
    • This should improve the cleanliness of the interface!
  • Arena has been removed in favor of Modes.
    • Hearthstone is evolving and so are we!
    • Easier access to Arena, Battlegrounds, Duels, and upcoming Mercenaries content.
    • Portals are still in the works for these modes, so things are a bit blank for now.
  • Expansions
    • Added link to Core 2021
    • Year of the Phoenix remains until we get closer to Year of the Gryphon.
• Deckbuilder Changes (Some of these have been out for a few days)
  • Support for Year of the Gryphon
    • You can now select a game format called "Year of the Gryphon" which enables the new Core set.
    • A banner displays on the deckbuilder to make it clearer that you need to set that game format to make new decks.
  • Added set icons to cards in your deck.
  • Added card background images to cards in your deck.
    • We are aware that images are missing for some Core Set cards.
    • We get our images from Blizzard and they are not always available right away.
• Card BBCode Updates
  • You can now specify a "set" attribute within card and cardimg bbcodes.
  • Setting the value of set to "core 2021" will ensure you are linking to or embedding the correct card.
  • Example: [card set="core 2021"]Battlefiend[/card]

Runeterrra

• Deckbuilder
  • Added Landmarks to calculations so you can see a more accurate breakdown of your deck.
  • You can now sort cards in the list by their type (Champion, Follower, Spell, Landmark)

Bug Fixes

General

• Premium users on mobile will no longer see a large space near the top of the site under the "promotional slots".

Hearthstone

• Decks now have correct dust cost calculations for Core 2021 cards.
• Deckbuilder now has correct dust cost calculations for Core 2021 cards.

Known Issues

Hearthstone

• Collections are not automatically filled with Core 2021 cards.
  • You can manually make this adjustment now or wait until they are added to the game and it syncs via the HSDT plugin.
• Fixed an issue where Demon Hunter Initiate still displayed in deckbuilder when selecting Year of the Gryphon.

Mythgard

• Deckbuilder link does not work.
• Decks link does not work.

We're introducing a new cosmetic today called Pins! This is the first part of how pins will be used on the site.

New Features

Pins!

• Pins are a new collectible cosmetic on the site.
  • The first round of these are available through the Snowpocalypse event in our shop.
• A pin can be attached to your avatar border's bottom left corner.
• Pins will only display on Desktop for now. Mobile devices display much smaller avatars and will be supported in the future in a different way.
• The Future:
  • We're planning on allowing you to move pins to any position over your avatar area and to resize them.
  • We'll allow you to use pins to respond to comments.

Bug Fixes

Hearthstone

• Fixed an error with collection imports through Hearthstone Deck Tracker plugin.
  • You will not need to update your plugin, this was a server-side issue.

Including some additions from previous days. Its all a blend because card reveal season is sooo much fun!

New Features

Runeterra

• Added site support for Labs.
  • We still need to backfill a bunch of data. Patience, please!

Changes

General

• Member page style updated on avatar area.
• Oozefest logo has been removed.
• Oozefest items in the shop are no longer available.

Hearthstone

• Deck detail pages have upgraded! The lists now show the same art that they do in-game.
• Site homepage now displays Card Discussion separate from Forum Discussion during reveal season.
• Card Design Competition transparency reports now display 5 decimal places for finalist scores.
• Deck guides interface now warns about special rules for guides.

Mythgard

• Game developers present on the forums will now have a "Rhino Games" title and Teal name along with the Rhino Games icon.
• Added shortcut to portals.

Runeterra

• Site updated with Patch 1.14 data.
• Deck guides interface now warns about special rules for guides.

Bug Fixes

Hearthstone

• Fixed CSS for Demon Hunter headers on deck detail pages (was broken resulting in Druid)
• Games navigation no longer references Scholomance when you are on non-Hearthstone pages.

Making a post here for visibility.

We were supposed to have our Halloween event go live earlier today, as teased via "Out of Cards Surprise" on the October card back post for Hearthstone. We're behind on schedule due to the craze that was this past week (sup Hearthstone announcements and Duels deckbuilder) so I just wanted to let everyone know that it is delayed until tomorrow.

I don't have the exact time when it will go live tomorrow, but I can tell you that we'll be extending the availability of the Halloween event a couple of days to make sure we have at least a full week for it. It doesn't line up perfectly with Halloween being the final day, but we'll just say we're also celebrating Day of the Dead alongside it =D

I think people will like what we've got in store. It's a jump up from our previous site events and will also be the basis for our Holiday event in December. Super stoked!