Cube Cobra
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Release 1.4.0
🕑 Added 2025-12-22 18:18:07 +0000 UTCThe last few months I've been chipping away at some pretty major overhauls. Most of these changes don't have major ramifications for user experience on CubeCobra, but significantly improve developer experience for contributing, maintaining, and adding new features. These changes did involve a major data migration. In the past I have accomplished this with downtime, but this time I decided to raise our standards and enable a dual writes strategy during the migration, to allow for a zero downtime, seamless migration. I would say this is mostly successful, but if you are an avid user of CubeCobra you may have noticed some weirdness in the previous two weeks. The data migration is finished now, and I believe I have fixed all the lingering issues. Please let us know if you spot any weird looking data, or perhaps something missing - we still have our old databases, so everything can be recovered. If you're interested in learning more about some of these technical changes, I've included a section at the bottom of this post.
That said, we have some really cool new features to announce today. The one I am most excited about personally is an integration with Lucky Paper's Rotisserie Draft template. If you have an active roto draft, you can set up your cube list to strikethrough cards that have been taken, and annotate them with who picked the card. You can also view lists of every player's picks with full autocard as you are used to on CubeCobra. Try it out on any cube page, under the Display dropdown, select "Setup Rotisserie Draft" to get started.
A common request we have received is a way to edit cards as they are being added to the cube, such as adding a tag, specifying status, or perhaps finish of a particular card. I've been hesitant to add new UI components to support this type of workflow, but I think I have finally figured out a UX that I am happy with. Cards coming into cubes now are clickable links in the pending changelist - clicking them opens up the Card Edit Modal that you are familiar with. This allows for full customization of any card being added to a cube. If there are three or more cards coming in, there is also now an extra link to edit all incoming cards.
Sometime last year I made a backend change that allowed me to roll back cubes to previous versions. We accomplish this by leveraging a feature of the data store for cube card lists - saving the previous ten revisions. I decided to release this as a publicly available feature, so now in the Overview page of a cube you own, you will see a "Restore" option. Restoring a cube will create a changelist history item that will precisely represent the delta between the current version and the version being rolled back to, to maintain an accurate history.
Cube Search, as well as the Packages page, have been completely overhauled. This is related to our data migration, but we've greatly expanded Cube search capabilities. Previously we had a monthly job to update the search index, which led to stale results for queries involving cards. The index is now managed in real time, and we are also able to lift the restriction of combining certain search criteria. Now you can combine search terms however you would like, to look for very specific cube lists. There are a few limitations, such as multi-criteria searches will only check up to 1000 cubes matching the first term before stopping if no matches to all terms are found - so for best performance put the most restrictive criteria first in your query. For the packages page, we've removed the concept of "approved" packages. Now packages are sorted by votes only. The old package search didn't really work at all, leading to that feature not being remotely useful. However, now you can search by a card like card:"steam vents" and see all packages that contain that card. Queries can be combined too, just like the new Cube search.
There are many more small new features and bug fixes, including some that I may have missed in the list below - please forgive me if you contributed a change that isn't mentioned in this blog post, and let me know so I can include it in the next one. These changes have been rolled out gradually over the last few months, so many of these improvements you may have already noticed!
I have had a lot of ups and downs with the site, with some periods feeling like there are an inexcusable amount of bugs on the site - but I think the site is the best it has ever been right now. Many of the behind the scenes changes like the TypeScript migration, and the monorepo refactor have greatly improved our ability to develop the site without introducing new bugs. So what's next? The project I have my eyes set on next is another mostly non-user affecting change, but will greatly improve the quality of our changes with respect to regressions. I am going to overhaul how testing is handled. This is an area of the site that has had a lot of ups and downs, right now we just have simple unit tests that are not representative of end to end user workflows. I want to create a CI/CD code pipeline so that newly merged changes are instantly queued up and deployed, and as a part of this I want to add a new test suite that does target end to end user workflows. When this is complete, we can be more confident new features work the way we expect them to, and introduce fewer bugs. And importantly, it will reduce how much we accidentally break other parts of the site. If you are a JavaScript/TypeScript developer who is good at writing tests and want to contribute to CubeCobra, hop in our Discord Server and we'll get you set up with our dev channels. We have a small group of passionate devs who are always happy to help new folks onboard. If you're inexperienced but looking to learn some new practical web development skills, we have a great supportive community to facilitate that.
New Features
Integration with Lucky Paper's rotisserie draft Google sheet
Added the ability to edit attributes of newly added cards during a pending cube edit, allowing for workflows such as tag-on-create, specify a version, specify a status, etc.
Added cube restore, to roll back the cards in a cube to a previous state
Added self service account deletion
Support custom cards in decklist upload
New filters including is:reserved, game:[arena|paper|mtgo], timeless and premodern as legality filters
Added timeless and premodern to card page legalities
Packages page overhauled, removed concept of "approved" but searching greatly improved
Cube search overhauled, added a help modal to describe full search functionality
Performance optimizations with alternate version fetching
Sort cards based on cube's default sorts in API endpoints
Add sideboard functionality to deck record uploads
Support custom card types in sorting
Added delete workflow for content creator dashboard
Added ability to update color category in bulk in the group modal
Replace with CSV now creates a minimal delta changelist, rather than removing all cards in cube, and adding all cards in import
Added color category filter
Bug Fixes
Drafts of a cube no longer update the cube's timestamp, bumping a cube's position in the "Recently Updated" list
Fixed an issue where if a tag was saved with a color, but no cards have that tag anymore, it would appear in the modal forever
Prevent private cubes from showing up in various cube lists
Prevent blog posts from private cubes from being viewed by anyone other than owner
Prevent blog posts from non-public cubes from being viewed
Update cardwordCount calculation to treat newlines as word separators
Fixed version fetching when a backside of a card is added to a cube
Fixed an issue with CSV export saving non-stable Scryfall image URLs
Technical Changes
Refactored the codebase structure into a monorepo, separating out distinct concerns such as back end, front end, jobs, infrastructure
Completed TypeScript migration, we are now 100% TypeScript
Migrated Dynamo usage to single table for all data models
Expanded CDK to cover all necessary infrastructure for the site
Added daily jobs lambda, a more reliable and maintainable mechanism to run jobs such as fetching new podcast episodes, rotating featured queue, rotating featured P1P1
Massively increased the speed of writing files to disk in update cards
Comments
Pino
Good job like always Dekk~
