Release 4.9

We have a surprise release today as a follow up to the downtime we had last weekend. For those of you that missed it, here's a quick recap: we rely on Scryfall's bulk download to populate our card definition files. We do this every 24 hours, and for some reason Scryfall's CDN had a single bad file, and this caused our daily update to fail. Unfortunately, this failure resulted in all of our servers failing to function. The temporary solution was to include a static card definition with the deployment, which brought the site back but had a nasty side effect of not being able to update when cards are spoiled. Some of you may have noticed recently spoiled cards in your cubes have changed to 'Invalid Card' - this will now be fixed. We also adjusted our handling of this card update so that if something similar happens again, it won't take down our service.

There are a few major goals I currently have, all of which require some significant infrastructure improvements. The start of these goals is an automated card analytics pipeline, so now we should (barring intermittent failures) have daily data points for card analytics. The next step with this, which will hopefully come soon, is an automated re-training of our card synergy machine learning model. This model is used for the card recommender, draftbot's synergy measurement, and 'most synergistic cards' on card pages. If we can automate this, and keep the model fresh, the recommended additions will stay fresh, and not include recently removed cards. This will also provide the draftbots with synergy measurements for newly spoiled cards. The next major infrastructure improvement I'd like to make is with multiplayer drafting. I know I've talked about this a lot, and even provided tentative deadlines in the past - but the reality is that this is a difficult problem to solve with how our service is current structured. It's eaten up a lot of my time with little results - so the most I can say right now is that it is still a major goal, but we don't have any news right now.

To wrap it up, we have included several critical bug fixes that have been submitted since the last release. Please let us know if you experience any other bugs!

New Features:

• Card analytics now has dedicated infrastructure for daily updates.
• Added '-' to approved characters in cube aliases.
• Significantly improved card search performance.
• Card analytics graph styling tweaked.

Bugfixes:

• Fixed long standing bug where card version selection would contain duplicates.
• Fixed sample hand.
• Fixed a bug where pre flipped cards in a cube would cause issues.
• Fixed pagination bug with firefox.
• Markdown links to same page not opened in new tab.
• Fixed typo in footer.
• Adjusted markdown URL handling to avoid double encoding.