Update 3.9

Tonight's update is our first release following our migration to DocumentDB. For those unaware, you may have noticed some severe latency issues the past week; I've been pulling some late nights to iron out all the kinks related to this migration. You should be able to feel an immediate improvement, our average latency has gone from 600ms to around 100ms! In addition to the performance improvements, this migration will help with stability, scaling, and make my job of managing the site much easier. The downside, is that our hosting costs have increased quite a bit. This migration was triggered from a patreon goal of $300, but the net costs were more expensive than I anticipated, and we're currently running about $200 over budget. This isn't the end of the world for me, but I would definitely appreciate any additional support through Patreon. There are two more infrastructure goals, both on a much smaller scale than the database migration. For card analytics, we have a script that gets run manually and infrequently, but I'd like to automate that process such that it runs every day, keeping card analytics fresh and up to date. It would also allow us to create histograms for card trends, which is super neat. The other change has to do with the machine learning portion of the site. Currently, that's being done on a separate server, and everything done is all manual. I'd like to migrate the machine learning to AWS Sagemaker, allowing us to keep the draftbots and recommender up to date at a weekly resolution. The latter change is much more extensive, so I can't commit to a timeline on that yet.

This update also features some changes in how we handle card prices and Elo, before, these values were separated from our card model due to logistical challenges, but Scryfall's new bulk data update allows us to provide prices and Elo with much less latency. All this means to the end user, is a significant performance update in many places around this site. Anyways, let's get into the full changes in this update.

New Features:

• Database has been migrated to DocumentDB.
• Handling of prices and Elo updated for much better performance.
• 'Build for me' option added to deckbuilder. This uses the same algorithm the bots use to build decks.
• Tweaked draftbots based on user feedback.
• Updated deckbuilding algorithm to account for synergy and overall deck strategy better. This is still far from perfect, but an improvement nonetheless.
• Added the ability to show draftbot breakdown during drafting, to see how a draftbot would approach a given pack.
• More sophisticated logging tools - this will help us investigate and fix bugs without the need for detailed bug reports.
• Performance updates to several pages around the site.

Bugfixes:

• Hypergeometric calculator labels are fixed, and some more hint text added.
• Sealed and uploading decklists fixed.
• Totals row in table analysis now show correct percentages.
• Fix power and toughness sort/filter.
• Fixed commenting on decks.
• Fixed several server side crashes, the impact of these issues were not widespread; we caught them with our new logging tools after a single incident each.