serra

Serra is my personal Magic: The Gathering collection tracker.

It began as a holiday project in winter 2021/2022 because I was frustrated of Collection Tracker Websites that are:

• Pain to use
• Want ~$10 a month
• Don't have the features I want

So I started my own Collection Tracker using Golang, MongoDB and Scryfall to have an overview in what cards you own and what value they have.

What Serra does

• Tracks prices
• Calculates statistics
• Query/filter all of your cards
• Shows what cards/sets do best in value development.

What Serra does not

• Does not care about conditions (NM, M, GD...)
• Does not track etched cards. Only normal and foil.

Quickstart

Install Binaries

on macOS you can use

brew install noqqe/tap/serra

on Linux/BSD/Windows you can download binaries from

https://github.com/noqqe/serra/releases

Spin up Database

To run serra, a MongoDB Database is required. The best way is to setup one by yourself. Any way it connects is fine.

You can also use the docker-compose setup included in this Repo:

docker-compose up -d

Configure the Database

Configure serra via Environment variables

export MONGODB_URI='mongodb://root:root@localhost:27017'
export SERRA_CURRENCY=USD # or EUR

After that, you can add a card

./serra add usg/17
./serra update

Start exploring :) (the more cards you add, the more fun it is)

Usage

The overall usage is described in --help text. But below are some examples.

Usage:
  serra [command]

Available Commands:
  add         Add a card to your collection
  card        Search & show cards from your collection
  check       Check if a card is in your collection
  completion  Generate the autocompletion script for the specified shell
  flops       What cards lost most value
  help        Help about any command
  missing     Display missing cards from a set
  remove      Remove a card from your collection
  set         Search & show sets from your collection
  stats       Shows statistics of the collection
  tops        What cards gained most value
  update      Update card values from scryfall
  web         Startup web interface

Flags:
  -h, --help      help for serra
  -v, --version   version for serra

Use "serra [command] --help" for more information about a command.

Add

To add a card to your collection.

Cards

Query all of your cards with filters

Sets

List all your sets

Set

Show details of a single set

Stats

Calculate some stats for all of your cards

Tops

Show what cards/set gained most value

Flops

Show what cards/set lost most value

Update

The update mechanism iterates over each card in your collection and fetches its price. After all cards you own in a set are updated, the set value will update. After all Sets are updated, the whole collection value is updated.

Check

To add a card to your collection.

Adding all those cards, manually?

Yes. While there are serveral OCR/Photo Scanners for mtg cards, I found they are not accurate enough. They guess Editions wrong, they have problems with blue/black cards and so on.

I add my cards the add --interactive feature, since they are sorted by editions anyways.

> ./serra add --interactive --unique --set one
one> 1
1x "Against All Odds" (uncommon, 0.06 USD) added to Collection.
one> 1
Not adding "Against All Odds" (uncommon, 0.06 USD) to Collection because it already exists.
one> 3
1x "Apostle of Invasion" (uncommon, 0.03 USD) added to Collection.

It also supports ranges of cards

dmr> 1-3
1x "Auramancer" (common, 0.02$) added to Collection.
1x "Battle Screech" (uncommon, 0.09$) added to Collection.
1x "Cleric of the Forward Order" (common, 0.01$) added to Collection.

Its basically typing 2-3 digit numbers and hitting enter. I was way faster with this approach then Smartphone scanners.

Upgrade

If you want to upgrade, go to releases Page and download the corresponding release for your platform.

For example:

wget https://github.com/noqqe/serra/releases/download/3.10.0/serra_Darwin_x86_64.tar.gz
tar zxfv serra_Darwin_x86_64.tar.gz
./serra 

Upgrade Notes

2.x.x -> 3.x.x

No extra steps needed. Only new Webinterface and Foil support

1.5.3 -> 2.0.0

In this stage of the development of serra, I was breaking the original database "schema" without migration.

Sadly you need to export the cards from the mongodb and import it again using serra add commands

I wrote a little helper script in python to export all the cards in format set/number and generate some queries

python3 export.py > add_commands.sh

head add_commands.sh
./serra add 5ed/3 -c 1
./serra add mmq/2 -c 1
./serra add p02/4 -c 1
./serra add chr/44 -c 1
./serra add 4ed/291 -c 1
./serra add 4ed/292 -c 1
./serra add mir/2 -c 1
./serra add usg/231 -c 1
./serra add mir/155 -c 1
./serra add pcy/29 -c 2

<do the upgrade of serra (download new binary>

<delete the old mongodb or just empty it completly>

bash add_commands.sh

Development

Install

go build .
./serra

MongoDB Operations

A few commands that do backups and exports of your data inside of the docker container.

Do a database dump

mongodump  -u root -p root --authenticationDatabase admin -d serra -o /backup/

Do a collection export to json

mongoexport  -u root -p root --authenticationDatabase admin -d serra -c cards > /backup/cards.json
mongoexport  -u root -p root --authenticationDatabase admin -d serra -c sets > /backup/sets.json
mongoexport  -u root -p root --authenticationDatabase admin -d serra -c total > /backup/total.json