The MSE Hub: A New Home for Magic Projects

Written by CanterburyEgg

Welcome one, welcome all to the future of Custom Magic!

Well, sort of. But it is 2025 and I do have something exciting to share with everyone that will hopefully make the showcasing process of our art form much more enticing: The MSE Hub. Today I'll talk a bit about the background behind the project, as well as detail the features we've implemented that you can start playing with today.

Building a Better Planesculptors

At some point last year, @crystal_rby previewed one of their Remastered sets in the Custom Set Previews channel on the MSE Discord. When they did so, they asked ChatGPT to create a script that would print the cards of their set in a spoiler gallery webpage, which they then deployed online as an aid in the preview process. I saw this and thought it was awesome, and they graciously shared the code with me so I could build my own.

I had one problem, though. Their spoiler was a big rectangle ordered by set number. It absolutely worked as a gallery, but I really wanted one styled after MythicSpoiler, with cards in color-sorted columns cascading by rarity. I set into the code and put my vision into place, which included a little bit of HTML, a LOT of tinkering with CSS, and probably the single ugliest piece of Python code I'll ever write (which converts raw set data into a list that the spoiler page intereprets). Seriously, if you know code, don't look at "list_to_list.py" for your own sanity. Once I was done committing sins against my degree, I had a working MythicSpoiler-style preview gallery, and one thing much more dangerous--an appetite for a new project to sink all of my free time into.

At the same time, Planesculptors put up a banner on the homepage saying there would be no more updates to the site, and we should begin pursuing a replacement. I realized what I was building could be that replacement, so I began testing my Javascript skills as well. A few weeks later I had an ugly, but functional, search page working, and I figured I was over 50% of the way to something I could share with the community. I'll admit it took a lot of tweaking to get to the end of the road, and the project isn't truly done, but with some brute force and some help from Juno and cajun to make the exporter behave, MSE Hub has officially launched. You can build your own right now!

Features of the Hub

The easiest way to think of your MSE Hub is as a hybrid between MythicSpoiler and Scryfall. On the homepage, you'll see fairly little: a big logo, a search bar, and icons that will link you to preview galleries for each of your sets. (There's also a random card of the day. It honestly took me like an hour to implement, which I'm not proud of.)

Following one of the preview gallery links, you'll see a cascading preview just like on MythicSpoiler! Each set gets one, and they all link to one another. These can be used during preview seasons to show iterative card reveals, or simply as a scrollable source for people to see all your cards.

If you search from the homepage or a preview gallery header, you'll end up on, as I assume you expected, a search results page. This will function (nearly) exactly like Scryfall, so you can enter any sort of search parameters to find specific cards from within your own sets. For instance, if I wanted to find all of my rare blue creatures that drew a card, I could type [r:rare c!u t:creature o:/draw .* card]. If you've used Scryfall before, this should be a very familiar process.

In the header bar, you can find three things, the first of which is a "Sets" page. That will link to a page displaying all of the sets you currently have hosted on your hub. Each of those lines will link to a page specifically for that set with a more configurable display than the spoiler galleries. You can also click "Draft me!" to download a text file used for drafting the set on Draftmancer.

The second option is the deckbuilder, which is self-explanatory. From this page you can build decks using any cards in your set hub, which can then be exported for use elsewhere (like Cockatrice). The final option is a random card, which will just take you to the page for a random card from your hub.

Into the Breach

That's the MSE Hub! If you want your own, follow the instructions at https://github.com/magictheegg/mse-hub/. This was truly an awesome learning experience for me, so I'm thrilled to get to share it with all of you. I can't wait to see all the outstanding sets you've all been working on. Happy trails!