Cards on the Table #2

Cards on the Table #2

Round two. A month on from the first one, and there's a fair bit to talk about.

Three Months In

Some numbers from the database:

Roughly doubled across the board in a month. Retention is the bit that's stuck out. People who play one game tend to play another, and a lot of them keep coming back. The Discord has gotten properly chatty too.

Draft (Beta)

Draft is now live for everyone as a beta format. Pick a set, invite some friends or open it up, and the table runs a real pack-by-pack draft. When picks are done you drop into a deckbuilder, and the game starts as soon as everyone's submitted.

Sets are configured when you create the table. We filter to draftable sets and pull pack contents from Scryfall, so it stays current as new sets land.

Playgroups

Playgroups are invite-only groups for your regular pod. Your weekly LGS crew, your Discord friends, whoever you play with. Each group gets:

• A members list and invites.
• Its own table visibility option, so you can spin up a private table just for the group.
• A leaderboard scoped to games played within the group.
• Scheduled tables with countdowns and reminder notifications.

Playgroups and scheduled tables are Supporter perks. They're the sort of feature that needs proper infrastructure to keep healthy, and gating them helps us keep the lights on without putting ads in front of anyone.

Companion App

The phone app got a lot of love this month.

• Booster pack scanner. Point your camera at a card and on-device OCR identifies it (ML Kit on Android, Vision on iOS). Handles double-faced cards and tells you whether it matched the exact print.
• Collection tab. Track what you own, with live USD to EUR conversion on pricing.
• Random commander picker in the create-deck modal, with hover preview and click-to-flip for double-faced commanders.
• Format-legal and identity filters in card search, so you stop accidentally adding cards that aren't legal in your deck.

In-Game Polish

A pile of smaller things that add up:

• Whisper chat. DM a specific player from in-game chat, with a broadcast notice so the table knows a whisper happened.
• Per-deck private notes. A place for sideboard reminders, mulligan plans, whatever. Visible only to you.
• Graveyard and exile awareness. Opponents get prompted before touching your zones, and you get notified when they do. Stops the "hey, did you just look at my graveyard?" moment.
• Commander damage breakdown. Hover any player's shield badge to see who's done what to them.
• Turn advance on elimination. Finally fixed for life loss, poison, and commander damage.
• Brackets in Lobby now show estimated deck bracket on seats and in the deck picker, so you can spot pod mismatches before the game starts.

Behind the Scenes

Less visible, but worth a mention. We moved both the frontend to Cloudflare Workers and the API and database to an alternate hosting provider: a redundant cluster running Docker Swarm. Same site, same app, faster in most places, and a meaningfully cheaper hosting bill, which gets us closer to the site covering its own costs (but not quite there yet).

Merch: DROP 01 is Live

We mentioned playmats last time. DROP 01 is now live at shop.tablecommander.com. Limited run. We tried to keep mat cost down to make up for various costly international shipping costs which are annoying. The desire was to try and help fund TC going forward with items you will use and love.

Coming Up

• More draft sets as the format settles in. We're keeping an eye on what people actually pick up.
• Playgroup-native features: group chat, recurring schedules, season stats.
• More companion app work. Collection valuation, deck-from-collection building, more scanner image/sets refinement.

Back Us

Same ask as last time, because nothing's changed about the maths. Servers, database, CDN, app store fees, it all costs money, and we're still covering it ourselves. We're not going anywhere, but supporter contributions are the difference between this being a side project and something we can put serious time into.

If you can help out, and grab playgroups, scheduling, deck folders, and the rest of the perks while you're at it, head over to our Patreon or buy a mat within the next 7 days at shop.tablecommander.com.

Keep playing!