Cards Archive Download

{The Full Story}

This first part might not affect you directly, but it might mean that the archive gets uploaded quicker than usual. Maybe. Probably not. Overall, I just want to share my happiness. I’ll try to fill this up with a few fun facts and tidbits so it’s a more interesting read.

1. First off, I feel like I should explain how I usually put the archive together versus how I'll be doing it from now on so that my happiness will make that much more sense. At the risk of creating boredom, please bear with me:

a. As the cards are being released during the month, I put the images in a folder labeled “NewWave Editor” which breaks down organization down to the rarity of the cards, just to make searching for a specific one a bit easier.



b. The day before the upload, a separate folder gets created labeled “NewWave Archive PNG” that basically follows the same folder structure as the “NewWave Editor”, only without the rarity subfolders (as to somewhat emulate how h2foxo set up his archives). All the cards from the Editor then get manually put into their respective folders in the Archive, repeated ad nauseam until all seventy-eight characters are done. Repeat with the images in the frameless artwork folder, and you practically have a half-complete archive.

And all of that will usually take around an hour and a half to do, breaks included. But then I’m not done yet, because there’s one problem: ALL the cards are PNG files. Hence the folder name, “NewWave Archive PNG”. Which is great if you love quality, but it’s a pretty bad situation if you want to upload it. After all, there’s a huge difference between uploading a 4GB folder full of PNG files and uploading (as of now) a 2.2GB folder full of JPG files. Not only will the upload times be monstrous on my end, but it’s not exactly a friendly folder size. Onto the next step!

c. Folder-by-folder (once again), all of the cards get put into an image batch processor that converts all of the cards into JPG files, thereby significantly lowering the memory they take up. I’m very particular with image quality, so I made sure to have the settings on the processor set so that the visual differences between the PNG files and the JPG files are practically invisible unless you actively try to look for the distinction (which even then, you’ll probably have a hard time doing so). Here’s an image comparison using one of the highest quality PNG cards I could find as an example:

Before Conversion:



After Conversion:



But the batch processor I use isn’t perfect. Occasionally it’ll throw errors whenever it processes a card that it doesn’t seem to like for whatever reason. In that case, I have to go ahead and convert that card manually, which takes up time when it repeatedly happens.

And that concludes the process I go through when I want to upload the archive. It’s tiresome, but I figure that doing most of the work manually is a good way to ensure all the cards are up to my personal standard of quality when they get converted. Fun fact: if you look at the “Date modified” section of each folder in the previous archive, you can see how long it took for me to put it all together during this final step. …as well as when I just got bored with the whole process and had to take a few breaks. But now here comes the happy and fun part where I take that entire process and shorten it considerably. Here’s another fun fact: The main reason I named each card the way they are now (ex. “Hikage_87, Hikage_88”, etc.) is for use in future projects, one of them being writing a program someday that’ll iterate through each card and automate the entire organization process for me.

Do you know what day it is? It is that day.

I finally got my act together and wrote a batch file that does the organization for me, and now the process goes a little something like this:

a. Run the batch file
b. Go eat a sandwich
c. Come back and upload

So as of now, getting the archive together is completely automated and takes a little under forty-five minutes. I performed a few test runs using this method to make sure the quality of the images are similar to the ones of the previous updates, and I can barely notice a difference. With that being said, the batch file does run through a new batch processor I’m using, and it seems that to keep up with the quality of the original images, the archive got a tad bit bigger. I would be concerned normally, but I did add more high-quality cards to it over the past month, so that could partially be the cause. I'm trying to keep it as small as possible without having major quality dips, so hopefully this isn't too much.

A few more things I want to mention before I move on:

a. At this point, I can pretty much compile the archive together whenever I want to without added stress. So if any of you want more frequent archive updates besides the monthly ones I’m doing now, feel free to throw some suggestions out there.

b. With this new method, the middle step of forming a PNG archive first still exists. I try to keep the original visual quality of the images as much as I can when I convert them, but it goes without saying that there is still some _tiny bit of quality loss. If someone out there wants the archive in its full unaltered glory, just say the word.


If you’re still reading this, you deserve a metal for reading my ramblings. Don’t worry; the torture is almost over. Here’s where it gets interesting.


2. The second thing I want to bring up is the “little something extra” I teased two weeks ago. I honestly haven’t been using Google Drive all that much before it came up as an alternate link, so I didn’t realize that I could create tons of sub-folders within the space that’s given. Taking advantage of that, I’ve been putting together a different archive over the past couple of months that organizes all of the cards by the events they appeared in, general promotions and crossovers, etc. So far I’ve done the events from March 9, 2015 and onward, and I’ll gradually keep adding to it when I have the time. I want to have this thing dating to the start of the game back in 2012, but as I keep going back, finding all of the event cards gets increasingly difficult. I tried my best so far, but I know well enough that it’s far from perfect. So in a poor attempt to try and keep this thread alive other than the occasional post every month, maybe some of you can point out what cards I missed or what cards I misplaced while organizing this. Not all of the cards in the game have appeared in events though, so it’s not meant to take the place of the monthly archive.

And before anyone mentions it, I’m aware that some of the start dates for the events I listed are a day or two off. This is because I’ve been using the dates of the event announcement articles posted on Gamer, 4Gamer, and other sites rather than the start date of the actual events. I’ll get to fixing that soon enough though.