About MTG Scout

A collection-management platform for Magic: The Gathering, built and operated by Synaptic Data — a personal data-engineering operation.

What this site is

MTG Scout tracks real Magic collections — loose cards, sealed product, prices, spreadsheet imports, Commander decks — on a Django + MariaDB platform with a daily data pipeline, operational telemetry, and market analytics. Card data comes from MTGJSON and Scryfall; market context is computed from daily price snapshots. The site is a working data platform first: every chart and report on it is produced from the same pipeline that keeps the catalog current.

Free accounts get collection tracking with advertising; premium memberships remove ads and raise collection limits. See the privacy policy for how member data is handled.

Who runs it

Synaptic Data is a one-man operation: twenty years inside complex systems — from classrooms to data centers to data pipelines. From 2001 to 2006 a technical instructor at CAE Inc. in Montreal, teaching customer teams; then independent web work as Lotek Solutions; then 2010 to 2022 at EMC / Dell EMC deploying storage clusters through final customer signoff. These days the focus is data analytics and data engineering (Google Data Analytics certified, EMC Proven Professional). The thread never changed: making complex systems legible to the people who depend on them.

How it's built

MTG Scout is the flagship: a daily MTGJSON ingestion pipeline with staged diffs and fingerprint-verified parity, a Django + MariaDB web app, and an event-driven Ops panel tracking every job and incident. Nothing reaches production without passing on a local virtualized testbed first. The supporting systems — the Recon crawler, Mars bot mitigation, the Contact Relay — are described on the Synaptic Data site, with build notes in Field Notes.

Elsewhere

synapticdata.ca — services and background.
Field Notes — real notes from this build (chunked applies, CDN staleness, replay guards, the S3 migration).
GitHub — public profile; the application code itself lives in private repositories.

Questions about the site, your account, or your data — or data work in general — via the contact page.

Colophon

Built with Python, Django, MariaDB, Docker, and Ansible; images served from object storage; visitor analytics via Google Analytics. This site is unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Wizards of the Coast Fan Content Policy — see the footer. Card images, mana symbols, and Oracle text are copyright Wizards of the Coast LLC.