Hang on, why am I waiting for someone else to fix any of this?
Before Sparkheim existed I was using a different app to keep track of my collection. One day I'm scanning a Forest. I moved the card a bit, some glare hit it, and it decided it was a different card and added that. Moved it again, it found the Forest, added that too. Did that a couple more times and I ended up with four cards in my collection off one Forest, three of them wrong.
That's the thing that got me started, really. That app goes off the art and nothing else, so it can usually tell you what card you're holding but not which printing of it, and if there's glare or a shadow or a sleeve in the way it'll sometimes just decide it's a different card entirely. When it lands the right one it's fast and it's good, no complaints there. But a lot of the time you end up picking the version yourself, or it picks one and you find out later it was wrong. Ours looks at more of the card than the art, which is what lets it tell two printings apart when the picture on them is the same.
The other thing was that I ran out of room. The app most people use gives you five binders and five decks unless you pay for it, and five doesn't go very far. I wanted the binders in the app to match the ones sitting on my shelf, so that when I'm looking for a card I already know where it is. That takes however many binders it takes. It shouldn't mean planning your collection around a number somebody else picked. And I kept thinking, okay, say I pay and I spend a month getting all of it in there properly. What happens if I stop? Do the binders go? Does the sorting go? They're my cards, and it's all sitting on my own phone anyway. I didn't want to rent that from anyone.
I write software for a living, so at some point I thought, hang on, why am I waiting for someone else to fix any of this?
Then there's a friend of mine. He's been buying boosters and boxes for years and ended up with something like five thousand cards, and he didn't really know what he could build out of them. He'd go on EDHREC, pick a commander, read through the average decklist, and then try to work out by hand how much of it was already sitting in his binders. There was nowhere that would just tell him. That's where Spark Finder came from. No AI in it, it checks your collection against what people actually play and tells you how close you are to each commander.
Anyway, I mostly built this for me. But if any of that sounds familiar, it'll probably do the same job for you.
Everything lives on your phone. No account, nothing to sign up for, and I don't track what anybody does in the app. If you turn on backups they go to your own iCloud, not to me. The flip side of all that is that I genuinely can't see what's working and what isn't, so if something's broken or missing or just gets on your nerves, tell me. I'd rather hear it.
Deni, Croatia