serra

A fast, self-hosted Magic: The Gathering collection tracker for your terminal.

Track what you own, what it's worth, and how its value moves — powered by Scryfall, stored in MongoDB.

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Serra started as a holiday project in winter 2021/2022, out of frustration with collection tracker websites that are a pain to use, want ~$10 a month, and still don't have the features I want.

• 📈 Price tracking — full history per printing, owned or not
• 🔍 Query & filter your cards by set, color, rarity, type, legality, …
• 📊 Statistics over your whole collection
• 🚀 Tops & flops — what gained and lost the most value
• 🌐 Tiny web UI on top of the same data
• 🗂️ Per-copy detail — finish, language and condition tracked separately

Note

Condition and language are stored as-is — serra does not validate them against a fixed enum.

Quickstart

1. Install

brew install noqqe/tap/serra          # macOS

Linux/BSD/Windows binaries: releases.

2. Spin up a database

docker run -d -p 27017:27017 --name mongo mongo:8

(fine for trying it out — no persistent storage, so don't use it for real)

3. Configure and go

export MONGODB_URI='mongodb://localhost:27017'
export SERRA_CURRENCY=USD   # or EUR

./serra add usg/17
./serra update

The more cards you add, the more fun it gets.

Commands

Command	What it does
add	Add a card to your collection
remove	Remove a card from your collection
card	Search & show cards from your collection
set	Search & show sets from your collection
check	Check if a card is in your collection
missing	Display missing cards from a set
stats	Show statistics of the collection
tops / flops	What cards gained / lost the most value
update	Update card values from Scryfall
migrate	Bring the database up to the expected schema
web	Start the web interface

Every command has --help with its flags.

Bulk-adding cards

Yes, manually. Photo/OCR scanners guess editions wrong and struggle with blue/black cards, so add --interactive turned out faster in practice — cards are sorted by edition anyway, and it's just 2–3 digits and enter:

> ./serra add --interactive --unique --set one
one> 1
1x "Against All Odds" (uncommon, 0.06 USD) added to Collection.
one> 1
Not adding "Against All Odds" (uncommon, 0.06 USD) because it already exists.
one> 3-5
1x "Apostle of Invasion" (uncommon, 0.03 USD) added to Collection.
1x "Auramancer" (common, 0.02 USD) added to Collection.
1x "Battle Screech" (uncommon, 0.09 USD) added to Collection.

How update works

update fetches the entire Scryfall bulk file and imports every printing into the cards collection, appending a price snapshot — not just for cards you own, so you can watch the price of something you're only thinking about buying. It then refreshes each card you own, rolls that up into the set value, and finally into the total collection value.

Demo

Each gif is recorded from a VHS tape in vhs/ against a small throwaway collection, so they can be regenerated whenever the output changes — see vhs/README.md.

Click to expand

add — add cards to your collection

remove — take them back out

card — query your cards with filters

set — list the sets you own cards from

set <code> — details of a single set

check — is this card already in the collection?

missing — what is still missing from a set

stats — statistics across your collection

tops — what gained the most value

flops — what lost the most value

update — refresh prices from Scryfall

migrate — bring the database up to the expected schema

web — start the web interface

Note on AI Use

Most of 5.0.0 was written together with Claude. This is a hobby project I maintain in the evenings, and the honest reason is time: I have a long list of changes I want in serra and no realistic chance of doing all of them by hand. Pairing with an LLM is what got the schema split, the per-copy language/condition tracking and a pile of long-standing bugfixes over the line instead of sitting in my notes for another year. Or probably forever.

Up to version 4.x serra was completly written by myself. If you dont want to use AI software, stay on that version. I want to be open and transparent about it.

Documentation

• UPGRADE.md — upgrading, schema versioning, migration notes
• CHANGELOG.md — notable changes per release

Development

task build
./serra

task build bakes the version string in via git describe. A plain go build ./cmd/serra works too, it just reports its version as unknown.

The gifs above are regenerated with task gifs, which seeds a throwaway database and replays the tapes in vhs/. Details in vhs/README.md.

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MIT licensed · built by noqqe