About

Hello!

Welcome!

This is SWU-Rec, a page made by me (the developer) to help me build decks for Star Wars: Unlimited.

It so happens that I am not good at building SWU decks. To help combat that problem I started looking at the data! Inspired by websites like edhrec I started scraping decklists from popular deck-building websites, and counting how often a card gets used. I was able get a lot of really consistent recommendations to help me build my favourite decks!

Why did I do this?

Normally I would count the above as a pretty good explanation. However, there is a little bit more to it than that.

In 2024, I started a Computer Science program at my local college, studying Data Science and Machine Learning. This meant learning Python.

I started this project to help practice and cement my understandings of the fundamentals for programming in Python. Lo and behold, it worked.

But that first version of the program just gave me data in a CSV. This is (obviously) way beyond that.

I already had a little bit of HTML basics under my belt, so I set to work creating the building blocks for a website that I would call SWU-Rec! I developed another Python script to construct those building blocks into full pages. Then I bought a domain name, and started hosting the pages on Git Hub.

But being honest, I'm not very good at HTML. I can read it, but I do not have the patience or organizational skills to make anything nice. But that was okay! It worked! The data was available, and helped me build a couple of really fun off-meta decks!

Then everything broke.

It turns out I didn't future-proof enough, and new cards came out, and everything broke. Oops. And to make it worse, the next year of my college program left me with no remainign free time to try and fix it. Which resulted in everything being put on hold for over a year.

Now that I've graduated (congratulate me) I was able to revamp everything! I've learned new tools to make the back end faster. I've found new resources to get more consistent data for future-proofing! And best of all, I acknowledged that my HTML skills were lacking and worked with Microsoft Copilot to make some way nicer building blocks.

Which brings us to today! I've got a future-proof system to scrape decklists and generate web pages to host for whoever wants to view!

What's next?

I don't have a lot of major plans for this project. I'm not a javascript programmer and so I won't be adding much for interactive features. One of the weak points of the project is that I have to manually run the scripts to download new data and rebuild the pages. The website does run on a static system, with no plans for a realtime system (sorry)

I will continue to try getting other sources for decklists. And I will always take feedback from those in my local community that use this project. They know how to reach me.

For my own piece of mind, I'm planning to clone a copy of the repo to local device that I never turn off. There I will create a job to automate running the scripts and pushing the updates to main.
Maybe there are more planned improvements than I thought. Should I make a list?

Planned Improvements

  • Get A Logo
  • Combine 30hp bases into one "Generic {aspect} Base" tile on leader pages.
    Combine 28hp force bases together
    Combine 27hp splash bases together
  • Create a copy-pase json of the "most popular" decklist to upload to Forcetable
  • Fix the "Card Type">"All Types" Filter button so that it grays out when aother filter is selected
  • Get an FAQ
  • Get a "Submit a Quetsion" box (Might be a bad idea, I am only one person after all)

Data Sources

These sources don't know that I'm using some of their data, so I need to make sure to thank them!

www.swu-db.com/api

This is the source of all the images, and the location I go to to get basic card information in my back end!

sw-unlimited-db.com

This is where most of the decklists that feed my data come from. They've made it very straightforward for me to scrape that information, and it provides us with lots over here! If they change their website layout, we may have a problem...

swudb.com

This is my second source of decklists. Unfortunately their system is a little bit harder to scrape, so I can't get nearly as much information from them. Again, if they change their website layout, we may have a problem...