Deck Den
DeckDen is a full-stack deck-tracking app built for players who don't stop at one game — bringing real authentication, live card search, and public profiles together in a single clean, fast experience instead of a different siloed app per game.
About the Project
DeckDen was built around a problem most TCG tools ignore: they're built around the game, not the player. Most players who are into Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokémon, or whatever else are into more than one — but every existing tracker forces a separate account, a separate app, a separate identity per game. DeckDen flips that. One account, one public profile, every deck you've built across every game, all in one place — whether you're theory-crafting something new or just want a clean record of what you're playing.
How its built
DeckDen runs on a real production stack, not a demo one — Next.js, React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS on the frontend; FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and SQLAlchemy on the backend. Authentication is genuine: hashed passwords, JWT sessions, single-use expiring reset tokens, and self-service account deletion that actually cascades through a user's data instead of leaving orphaned rows behind. Card search pulls from three separate live data sources — two official third-party card databases, and a self-built scraper and database for the one game with no public API at all.
Practical by Design
DeckDen isn't a local demo — it's deployed for real, with a Next.js frontend on Vercel and a FastAPI backend and PostgreSQL database on Railway, connected end to end with production-grade CORS and environment configuration. Transactional email runs through a verified custom sending domain rather than a shared sandbox, so password resets reliably reach real inboxes. The whole stack runs in Docker locally, and both backend and frontend are covered by an automated test suite, not just manual click-through testing.
Built to Extend
DeckDen was built to extend, not just to ship once. Adding a new game means adding a search source and a game entry, not restructuring the app — the self-built Union Arena database already proves the pattern works even without an official API to lean on. Deck metadata like optional play-style tags was added without touching the surrounding architecture, and the same card-focused UI scales cleanly whether a deck has three cards or three hundred.
Polished UI, Serious Engineering Underneath
Every part of DeckDen — the poster-style deck cards, the click-to-zoom card view, the consistent dark theme — was built to feel simple to use. Underneath that, it's handling real authentication security, real race conditions caught and fixed through actual production testing, and a real deployment with its own DNS, environment, and CORS configuration to get right. The result is an app that reads as effortless on the surface, with the actual engineering to back it up underneath.
