The best kittens, technology, and video games blog in the world.

Monday, May 28, 2018

Preconstructed Magic Decks on mtg.wtf

2018-05-28-13 by RobynAnderson from flickr (CC-NC-ND)

There's now a number of search engines for Magic cards, but some information is still missing from them all.

I just fixed one of such areas. mtg.wtf now has searchable contents of all preconstructed decks ever released. They contain cards from correct set, so viewing a decklist like this you can see actual cards which are in the deck. Every other decklist visualizer I've ever seen just gives you the most recent scans (like this for example), which looks really weird, especially for older decks.

You can view the decks, download decklists, or mix deck queries with other queries. For example to see which cards from Feline Ferocity are Modern-legal, just use deck:"Feline Ferocity" f:modern.

All this information is available in simple machine readable format.

Raw data is in magic-preconstructed-decks, and compiled jsons are in magic-search-engine repository.

Future enhancements

There's still room for improvement - information which cards are foil is missing, but easy to add. In theory it should be possible to find exact card printing instead of just set it's from (how many copies of which basic land etc.), in practice it might be a bit too much work.

Decklist visualizer could get extra features like sample hand, mana curve statistics etc.

And inevitably like with every project, there's going to be some errors. If you find any, please report them on github.

No comments: