HQ PICS DOWNLOADS and Status List (MTG)

[The Scientist]

today is the release, so I should have scanned most of it by Tuesday.

I'd guess by the end of the next week.

[creepycrawly]

by the end of the next week

Excellent.


Oh, and PresetM and extreme: Three Kingdoms = bad ass. You guys rock.

[Nyth]

Do you think it would be possible to start a new torrent that includes the following:

Old Lorwyn Update Torrent

Up-to-date LOR Lorwyn block pictures

Up-to-date MOR Morningtide block pictures

Up-to-date SHM Shadowmoor block pictures

Up-to-date EVE Eventide block pictures

Any other changes and amends that have happened since the original 10E HQ Pics 3GB torrent and the Lorwyn Update Torrent (including tokens and promos)

And let's have a date in the torrent name for easily referencing it in the future. Call them patches of the 10E torrent or version number them so that future releases can be easily added along with newer or updated scans... I know From the Vault: Dragons is coming out soon, but it may be worth not waiting till then to create this torrent...

[Huggybaby]

It is possible, but so much has changed that a new 3GB torrent is required. I haven't decided how to proceed yet, so I procrastinate.

[PsiKoTicK]

Meh, it depends on how you do it. Zipping everything is... cumbersome, to say the least.

I would say the BEST thing to do would be 7zip the entire pics directory (up to and including eventide).

The only problem with that is when the next set comes out, you end up creating an entirely new torrent, and cannot just stick the pics in the current one (and have others redownload the torrent and keep seeing, -eventide, until they get them).

7zip is much higher compression than even RAR. <shrugs> I'd be happy to lend a hand, man, just let me know.

[extreme]

i read somewhere that stuffit is the best compression for jpegs

[Nyth]

Ok then... Other ideas to help minimize re-downloading a whole 3GB regularly:

1 Torrent containing:

Standard Cards: All current core sets and expansions legal in Standard Format.

1 Torrent containing:

Extended - Standard Cards: All current core sets and expansions legal in Extended Format minus those already in the previous torrent.

1 Torrent containing:

All other cards form other core and expansion sets not included in the previous two torrents

1 Torrent containing:

All promos, tokens, and other special cards

1 Torrent containing:

All the foreign language card scans, since there aren't enough to breakdown into the above categories

Naturally the above should include all cards in each set including banned/restricted cards.
All blocks and sets should be archived in separate files as with current torrents.
As suggested before, it may be prudent to label each archive with a date/version number to allow for modular updates.
This will also mean that when a new set is released or an old set rotated out of a specific format, new players of MTG who may not be interested in the old sets need not download them if they are not playing vintage or legacy formats; whereas existing users can just reorganise their folders and seed using the new torrent file.

Alternatively, just create a torrent for each block/cycle and a torrent for each or all of the core sets.

I can happily create the structure listed above if necessary.

Any comments?

[Huggybaby]

Those are all good ideas, so let me explain again why I do it the way I do.

Why compress at all? Because torrents weren't designed to include tens of thousands of files. To reduce the files to a workable number I compress by set. Compression in this case is just to put each set into one container, not to save space, because jpg's are already compressed. There is no difference between zip, 7zip, rar etc. when it comes to space savings, so I use torrentzip, although nobody uses that either.

Stuffit IS the only utility that will compress jpg's, but it's not free and nobody uses it. Imagine the howl and support headaches if all our archives suddenly had an unusable .sit extension.

Breaking the torrent into pieces makes sense from several standpoints, except the ones that really count. If the torrent is pieced out, nobody will seed it. You may not believe it but it's true. You may think that more, smaller torrents are better than one larger one, but that's not true. Look at the not-english torrent, with only ONE seeder right now. So the not-english torrent will probably be rolled back into the main one.

And which guru is going to maintain five or more separate torrents? What, no hands? Shocking!

Also, there's no reason to download 3GB regularly. The last big torrent was released over a year ago, and the next one will probably last longer, because far fewer sets are on the do-over list.

The only way I know to improve the current system is to add some nice high speed webseeds to the tracker list. They cost money and you need a permissive host, and we have neither. Which brings us back to our well considered and time tested square one.

[A.R.]

> Look at the not-english torrent, with only ONE seeder right now. So the not-english torrent will probably be rolled back into the main one.

Was not-english torrent already announced? I see no link to the torrent file on the forum...

[creepycrawly]

Was not-english torrent already announced? I see no link to the torrent file on the forum...

http://slightlymagic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=447

[A.R.]

Thank you!

[Huggybaby]

Fixed...
CCGHQ MTG P3 (Portal Three Kingdoms) Fulls 072908.zip (31.86 MB)
http://www.mediafire.com/?1ybyqromkwj -or-
http://rapidshare.com/files/133487992/CCGHQ_MTG_P3__Portal_Three_Kingdoms__Fulls_072908.zip

[halfheart]

I love this site! you are doing a great job guys.

Waiting for EVE full scans

[extreme]

Missing Eventide list:

14 Spirit of the Hearth White
31 Wake Thrasher Blue
100 Crackleburr Multicolor
123 Hag Hedge-Mage Multicolor
177 Flooded Grove Land

and the blue-red elemental token

please help

[Fritti]

I appreciate all the hard work for these images! They're very nice scans.

I do have a question though: are the mediafire linked ZIPs the "master" versions of these collections? I ask because the updates listed in this thread sometimes update older sets from the torrents, so I'd like to have the newest version. Downloading it all from mediafire again kind of defeats the torrent point but I can't seem to determine what sets exactly have changed since the "lorwyn update" torrent.

I'm willing to find out for myself but then I do need to know which sets are the master sets...