AutoMana

[rhianor]

Are you planing to add a automana feature like in shandalar??
example... playing a creature... you click in the creature and it automaticly taps the lands for mana?

[Incantus]

Nope.

The reason is that it gets complicated when you have many possibilities to generate the mana you need, and people would get annoyed if the computer generated the mana in the wrong way (say you could sacrifice a creature to generate some mana, or to pay colorless costs).

Do you find the current way annoying? The way it is set up, you can either generate the mana before you play the spell/ability, or while paying the costs (just like in the comprehensive rules). If you have ideas for streamlining it (besides having the computer choose for you).

[rhianor]

Actually i only talked about automana... to speed the game...

[Incantus]

Then I'm not sure what you are talking about. I've never played Shandalar, Magic Workstation or MTGO. Please describe how automana works.

[The Scientist]

MWS doesn't have anything
MTGO ahs the same system as incantus, as soon as you have enough mana in your pool to play the spell, the spell is played

from a players perspective, the game speeds up a little with automana, but you don't get to choose which lands are tapped. In the monocolored decks from 10th, there's no problem, but in multicolor decks I'd rather have this automana off.
Which mean in general I would prefer no automana.

[MageKing17]

In Shandalar automana just tapped lands (and only lands, it didn't even tap Moxes) if you double-clicked to play the card instead of single-clicking. It generally didn't do too badly. One annoying thing is it would sometimes tap lands that have been enchanted with something nasty (Psychic Venom leaps to mind).

[Tynion]

I'd like to point out that if you are trying to make the game flow according to the rules of Magic, then your mana system is right as it currently is. The way a spell is 'supposed' to be played is by announcing the spell, then generating the appropriate mana. Adding in for laziness is going to soften your engines rules enforcement.

Also, I would highly recommend playing those other programs as you could always find out what does not work well and avoid it and what does work well and ... 'implement' them