ML3 basic Playdeck brainstorming

[Zeek]

Latest Playdeck folder as of 2014-11-19:
download/file.php?id=20643

On one hand, affinity still moves pretty fast, regardless of format. So quite often they can be a good challenge to play against when dueling random AI opponents in random deck mode.

However, the AI is addicted to saccing EVERYTHING to Arcbound Ravager, ASAP. After that, one bounce/destroy spell that can hit an artifact creature and it's game over. So...usually the matches end up being really easy because of the risky play style.

But then again, the AI doesn't often pilot many decks well to begin with. I saw the AI play the Hermit Druid deck that has no basic lands (so basically, G, tap: mill library), but then didn't flashback for the OTK. lol?

[stassy]

Those decks are a compilation of decks from various players long time ago, this pool is also not filtered or sorted at all and contain many test deck so it's not surprising to get faulty deck, like the one you mentioned.

There are also some deck that got cut out by PDA and are half missing their content.

Any help would be appreciated in order to filter them, but be aware that it take a long time to work on them (find the original author and restore the original cards in this 2K+ deck file).

[CirothUngol]

Yea, the PlayDeck folder is in sad shape... I've really never spent much time on it. It was almost a year ago (when I was working on the PlayDeck Analyzer) that I collected that set of PlayDecks together and I didn't do much sifting at all. I would imagine that Manalink now contains over 1000 cards that simply aren't represented in any of the decks. Just for reference, here's the archive of original PlayDecks that I use to build the folder:

ImportPlayDecks.rar

Original PlayDecks to import using PlayDeck Analyzer.

(839.47 KiB) Downloaded 823 times

I re-import all these PlayDecks and re-build them for each new Manalink Update.

There are also some deck that got cut out by PDA and are half missing their content.

To keep the PDAnalyser from truncating your PlayDecks change the value for Maximum # of Unique Cards to something more appropriate before you import them (the highest value allowed is 16384, which I believe to be the new maximum card limit in Manalink.csv). However, any PlayDecks containing more than 200 unique cards will be rejected when you try to start a match.
I don't think any of the included PlayDecks originally contained more than 200 unique cards.

[porphyre]

FYI - I culled 95% of the Affinity out of my folder a couple releases back. It was 234 files. About 10% of the folder.

I hate to make suggestions that I don't want to do myself, but /somebody/ needs to work through CirothUngol's listing. In addition to the wealth of poorly piloted Affinity, Oath, Druid, and anything-with-Zuran-orb.dek decks, I get easily annoyed by "unobtainable" cards getting thrown into EVERYTHING.

I let the Power9 slide, but other stuff is just like, "Comeon, really?" Moat? Abyss? Tabernacle at Freaking Pendrel Vale? Eureka. Natural Order. Rolling Freaking Thunder?

It's mostly the Tabernacle that annoys me. I've been playing this game for more years than I'd like to remember and I've never seen that guy hit the table. Yet 50% of the UW control decks in PlayDecks run it. There's probably less than 5000 of those things still in existence but I have to play against it daily on Manalink.

[CirothUngol]

Although I believe that part of the whole Manalink "mystique" is the fact that you can play with any card, I agree that the current selection is rather wild... like I said, it was simply every single deck I could find, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. ^_^

I could always try breaking them into smaller\better categories. PlayDeck Analyser will allow you to search for specific "problem" or "key" cards in PlayDecks and move the flagged PlayDecks to a different folder. I've already separated out all PlayDecks containing Locked Challenge Cards in the latest release. Perhaps we should try to identify what groups to break them into, or which decks to eliminate entirely.

If anyone knows of a large repository of PlayDecks (in any digital format), perhaps we can start from scratch. Maybe make specific folders for World Champion, official WotC MtG PlayDecks, etc. I'm open to suggestions... anything is probably better than what we currently have.

[porphyre]

Yeah, mentally, groups is what I've been kicking around.

Do you know how the "Custom Magic" button under "World" works? Never clicked it, but seems like it may run a batch file or something that swaps out card databases. If it truly is running arbitrary code, something could be written to display various groups. Vintage, Legacy, Block, Commander, ALL, etc. Customize the playdecks folder on the fly.

[Aswan jaguar]

Custom Magic was made by Jatill when we had the limitation in Manalink 2.0 of no more than 2000 cards on the game at the same time on one version so that one could have the cards that he wants to play with choosing cards a player would like to have from Constructed and from Limited to his custom one.Now is obsolete as we have all coded cards in one Magic.exe on Manalink3.0

[CirothUngol]

Do you know how the "Custom Magic" button under "World" works?

Those buttons actually call the executables LaunchML.exe and LaunchMCu.exe, or at least they once did.
Those EXEs would then create BatchScripts in the Windows temp folder that would then call MagicLimited.exe or MagicCustom.exe.
Never quite understood why.

The "Magic Limited" button will still call a program named LaunchML.exe if placed in the program folder, but the "Magic Custom" button will not call LaunchMCu.exe... in fact, that button doesn't seem to work in any of my installs all the way back to January 9, 2010! Perhaps I have the filename wrong, but that's the file included with the Manalink 2.0 Updates.
There's also a third file, LaunchMC.exe, that would call Magic.exe (called "Constructed" at the time) when you were in either "Limited" or "Custom".

The text for the buttons and their descriptions is located in the Text.res file under "@SHELLSCREEN_METAGAME", so it's easy to change.

It'd be nice to use these for something... but I feel that would require a group consensus, as well as a little developer assistance to get the other button working (i.e. I'll ask Gargaroz ^_^)

[stassy]

As jatill stopped working on the DeckEditor, I suppose he removed the executable that launched the custom mode.

I still think we should work on playdeck first before toying with the UI (that would also imply to work on the main menu background too).

[CirothUngol]

I still think we should work on playdeck first...

Agreed.

[stassy]

Well, we could start by defining folders like that :

Code: Select all

Block decks (Expansion decks, Tournament decks (years, player...))
Special gameplay decks (Avatar, Momir, EDH, Planechase...)
Degenerated decks (theme deck, combo deck...)

Then with Ciroth magic PDA we could start filtering deck by cards...but what I still want 1st is restore the original decks submitted by players, I will be working on that asap.

[stassy]

Hum I just ran 2 PDA check on your ImportPlaydeck (only ML dck files since others are already well ordered), and if I look at the creation date it seems to be this is a very old Playdeck (most of them are from January 2012 and January 2011).

Also they retain the "classic" PDA issues (special char are not recognized like Ring of Maruf, Leyline of Sanctity which switched as UNCODED, comment error...)

So, do you want me to start cleaning/fixing manually them ?
Attached is the log of the 2nd PDA check so you can see what's wrong.

Also, what's bug me is that many Tournament decks contain UNCODED cards, it's impossible because they were created by Cognis or 240sxforever and around 10ish player used them, something wrong must have happened with the old ID card changer but the issue is I can't find the original deck in the Tournament section =/

[CirothUngol]

Thanx for taking an interest, stassy.

Also they retain the "classic" PDA issues (special char are not recognized like Ring of Maruf, Leyline of Sanctity which switched as UNCODED, comment error...)

I've been taking a look at the issues in your LogFile:

Any UnMatched CardNames can be corrected by adding them to the Spelling.txt CardList. For example, I fixed the Ring of Ma'rûf issue by adding the following line:
Ring of Ma'r?f;Ring of Ma'rûf.
Look for "Spelling Correction CardList" in the ReadMe.txt for more info.

As for the UnCoded cards... I think they used to be Coded, but currently aren't. I just base this on the fact that all of the ones I looked at seemed to belong in the deck they were in. Especially Cooperation, it's in the Banding deck, so I'm sure it's true for at least some of them.

Also, all of the PlayDecks that are listed as "Invalid Format" in your LogFile either contain unmatched CR+LF pairs or extra blank lines... all of which should have been caught by the Import PlayDeck Function.
You did Import the PlayDecks by using the Menu Option Import PlayDeck\from Manalink, right? If you did, then I might have to try and replicate the error... all of those PlayDecks scan fine for me.

So, do you want me to start cleaning/fixing manually...

Sure! ^_^
Ok, for Catagories, how about:

Code: Select all

World Championship Decks separated by year
PreBuild WotC Decks separated by Set or Release
League Decks (is this even a thing anymore?)
Tribal Decks (Creature Type identified in the FileName?)
"Degenerate" Categories (Oath, Challenge, Banned, Affinity)
Maybe a "Computer plays these best" Category, with decks the AI plays well.
Plus Microprose Originals & Shandalar Enemies Decks

How much of this stuff do you already have... or are you starting from scratch?
Once we have complete sets, I'll try to build a DeckMod.exe that'll allow the user to Install\Remove specific PlayDeck Categories.
Any suggestions for options on the DeckMod.exe?

[Aswan jaguar]

CirothUngol wrote:
Once we have complete sets, I'll try to build a DeckMod.exe that'll allow the user to Install\Remove specific PlayDeck Categories.
Any suggestions for options on the DeckMod.exe?

A great idea CirothUngol also there are already some decks separated by their strength as TI- *.dck and T2- *.dck it will make Gauntlet very fun to play with.

[stassy]

Ok, I was using the "basic" method as to put decks in the Playdeck folder of PDA, hit refresh and run so I tried the import Manalink method

However, I still got the Invalid Format error on deck that seems ok like Artifact of Death

The Spelling trick was useful and cleaned all the weird entries

What should we do with UNCODED card? Substitute them or remove the entire deck?
I think it would be a shame to remove the whole deck as there are some interesting theme deck but I don't know what would be their replacement...

The issue with the "decks that AI play well" is that the AI only play very well broken decks like Natural Order or Oath, we should have a deck pool with "legit and fair" well played deck, though it would be a really scarce pool...

Also as I am not a 1st time mtg player, is the T1 T2 etc... ranking still the same now with the current banned list?