New sets coming this year (and Forge inclusion dates)

[Vernon]

Avacyn Restored (AVR) comes out in May (7 weeks) with M13 on track for July. I was wondering about the amount of time it takes between new sets and their inclusion in Forge... Discuss please.

[timmermac]

Cards start getting coded once the spoiler season starts for each expansion. The expansion usually gets added to Forge in the beta that's closest to the release date for that expansion. Sets like M13 tend to be a little bit different, in that those sets tend to include many of the same cards as last year's core set.

[Vernon]

So we should see the cards for AVR sometime after 5-4-12. The images for those cards should be out mid-May.

[friarsol]

So we should see the cards for AVR sometime after 5-4-12. The images for those cards should be out mid-May.

The images are solely dependent on a different group of people. Looking back for DKA, we had about 149 out of 158 of the cards scripted by the day of the pre-release. It mostly just depends on the cards, but we usually get a good majority without even needing to add any code. Our least finished set is Ice Age at 76.61%, which is pretty impressive considering how unnecessarily complex some cards from Ice Age were.

Ice Age Examples | Open

Musician
Ice Cauldron
Balduvian Shaman

[Chris H.]

Forge has a card scripting system in place which is used by the vast majority of forge's current card base. It may be possible to implement over half of the AVR cards via card scripting.

In the past we have released a new beta of forge before the card pics became available.

Our release date is primarily dependent on obtaining the newest "mtg-data.txt" file.

[jeffwadsworth]

Off topic, but Ice Age's problem lies in the whole snow mana thing. They are so limited in scope.

[friarsol]

Off topic, but Ice Age's problem lies in the whole snow mana thing. They are so limited in scope.

I'm not sure about that one. Ice Age didn't have any cards that cared about Snow Mana. I'm not even sure if the concept of Snow Mana existed back then. (Ice Age was my first set) It could have, but since no cards cared about it, nobody knew about it.

http://mtg.wikia.com/wiki/Snow#Snow_Mana

Ice Age's problem is solely in how complex some of those cards are. (Including Banding)

Edit: Here's an article about Coldsnap design and Snow Mana. So back when Ice Age was released, Snow mana didn't exist. http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/A ... aily/mr234

[timmermac]

Some of Ice Age's cards cared about snow-covered lands, instead of snow mana. There's even a few cards with snow-covered landwalk floating about in the set.