Images by Set

[Chris H.]

I noticed something strange and Rob may want to investigate. Open the deck editor and click on Windseeker Centaur. This card does not display a set box in the card detail panel nor does it display a rarity value in the table.

I checked the card txt file and it looks OK to me. This is from rev 4312:

Windseeker Centaur | Open

Name:Windseeker Centaur
ManaCost:1 R R
Types:Creature Centaur
Text:no text
PT:2/2
K:Vigilance
SVar:Rarity:Special
SVar:Picture:http://www.wizards.com/global/images/magic/general/windseeker_centaur.jpg
SetInfo:MBP|Special|http://magiccards.info/scans/en/mbp/3.jpg
End

[Rob Cashwalker]

It's a promo that was never released in a regular set. I think if the LQ image is in the normal pics folder it should still be displayed.

Special is not a recognized Rarity, which is why it's not listed.

I'd say scrap it, it's a french vanilla creature.

[Chris H.]

It's a promo that was never released in a regular set. I think if the LQ image is in the normal pics folder it should still be displayed.

Special is not a recognized Rarity, which is why it's not listed.

I'd say scrap it, it's a french vanilla creature.

`
Now that we are working on implementing sets we should consider removing Windseeker Centaur. We got rid of Rares three fantasy cards. Does anyone have a real attachment to this card?

[timmermac]

I'd kind of like to keep it... It has vigilance, which isn't that common in red, plus it's saved my backside in quest matches before.

[friarsol]

Windseeker Centaur isn't a fantasy card and is legal in Vintage and Legacy. What's the reason for getting rid of it? I worry about breaking peoples quest files by just removing cards.

This card itself isn't anything special, but there are a few other cards that were also Book Promos that might be interesting to players:

Sewers of Estark Windseeker Centaur Mana Crypt Nalathni Dragon

(Arena and Giant Badger were also book promos, but were reprinted at some point)

Maybe we can have a "Promo" set for cards like this that don't actually appear in sets but are still legal for play. It looks like this is how Gatherer and magiccards.info handles it.

[Sloth]

If the problem is the rarity, just make it an uncommon instead of removing it.

[Rob Cashwalker]

I guess it's in the same boat the Starter sets, as I did include Starter, but it was never released in boosters. I'll have to modify the SetInfo data in some manner to indicate if the set is available for draft or not. Then of course this would open up the flood-gate for Duel Deck and From The Vault printings....

[slapshot5]

: Nalathni Dragon has been on my list for a while since I actually *have* one from The Duelist #3 I think.

Banding will not be easy though. OT: Has anyone thought at all about Banding?

-slapshot5

[Sloth]

: Nalathni Dragon has been on my list for a while since I actually *have* one from The Duelist #3 I think.

Banding will not be easy though. OT: Has anyone thought at all about Banding?

-slapshot5

I thought about banding a lot already. My thoughts were: "I hope nobody will ever try to implement this keyword. It will never work correctly, the AI will never use it correctly and testers will always say it doesn't work correctly because they don't understand how it should work correctly." Rambling end.

[timmermac]

Didn't Wizards remove banding at some point?

[friarsol]

Timmer, They don't print cards with banding anymore, but that doesn't mean that keyword doesn't exist anymore. You might be thinking of Islandhome which has been changed to mean two different things.

My thoughts are similar to Sloth's. While I understand how Banding works, I don't know if many of the user base will understand how it works or just simply be confused about it. That's before any AI considerations on how it would work.

Although if we got to the point where there were 41 cards left and it's because banding wasn't implemented I'd take a crack at getting it working.

[Chris H.]

Yeah, I don't know why the HQ pics are a problem, when they weren't before. Converting them to LQ (maintaining folders) did the trick for me. On a laptop without a large screen, HQ/LQ, it doesn't make a difference visually.

`
I downloaded your CoreSets_LQ archive last night while I was sleeping and wow, I like what I see. They are just a bit bigger than what we get from the wotc site but not by much. And the file size of the pics are reasonably small. I guess that you are not saving the jpgs at 100% but that would increase the bandwidth needed for people to download.

It will take me a few nights to get all of them, I can hardly wait. Good job and thank you.

[Rob Cashwalker]

No prob.

I began trying to figure out how to deal with downloading them in-game last night, but it's starting to make me cross-eyed.... I have to test for many different combinations of path, filename, and PicCount for multiple artwork. Then if it's not found, build a path and filename to store it as, and a URL to go along with it...

The easy part, is that I have the pics stored on the server in Base64 with Base64 filenames. The encoding adds 33% more data, but it's slightly obscured from casual glance what the data represents.

[Rob Cashwalker]

friarsol-

Just ran across an issue with Obsidian Giant. It's listed by the script as being in both Portal and Portal 2. However, according to magiccards.info it was only in Portal 2.

[Chris H.]

I see that you merged your initial code for downloading set images in rev 4423.


I was playing a test deck last night using my normal collection of LQ pics without any of the new LQ pics in subfolders. I thought that I may have detected a slight slow down later in the game.

Once I have all of your LQ pic sets I will try to play another quest game using these pics and will look to see if everything is working OK.