stassy wrote:incidentally I am looking for a way to make a much more refined list for card test purpose, like filtering by expansion and such
This could perhaps be done with Magic Assistant, but the list would have to include a copy of each card for each set that it was ever in. That is, unless you only care about the first set it was in. Unfortunately, MA requires each card to be associate with a set, since they are treated as representations of actual cards that are owned in a real collection. Alternatively, I might simply use whichever set listed the card at it's lowest commonality*.
For example,
Ivory Tower was Uncommon in AQ, but Rare (or even mythic) in every reprinting afterwards. Whereas,
Savannah Lions was Rare from Alpha until 9th Ed, then Uncommon in Masters Ed. IV. IMO they are both fine at Uncommon.
Back in the day,
Ivory Tower was insanely powerful because the game as a whole lacked enough cards to provide aggro decks good enough tempo
and versatility to overcome it with consistency. To play an
Ivory Tower now and presumably hold back cards to benefit from it, even in limited (ie Shandalar), you sacrifice so much tempo that you could still lose if the opponent has a good enough deck/draw. You'd be better off using active life gain from batches of more efficient spells (
Congregate,
Gerrard's Wisdom) or effects (
Wellwisher,
Loxodon Hierarch).
[rant]This is actually one thing that frustrates me about Shandalar. I find certain more-powerful cards too easy/inexpensive to buy and vice versa. IMO original dual lands should be treated as more than merely 3 gems or a couple hundred gold. I'd love to have more than 4 tiers of gem-buys and much higher gold values on the best of the best cards. I might even go so far as to use real-world dollar values as a guideline for setting in-game gold values. Not 1:1 mind you, but similar scales. Unfortunately, the mono-color quest rewards override any such layered-value efforts. But this is all my problem.[/rant]
* Either way, many thousands of tinkering clicks to set all the details in place. Might only take a week if 2000+ were done per day, which seems like an overly-generous and unrealistic estimate. If you want a copy of the database that I (hope to) make, I am happy to share it.
I should mention, Magic Assistant can export to .dck format, but it probably doesn't have the most up-to-date list. I expect more problems when I get to that stage, but I'll deal with that then. Maybe it can be updated with the new card index values. Not functional.