Collectible Card Game Headquarters

Hi,

I recently tried out the latest version 1.64 of Magarena.
Because there are now a lot of cards available, several decks can be constructed.
Congrats for the many UI changes, the game flow works well.

I had some fun while building decks and play testing them against the modern Mono Green deck.
Feel free to include them in the prebuilt decks.

Keep up the good work and enjoy.

Thanks, not much happening with the prebuilt decks so it is nice have some new contributions. I have added these to the repo so will be included in the 1.65 release.

Wow, 33 decks is a lot!

Yes it is. I tried several approaches to defeat the very fast modern mono green deck.

I attached another one. I still need to try it out to see if it plays well.

6 - 0 against mono green MCTS level 4. This deck seems to pack some punch.

I have about 70 decks stashed somewhere ranging from bad to kind of decent... haven't been playing with built decks in a while though. Random games are so much more fun. Maybe I'll get around to sorting them out at some point. Should also update my older decks because there are sooo many more cards now.

What size do you like for decks these days? 40 cards or 60 cards? And are there plans to categorize the decks somehow? A lot of my decks have fun themes and will hold their own against a random generated deck, but don't have much hope in serious competition.

sponeta wrote:What size do you like for decks these days? 40 cards or 60 cards?

I think the original game's AI was optimized for 40 card decks which I believe is still the case (Melvin can explain better). But there are a fair number of 60 card decks as well so it is not a hard and fast rule. I have a Battle of Wits deck (from ShawnieBoy if memory serves) that has 223 cards!

sponeta wrote:And are there plans to categorize the decks somehow?

Just waiting for someone to come along with some ideas and a git client. The decks are all here - a pretty dusty and neglected place except for ubeefx's recent contributions.

Well I sorted out the really bad ideas, and here's 62 decks that have sprung up over the months. They all indicate the deck size, but I gave up on trying to cram colors or cubes into the names. I'm really bad at organization though. I have no idea how to sort all this stuff sensibly.

Most are average strength and fun to play against AI random decks, but there are a few that accidentally ended up being real monsters:

Warriors Rush 2015
Five of the finest steppe warriors. If you're lucky, you can deal 20 damage in four turns: 1. (anything), 2. Battle Brawler, 3. Arashin Foremost, 4. Chief of the Edge. Even if you don't get this combo, it's still a frighteningly fast deck.

Chroma
This deck routinely destroys anything that takes more than 5 turns to start (although it's still weak in the very beginning). Gather up a land of each color, then throw around major 5-color spells like Bringer of the Black Dawn, Maelstrom Archangel and Genju of the Realm. Also contains the entire Honden cycle from Kamigawa (Honden of Seeing Winds etc.), just for fun.

Draw Your Goblin
Unblockable goblins that summon more goblins for free. Plus draw power. What's not to like?

Mardu Mayhem
Ankle Shanker is just plain evil. But even without it, there are lots of really cheap Mardu cards whose only drawback is having two or three colors.

Mirror Stomp
Another 3-color deck that becomes overwhelming very quickly thanks to strong 3 CMC creatures, enters-the-battlefield abilities and clones.

But my finest hour is the deck I call simply Argh! No, it's definitely not powerful, but it's the most counterintuitive deck ever! You win by making your opponent gain life, summon creatures and cast spells. Even the humble Grollub finally finds a use when your Kavu Predator eats up the lifegain! It also gives whole new use for cards like Collapsing Borders, Malignus, Grove of the Burnwillows, and anything that gives life to the opponent. You also get cards to manage your opponent's lifegain, like Quietus Spike and Pulse of the Forge. To add insult to injury, Dragonlair Spider, Taurean Mauler and Heartwood Storyteller are used to give you benefits no matter what the opponent does. Damned if you do, damned if you don't!

Other fun surprises include Trees Are Useful, where Treefolk are actually good for something, and Rot Farming, where you load up your graveyard with creatures but don't animate them.

Thanks Sponeta for your decks.
Putting more structure into the decks with folders might be a good idea.
Please keep using this thread to share your decks.

I'm thinking decks may have more than one thing to sort by. Like in Duels of the Planeswalkers each deck has measures for things like speed, creature size, control and synergy. But maybe there should also be a "novelty" tag?

Maybe you could do something with tags in general? Like have some predefined tags, one for each color for example, and general deck types like "creatures", "discard", "burn", etc. And deck creators could also add any other tags like "vampires" or "silly".

Maybe it could be useful to automatically determine which block the deck belongs to, or if it uses cards from all over the place?

I've been thinking about improving the deck search on firemind for a while now https://www.firemind.ch/decks/search

A lot of the requested features (filtering and sorting by archetype, tags, formats etc.) overlap with what I plan on doing.

I'd be happy to coordinate with you guys on how to do deck search properly. With that I could provide a JSON API on firemind which magarena could use to let users find new decks.

If anyone is interested in doing the client side stuff let me know what you'd like the API to provide.

mike wrote:I've been thinking about improving the deck search on firemind for a while now https://www.firemind.ch/decks/search

This would be pretty cool although I am getting the following when clicking on the link (Firefox) -

mike wrote:If anyone is interested in doing the client side stuff let me know what you'd like the API to provide.

You already provide a list of top decks which is a specific filter. So with a custom filter I would imagine the client sends info as specified by the API and Firemind returns a list in the exact same format. You might need to paginate the returned list to keep things speedy - page 3 of 20 etc.

This would be pretty cool although I am getting the following when clicking on the link (Firefox) -

Hm, strange. I renewed the cert today but my firefox seemed happy enough. Nevertheless, I just added the newest intermediate certs. Hopefully that fixes it.

You already provide a list of top decks which is a specific filter. So with a custom filter I would imagine the client sends info as specified by the API and Firemind returns a list in the exact same format. You might need to paginate the returned list to keep things speedy - page 3 of 20 etc.

I agree. That part seems straight forward. I would keep the same format as top decks with some added meta info (format, archetype, tags).

Here are some ideas for filters, let me know if you can think of anything else worth adding:

* Deck name, archetype or description contains "STRING"
* Deck is by "Username"
* Deck contains cards X and Y but not Z
* Deck is legal in "Format"
* Deck has (un)favorable matchup against "other Deck"
* Deck has balanced matchup against "other Deck" (45% -55% maybe?)

For the future maybe:
* Deck is playable in magarena version X.Y

sponeta wrote:I'm thinking decks may have more than one thing to sort by. Like in Duels of the Planeswalkers each deck has measures for things like speed, creature size, control and synergy. But maybe there should also be a "novelty" tag?

Maybe you could do something with tags in general? Like have some predefined tags, one for each color for example, and general deck types like "creatures", "discard", "burn", etc. And deck creators could also add any other tags like "vampires" or "silly".

Maybe it could be useful to automatically determine which block the deck belongs to, or if it uses cards from all over the place?

All sound very interesting - how would you actually implement it though? Magarena does not use a database (yet!) so this info would most likely need to be stored in each deck file or maybe as separate text files where each file represents a tag containing lists of matching decks. Potentially could be a right pain (or slow) if relying solely on the filesystem (through directory organization or lists of files etc)!

mike wrote:Hm, strange. I renewed the cert today but my firefox seemed happy enough. Nevertheless, I just added the newest intermediate certs. Hopefully that fixes it.

That did the trick.