I discovered most deck builders suffer from having either super small card pics that are hard to read the rules text, don’t have pictures, or have large pictures which you have to wait considerably for each to download, and can only view one at a time. Using them was not fun!
I thought for a while about what it would take to generate cards dynamically. I figured it was totally doable. The more I thought about the cards, I realized much of what is printed is fluff — some cards have an abundance of reminder text and flavor text which could be left off entirely. So I spent the last few weeks trying to re-create cards… and I think the result is better than I imagined.
Keep in mind this is a little rough. It’s definitely a work in progress.
Features
Strong, graphical interaction with cards
Very small overhead for graphics (~2 MB for frames and symbols; card images average 16 KB each on-demand)
Support for nearly all tournament-legal cards (no — I am not going to even try to render “Un” sets!)
Support for generic deck lists and multiples of given cards
Fully scalable cards, readable at small sizes, larger sizes may allow for proxies
Consistency with all cards rendered using newer 2014 card frames
Rendered in Plantin web font by license
No reminder text and flavor text dramatically improves readability
Known Issues
Image loading needs optimization
Alternate art, versions not available
Lacking support for sets, rarity, collector number and illustrator credits (though at the very least I really want the artist credit here)
Split cards, flip cards and dual-facing cards are not fully-supported yet
Planeswalkers frames are missing
Colored frames on lands which produce mana are missing
Color-specific gradient frames are missing from two-color cards
Cards are not printable (a change back to using <canvas> may improve this)
Collision happens with the power and toughness box
Hybrid mana isn’t perfectly-sized with the rules text
Some pictures are missing and pictures aren’t perfectly sized (fix in the works)
Stars for power and toughness aren’t sized correctly in all browsers
Future
I’d like to turn this into a deck builder and provide more information, but the goal is to keep this as simple as possible. I want people to be able to save decks like a pastebin and take advantage of the visual appeal by being able to truly see a deck. It would be nice to be able to simulate drawing sample hands for decks. Finally, I want to pair this with a smart database to find, compare and suggest similar cards.
Feedback
So what do you think? I’m taking this slowly on purpose but I wouldn’t mind your criticisms. Certainly it’s lacking many features. Anything is okay at this point, and if you think I should push this into an entirely different direction I haven’t thought of, I’m open to your thoughts.
Thanks!
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Create your own cards on MTG.Design
( ancestral on Custom Magic Discord server )
( mproud on reddit )
I notice you've got a little bit of white border around some of your images - have you thought of scaling your crops to slightly larger than the image frame so it's eliminated?
I'd also use a sans-serif font for the card text, preferably one of the standard, boring web fonts like Verdana - boring, I know, but I found that at the default zoom the text was a little hard to read. Using a serifless font would make the text easier to read at small sizes
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
I notice you've got a little bit of white border around some of your images - have you thought of scaling your crops to slightly larger than the image frame so it's eliminated?
Yeah, I need to resize the cropped images. There was an issue during my initial batch image conversion, but I'm in the process of fixing them, and also getting the missing artwork for a handful of cards.
I'd also use a sans-serif font for the card text, preferably one of the standard, boring web fonts like Verdana - boring, I know, but I found that at the default zoom the text was a little hard to read. Using a serifless font would make the text easier to read at small sizes
Hmm, possibly that could work. For now, I've increased the sizes a bit, but I could maybe see somewhere a checkbox to show it in a sans-serif font instead.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Create your own cards on MTG.Design
( ancestral on Custom Magic Discord server )
( mproud on reddit )
The readable, visual deck aid
(Link)
I discovered most deck builders suffer from having either super small card pics that are hard to read the rules text, don’t have pictures, or have large pictures which you have to wait considerably for each to download, and can only view one at a time. Using them was not fun!
I thought for a while about what it would take to generate cards dynamically. I figured it was totally doable. The more I thought about the cards, I realized much of what is printed is fluff — some cards have an abundance of reminder text and flavor text which could be left off entirely. So I spent the last few weeks trying to re-create cards… and I think the result is better than I imagined.
Keep in mind this is a little rough. It’s definitely a work in progress.
Features
Known Issues
Future
I’d like to turn this into a deck builder and provide more information, but the goal is to keep this as simple as possible. I want people to be able to save decks like a pastebin and take advantage of the visual appeal by being able to truly see a deck. It would be nice to be able to simulate drawing sample hands for decks. Finally, I want to pair this with a smart database to find, compare and suggest similar cards.
Feedback
So what do you think? I’m taking this slowly on purpose but I wouldn’t mind your criticisms. Certainly it’s lacking many features. Anything is okay at this point, and if you think I should push this into an entirely different direction I haven’t thought of, I’m open to your thoughts.
Thanks!
( ancestral on Custom Magic Discord server )
( mproud on reddit )
I notice you've got a little bit of white border around some of your images - have you thought of scaling your crops to slightly larger than the image frame so it's eliminated?
I'd also use a sans-serif font for the card text, preferably one of the standard, boring web fonts like Verdana - boring, I know, but I found that at the default zoom the text was a little hard to read. Using a serifless font would make the text easier to read at small sizes
Minouris's Library - Collection manager and deck builder. It's nifty - Check it out!
Yeah, I need to resize the cropped images. There was an issue during my initial batch image conversion, but I'm in the process of fixing them, and also getting the missing artwork for a handful of cards.
Hmm, possibly that could work. For now, I've increased the sizes a bit, but I could maybe see somewhere a checkbox to show it in a sans-serif font instead.
( ancestral on Custom Magic Discord server )
( mproud on reddit )