At the Kitchen Table

There are many iOS apps available for magic players, to do a range of things from simple life tracking to deck building and draft simulation. Some of these are free and some are for sale.

I have recently taken the plunge to set myself up in the business of writing iOS (and eventually OSX) apps, focusing specifically on games and gamers. My first “for $” app appeared in the app store on Jan 11.

A couple days before my app hit the store, WotC announced their official iPhone app. For free (although you will need to buy new card sets for the deck builder. I wonder if they’ll do it a random booster at a time? ).

The same week, Monday Night Magic talked about it and about me and my upcoming app. The gist of part of that discussion was “poor Dave, it must suck to have WotC release a free app just as his is coming out.” I thought about that and am writing this as a response.

Official, corporate apps like the WotC app and the SCG app are largely a marketing expense for the companies. They are either branding (as is the case of the WotC app) or tie in with other services (e.g. content and retail access for the SCG app). There’s nothing at all wrong with this. I really appreciate having a good way to read SCG articles and do price checks on my iPhone.

If these apps serve your needs, excellent. You win. But I do encourage you to have a good look at the alternatives from the smaller, independent developers, though. Yes, developers like me. But also developers like the folks behind Decked Builder and the many other good independent apps.

Here are a few things to consider that occurred to me as I thought about this.

1. These ‘official’ apps are often free, but can always be considered a marketing effort by the companies. In contrast, apps for independent developers are part of their income. If they make enough from app sales, they can continue improving their existing apps and creating new ones.

2. Independent developers often write apps that they want, or that relate somehow to something they love, e.g. Magic: the Gathering. As a result, you can expect them to put a lot of care and effort into their work. It’s the whole labor of love thing.

3. They are also part of the magic community, and we need to support the community. The Magic community is broad and vibrant. In it are musicians, artists, card alterers (be it painting or 3D), software developers, and even the occasional adult entertainer. These people use their abilities to create things for the rest of the community to enjoy and use. As part of that community we need to support their efforts, because it’s partly those efforts that set this game apart from many others.

4. Finally, you typically have a direct line to independent developers. If you have suggestions, requests, or bug reports, you can often shoot the author an email and get a quick response. And they’re probably on twitter so you can interact with them even more directly. They may even be sitting across the table from you at an FNM or PTQ. That’s exactly what happened with my MTGLife app. I was testing it at FNM and showed it to my opponent after our round. He suggested adding a turn counter (for when a game went to time). I added it when I got home that night.

So, I’m not saying don’t use the WotC, or SCG, or similar apps. I am saying to give some thought to the advantages of buying and using an app from an independent developer. Sure, maybe you can get the same thing for free, but this is a game/hobby where you happily drop $3 for a booster, what’s $3 for an app?

I’ll download the WotC app, but mainly to see where it can be improved on so that I can write a better app. I did the same with the SCG app. I found the life tracked overly complex and cluttered and I haven’t really liked other life tracking apps, so I wrote my own.

It’s  the end of the Worlds as know it.

Today started early. I set my alarm for 7am so that I could be to the site in plenty of time to see the opening ceremonies and the HOF induction.

I caught the 49 bus to Fort Mason. This reminded me vividly how much nicer the public transportation system in Chicago is.

I made it to the venue in plenty of time. On entering the hall, I was greeted my Magic’s reigning posterboy:

Meeting people.

I spent much of the day simply meeting people: those that I’ve met before, and those who I know on twitter and the like.

The list is long but the day began, and ended (over a fabulous diner at Tony’s) with Robert Martin (Men of Magic), Trick, Adam (aka Trick version 2.0), and Evan.

I got a seat for the ceremonies. BDM stopped on the way to the stage to say hi. Brian is simply a great guy whose knowledge of the game and it’s history is simply amazing.

I watched the opening ceremonies and the HOF induction. It’s so good to see Steve OMS get in. This is so long overdue. I noticed Shuhei having a good laugh at the recounting of his past achievements and adventures: Play every GP across the world, and something about petting an alligator?! He was in fine form today, in Japanese attire.

I squoze in an 8 man standard pickup. I played UW Illusions, and lost in round 2. More public events later in the weekend.

After that event I wandered around more and met up with more people.

Notably, I ran into Lokman Chen Fresh from his GP San Diego top 8. Lokman is someone I have good memories of playing at Superstars when it was my LGS.

I finally had the pleasure of meeting @affinityforblue himself, Joey Pasco. We had a long chat that wandered over several magic and non-magic topic.

Tristan Sean Gregory is another guy I know from my days at Superstars/ChannelFireball. Good times catching up and having a deep discussion of the OP changes.

I must say I was dismayed when I saw where the event was. Restaurnats? NOT. Coffee? NOT. The coffee I took care of with a short walk to StarBucks, and lunch was in true San Francisco style: food trucks! Real food trucks, unlike as the legally castrated trucks in Chicago. Yummy food trucks, too. Mmm.. chicken and donuts!

Waiting in line for lunch I met Josh Frankel (@inkwell_looter) and chatted with him and Mark Rosewater.

Sat with Josh, Adam (@the_stybs) his wife, and a couple other guys.

After lunch Adam and I played a game with a couple casual decks he had. I ran the BG werewolf deck with copy effects. I won that one fairly handily. I believe  he is planning to write it up. It was fun, and the first time Ive had the opportunity to play with werewolves. The dual face cards are a bit of a pain, but the werewolves are great fun. After he experience with them, as well as the Delver in my Illusions deck, I see the value of using checklists.  I’m sold.

Many of the greats are here. Many old timers as well. I’ve seen Jon Finkel several a times, Alan Comer, Darwin Kastle, Rob Dougherty, Randy Beulher. Many seem to be here because it really is the end of the Worlds as we know it.

Artists, spell slingers, and Seishiro Ohkubo with his amazing 3D alters. So nice I’d want to put them in a perfect fit…. um….

Finally met and had a good chat with Ziam Beg, after working with him on channelforeball.com.

Adam and I did a fairly significant trade.  I almost took one of his Underground Seas as part of it, but decided to go with more on less valuable lands: pains and various colorless generators for my Karn Commander deck that I’m rebuilding. I followed that up with cruising the vendor booths for more Commander fodder.  I like Adam’s idea of building a ‘Commander box‘.  This weekend is getting it up & running.  It’s time to head back to the ATM…

After a day full of magic Adam, his wife, Trick, Robert, and Evan and me heading to dinner at Tony’s in North Beach (corner of Union & Stockton). If you like traditional pizza, get there at least once while you’re here!

The day wrapped up back at the Armory with me meeting (a hug was as far as it went) my favorite kinklive.com girl.  A while ago it came to light that we had a couple of really good friends in common (which I had dinner with on Wednesday, in fact). A great day over all.

A new set means a new binder, which for me means a new set of page inserts: Page_Inserts-Innistrad.pdf.

Innistrand was interesting because of the dual face cards: they are each two unique cards as far as the card database is concerned. Some work was needed to deal with them (i.e. have on insert per DFC rather for each gatherer entry).

I recently got the set of 5 commander decks to jumpstart my reentry into playing EDH… um… Commander. The Counterpunch deck especially caught my attention, so I sleeved it up and started digging into it. I dug through my stash of tokens to pull out what the deck needed: Zombies from M11, Soldiers from SOM, Eldrazi Spawn from ROE, Wolves from ZEN, Snakes from ZEN, and a ton of Saprolings from M12. They were easy. The rest presented challenge. I dodged the Squirrel bullet by swapping out Acorn Catapult for Doubling Season. I considered buying a pile of Unglued Pegasus tokens but decided against it. I decided to make my own for the remaining. So I fired up Magic Set Editor and google image search. Things went smoothly and I ended up with Spider, Pegasus, Spirit, a couple different Insects, and a Spawnwrithe that someone else had made. Here they are:

And here’s a PDF of them, ready to print.

Today I ordered a couple cases of M12 and got a binder ready to hold it. I tweeted such and included the following picture. @the_toMatto asked about my organization system. I’d been planning to write about it, so I figured now was the time.

Early in my relationship with Magic, as my collection was outgrowing a couple 800 count boxes, I saw that one of the kids at the LGS I frequented was putting cards in the corners and edges of the standard 9-pocket binder pages. That left the center empty. He had various foils and such in the center spots. I figured that I could improve on that and use the center for indexing purposes. Being a programmer I wrote a program to generate a PDF of inserts. Here’s a shot of a page from my NPH binder:

So here’s how I store my cards. Each set gets a binder. Previously I used D-ring (D-ring, not round ring!) binders from Staples, which worked well enough. This time around I’m using Ultrapro Magic logo binders. Cards were put in the binder, two sets of 4 on each face of each page, sorted by collector number.

I have bulk basic land in a couple 800-count boxes, and a smaller box containing my ‘working’ basic land collection (many copies of my favorite version of each basic). Other boxes contain random selections of older cards.

If you’re interested, here’s the PDF for M12 center inserts. Print it, cut them out, and load up a binder.

“I never was on the ProTour”*

I haven’t even played in a GP. I played in a ton of small events at SuperStars/ChannelFireball, including a PTQ (if memory serves) and Regionals one year. I even top8ed a sealed 1K (or something similar). I was an FNM regular before moving to California, and am trying to become one again at my new LGS in Chicago.

So when I decided to contract to StarCityGames, Indy was a few weeks and a cheap/quick trip away. I talked to Evan and decided to go, have some fun and talk some business.

Evan ended up bailing due to an impending child so it changed to a chance to meet some people (including some SCG folks) and play some magic. My buddy Jerry Martin shipped me a list he’s been brewing that he says has good matchups against CawBlade and DeceiverTwin. So I figured I’d pick up the remaining cards for it when I got there and see what it could do in side events and casual games. For fun, I also brought along UR DeceiverTwin.

I’d been building a friendship over the last couple of months with Kelly Reid from QuietSpeculation and when his arrangements for a place to sleep fell through I was happy to be able to offer him & Matt the other bed & floor in my room.

*If you don’t have the album by Tha Gatherin, give it a listen. It’s half decent to good and all about Magic.

It is with a mix of feelings I am announcing that as of the end of May I will no longer be working for ChannelFireball. It’s been good and I’ve greatly enjoyed working with Jon, Zaiem, Luis, and the rest. I leave content that matters are in Zaiem’s capable hands and I look forward to seeing great things from CFB.

Starting June 1 I’ll be working for StarCityGames on a contract basis. Evan has a bunch of super cool projects bubbling away in his Breeding Pit of ideas that I’m looking forward to getting involved with. June is going to be very exciting as I find out what he’s cooking up and get up to speed on the inner technical workings of SCG. It was one of those opportunities that come along unbidden that you simply can’t turn down. Working for SCG has been a semi-serious goal since I discovered them shortly after getting addicted to the game.

What do I bring to SCG? I’ve been working in the software field in some capacity for almost 30 years in areas ranging from environmental control and monitoring systems, AI, games, programming tools, web apps and iOS apps. Some of you might know me from the Agile and Ruby worlds where I have my name on the covers of a few books. If you’ve ever used a little tool called rSpec, you know of me. I’ve consulted to or worked for numerous technology startups as well as some big names including Intel, Fannie Mae, Daimler-Chrysler, Google, and Groupon. My goal is to bring that depth and breadth of knowledge to SCG and do some truly awesome work that will benefit the Magic playing community in general.

If you’re at SCG Indy in a couple weeks, find me and say “Hi”. I’m looking forward to meeting many of my online acquaintances a well as new friends.

I’m @dastels_mtg on twitter, dastels on facebook, and can be reached at dastels@starcitygames.com.

Dave

After spending 5 rounds with my UW Blightsteel deck at FNM last week, I’ve made a few changes.

The first thing that I noticed is that I never cast Mass Polymorph. I cast White Sun’s Zenith once or twice for a couple cats, but never morphed them. It was always Master’s Call and Shape Anew that led to having a Colossus on the board. I’ve left the Mass Polymorph in as it can be used on the Myr from Master’s Call and soldiers form Elspeth.

Since I had a couple Planeswalkers already, and I really dig Gideon, I added a couple to the deck. He has the added plus that he can become a creature as required. So he plays nice with Mass Polymorph as well as generally being a BAMF.

I also found that I could have used a bit more in terms of counters. To this end I’ve added a fourth Turn Aside and a couple copies of Deprive. The sideboard now has 2 fewer Deprives, replacing them with two more Journey to Nowheres.

Finally, the mana-base. I cut one each of Island and Plains, replacing them with another Celestial Colonnade and Inkmoth Nexus. The nexus proved invaluable, both as a infecting flyer as well as a target for Shape Anew.

We’ll see how it works on MTGO. If it seems good, I’ll take it next week to FNM.

The new build is:

UW Blightsteel 2.0

---

Basic Land (16) 9 Island 7 Plains Land (8) 3 Celestial Colonnade 2 Glacial Fortress 3 Inkmoth Nexus Creatures (2) 2 Blightsteel Colossus Sorceries (9) 2 Day of Judgment 3 Mass Polymorph 4 Shape Anew Instants (17) 1 Spell Pierce 2 Deprive 4 Mana Leak 4 Masters Call 2 Negate 4 Turn Aside Planeswalkers (8) 2 Elspeth Tirel 2 Gideon Jura 4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor Sideboard (15) 2 Day of Judgment 2 Deprive 1 Dispel 4 Flashfreeze 3 Journey to Nowhere 3 Oust

I’m writing this from memory so some details are likely a bit off.

I was very vaguely aware of Magic: the Gathering when I was in grad school (my undergrad days ended a bit before Magic had made it’s appearance). Very vaguely aware. It’s just as well because, while I’m sure I would have taken to it, my wife at the time would have frowned on such a “frivolous” waste of time and money. Note that she’s now my ex-wife.

So, fast forward 10 years and 3 relationships. I was seeing a truly geeky woman whose son kept spending his money of random grab bags of some sort of cards for a game. “What the **** are those?” I asked. “Magic cards!” he answered. Then his mother gets that faraway look in her eyes and tells me about her undergrad days when she “played Magic” (ya, I prefer them young) and how it started getting too expensive to keep up with the good cards, so she stopped playing. Then she disappeared into the basement and came back with a shoebox full of cards. Mostly Revised, 4th Ed and the like. She looked through them in a state that I can only describe as nostalgic bliss.

After a while she looked up and said something like “I should start playing again.” and “You should try it, I think you’d like it.” and finally “Let’s get some cards!” I said something like “Isn’t that kind of dorky?” Pot, meet kettle.

This was just before the Planar Chaos launch weekend. On launch day we dropped her son off to play in the tournament. We talked to the shop owner and looked at some cards. We looked at some of the recent precon decks. We settled on a couple of Ravnica block decks. I chose Simic (UG graft). I can’t remember for sure what she went with, but I believe it was Orzov (BW). And so we played. A lot. Her son taught us how to play. We played. We consulted the comprehensive rules. We read articles on the mothership. We taught her son how to play correctly (he learned from friends around the lunch table at school).

Our early days were very much like the stories you hear of the game’s early days. We visited local shops, and flipped through their binders. We bought cards that would work with our decks (mainly green in my case). Our decks grew into a massive collection of fairly random 1-ofs. Mine reached around 125 cards before we stumbled on the rational for sticking to the 60 card minimum. Thinking about it, my early deck resembled an unfocused EDH deck.

It’s intersting to think back to when our combined card collection fit into an 800-count storage box with dividers for each color (plus artifact & land). Then we moved to an 800-count for each color. That was a big step. As we got more serious, so did our storage. We switched to binders: One per set, a playset of 2 cards of each page face. I saw that one of the kids at the Gametronics (the local shop where we learned so much about the game … a bit thanks to Matt, Jerry, and the rest of the regulars for spending so much time talking to us and answering all our questions) was putting cards in the corners and edges. That left the center empty. I wrote a program to generate a PDF of inserts (below). As soon as each new set was available on gatherer, I’d load it into my program and print inserts. Then cut them out and put together the binder.

In time (probably about when Shards of Alara came out) I got interested in EDH (now Commander) and began acquiring 1x older sets. When I sold my collection (out of necessity, not desire) I had a nice collection going back to Arabian Knights (with a handfull of missing sets). which occupied a moderate sized bookcase.

But I digress: back to the history. Soon we were going to FNM. We drove 4 hours and spent a couple nights in a hotel for the Futuresight prerelease (we later did the same for Lorwyn). We were hooked. When it went on sale two weeks later we bought two cases and assembled a play set each (and remember, this was 3 months after we bought our first precon and started learning how to play). We did the same with 10th Ed. and Lorwyn, and even backfilled with Coldsnap and the rest of Timespiral block.

We were a magic playing family. One Christmas I got her sets of Alpha Serra Angels and Hypnotic Spectors.

We’ve since split up and so I don’t know whether she’s still playing or not. I’m pretty sure her son is as I see pics of him on the local shop’s FaceBook page, and (after a short hiatus) so am I.

We may not be together anymore, but I owe her a great deal for introducing me to the game.

I took my UW Blightsteel deck to FNM tonight and finished the night at 2-3.

Since the deck pretty much hinges around getting a Collosus into play, it is easily hosed by Memoricide targeting the colossus. In the face of this, Celestial Colonnade and Inkmoth Nexus are good backups.

Most games were pretty routine, but there were a few couple plays that stick in my mind.

In my match against a mono black deck, two things were notable. First, game one went so long that I was able to hardcast a Collosus! Near the end of game two I had a Collosus in play. My opponent cast Black Sun’s Zenith for 6, dropping the Collosus to a 5/5. I attacked with it and he blocked, absorbing a couple points. I think I got 3 points of poison through that time. Following combat I used Shape Anew to exchange the tapped and weakened Collosus for a fresh one that was ready and able to block. The game ended on my next turn when I got through the rest of the 10 required points of poison.

The last match provided a epic series of plays.

At the end of game one I had Jace and Elspeth in play. I used Master’s Call (at the end of his turn) and Shape Anew (in my main phase) to get a Collosus. On his next turn he stole it with Corrupted Conscience. On my turn I bounced the stolen Collosus to my hand with Jace before he had the chance to use it against me. Another Shape Anew on the remaining Myr for a second Collosus. He then steals my Jace with Volition Reins and uses it to bounce the Collosus to my hand. I now have both of them in my hand, right where I don’t want them. I have a Jace in hand as well, and Elspeth is able to ultimate. I do that, blowing up the Jace he’s controlling along with his creatures. I have 10 mana on the board, including am Inkmoth Nexus, and at least 4 blue sources. I play Jace and use him to Brainstorm, putting both Collosus on top of the library and getting me a Shape Anew (careful to leave an Island untapped). I then tap the Nexus for mana and use that to animate it, and then cast Shape Anew to trade it for a Collosus. On his turn, he tried the Corrupted Conscience trick again, but this time I had a Turn Aside in hand that Jace had just gotten me. And that was GG.

Next week I should have the last cards I want for a post MBS build of my BG Infect deck. I may take that, or tighten up this Blightsteel deck: loading it up with more counters and likely ditching the White Sun’s Zeniths.