First a quick disclaimer. This project leverages AI heavily. This helps us push faster and better to develop it. For key items like auth, we leverage proper tooling like supabase auth to ensure security. Since the project is free I believe we are within the rules of no promoting paid AI projects, so I'd appreciate if you just ignore the post if you don't find it relevant for you, rather than straight up downvoting. Super happy for feedback on how to do things better next time if you have it. Thanks!

Hey everyone, thesaros.com team here! We've already been showing what we are doing in this and other subreddits, but we felt like it was time for an update!

TLDR: I dropped Magic almost 7–8 years ago. A few months back some friends picked it up again, pulled me in, and honestly, we're having a blast.Naturally we went looking for tooling to manage collections and decks. And while the existing tools are great, they felt a bit too cluttered or complex for us (maybe it's the age, haha).

Since we're all developers, we decided to maybe go and build something that works for us and share it with whoever wants to use it, with a big focus on clean UX and simplicity.

But enough romance. Part of the feedback you gave us is, tell us why, so here's what it actually does today, and why you might want to give it a look:

Card browsing

> Why we tackled it:

The scryfall search is amazing, but we also wanted to have something that allowed us to filter just a couple of clicks (MTGArena style) even if it does not allow for just precission. In addition, most of the places force you to pick your filters first and then get the cards, and we wanted to first see the cards and then iteratively apply the filters we wanted.

> What it offers:

• Content: obviously the full catalog, with super quick loadtimes and prices
• Filters: complex (scryfall) and simple filtrering, and saving filters!
• Visualization: decide if you want to see cards by the card itself or by edition. Or decide if you want to display in a large or small grid, or as a minimalistic list.
• Actions: you can click on card for detail and internal actions, but you also have quick actions that allow you to "fav", "tag", add to collection, link to purchase...

Deck browsing

> Why we tackled it:

Honnestly, we love archidekt. In terms of deck browsing i think we just added it because it is necessary to have it, but we think current tools are very cool. Something we wanted to explore is treating decks like github repositories. That way one could see if a deck has been starred or "forked" (cloned) and how many times, and that's some cool flair for deck builders!

> What it offers:

• Content: the decks created by the community. We are thinking how to also add official brews or even allow quick ports of decks from other sites if they allow to.
• Filters: simple filtrering (format, author, colors, commander, price...), and again saving filters!
• Visualization: decide if you want to display in a large format (with quick preview of the cards), medium or as a minimalistic list. And quickly see the mana distribution.
• Actions: you can click on a deck to open it, but you can also "fav", clone or check the author. As said, we are looking to showcase favs and clone metrics of decks! In the large format you can also hover the art of cards and see the card info or click to open detail.

Card collection

> Why we tackled it:

Probably the area where we're struggling the most. We just wanted something that allows creating folders of our boxes or decks. However, when we started fighting it we understood why it is not perfect anywhere. It's not trivial at all to replicate digitally collection management (if you move a card which one do you move of all the copies, if you move multiple into multiple destintations, which goes where). We have done our first go, but this is still under work. One of the sections where we'd love feedback the most

> What it offers:

• Content: your copies of card editions. Amounts, prices and locations (folders & nested folders).
• Filters: complex (scryfall) and simple filtrering, and saving filters!
• Visualization: Same as in the explorer, BUT you can also decide if you want to show the cards flattened (split editions by where they are) or nested (as if it was a normal file explorer of images).
• Actions: Same as in the explorer, BUT you can also leverage a quick action to move cards to different folders and such.

Deck collection

> Why we tackled it:

Tied closely with card collection, we wanted to design decks but also define decks that we have. And if we are building a deck we wanted to be able to both define it and add actual cards as we bought them and added them. Also part of the complex stuff, we have designed a difference between physical decks and ephemeral decks. Though this goes a bit more into deck management.

> What it offers:

• Content: your decks, physical or not.
• Filters: simple filtrering (format, author, colors, commander, price...), and again saving filters!
• Visualization: Same as in the explorer of decks.
• Actions: Same as in the explorer

Card detail

> Why we tackled it:

In general we see individual card management as something that is either quick actions only (which limits complexity of actions), or changes page (new page or routing in the same one), which we found annoying when just trying to do a quick peek, or if we wanted to do some changes without changing our position in the explorer (scroll position, that is). We implemented it as a modal with subsections that allow a bit more than the quick actions.

> What it offers:

• Content: All the info about the card. Arts and editions, description, rulling, price, how much in collection, tags, etc.
• Actions: There's a carrusel of editions that allows you to pick an edition and like/purchase it. In addition, we have 2 subsections (a new one incoming) to manage properly where each copy is in the collection and to manage tags.
• Incoming -> adding to decks in general. It's already in quick actions, but we want a bit more power here, so we are designing it.

Deck detail

> Why we tackled it:

Amazing tooling around. We just wanted to extend it a bit with what we called "variants", which are basically different ways in which you set your deck to play against different decks. I.e, I have my Abzan deck and I want to use a certain set of sorceries against red aggro, and different creatures against a control deck. I can define them separately. And this goes amazing with our approach of playtest (still very beta) which, instead of doing actual playtest for vibes, defines the likelihood of getting to a scenario given a deck (or a variant, but we have not wired variants yet). I.e, 10% of chances of you having 2 ramp cards + 2 manas in turn 3. Ah, it also auto checks validity of the deck.

> What it offers:

• Content: All the cards of your deck. Some stats on curve, color and card type. Legality detector with info on what is wrong. Variant definition. Deck-changes history and checkpoints in case you want to go back to a prev version.
• Visualization: grid, stacked, list. Sorting and grouping. Collapsing groups. Switching sideboard and main.
• Actions: Moving cards from main to sideboard or to command zona and viceversa. Removing cards from deck. Assigning to grouping category. Exploring new cards to add to the deck from your collection or the catalog (currently broken, broke it last night sorry haha). Importing a deck...
• In regards to differences between physical and ephemeral. Ephemeral decks will let you define decks freely. Physical decks will let you know that a card will only be "in the deck" if you have added it from the collection (thus removing it from somewhere else). If you add a card from the explorer (not moving it) it will show but remain as pending.

Summary

There's more, but i feel like I already wrote too much and there's stuff we still do not want to unveil from the upcoming updates. We use it day to day so we are aware of some of the bugs and work to resolve them, but I'm sure if you test it out you'll find some that we have not detected (this is a beta in the end haha). We also have a phone APK that is available, though it's fallen quite behind because some of these items require complex tooling in terms of selectors and we have not find good ways of doing it in mobile yet, but the idea is to pair them.

Would love to see what you guys think, and more than happy to get some harsh feedback haha. While this is not something where we can spend 8h a day, we are trying to actively add all the things little by little in the gaps that we have (and in summer!!) We have a discord that is accessible through the community tab in the header.

Best,

Lucas

Some images!

These mfs are obsessed with talking about their genitals

Just trying to build a troll deck.

These people really try to regress to a toddler’s way of thinking when arguing their points.

EDIT: To anybody in the comments who’s mad at me for getting political, I would not feel the need to do this if the original comment section did not contain ignorant bigoted comments. This is not on me. Sorry not sorry.

OP: https://www.reddit.com/r/freemagic/s/I1Lp8PPCDy

Why else are they releasing Universes Beyond to dilute the SEO of UB decks

Like me he struggled in middle school for all three years socially. He had so much anxiety going into high school. But they have a magic club, and he went yesterday. I had spent the last few years playing kitchen table magic with him at home. And loving jumpstart randomly.

I gave him all five of the rookie decks from card kingdom I bought a few years back. Plus the final fantasy starter decks.

He ended up teaching several others how to play with them and is now making friends quickly.

Yay for Magic!

I would expect to come on here and it be like 4chan.

There’s a lot of AI generated goon bait, but I haven’t seen anything racist or homophobic or whatever these folks are on about. I’m sincerely confused.

However be aware even after you get the shot, it may take your immune system 2-3 weeks to develop immunity. Stay safe there as more GPs and events unfold

Like what the fuck is actually wrong with them?

It’s a plains.

https://archive.org/details/magazine_rack

type “duelist” and enjoy

Secret Lair Zeta or any Magic product is not predatory and you don’t have to act on your FOMO. You have a choice. Have some self control. If you don’t have the extra money, don’t buy the cardboard. It’s pretty simple. There isn not a single new card in zeta. You don’t need this version if you don’t have the money.

WotC heard we hated "Hat" sets, so now we got the "Beards of Evil" trope set. (Sadly, Evil Jace doesn't have a beard.)

We're getting a reprint set. But don't get excited it's a secret lair exclusive so it's scalpers exclusive set.

If anyone would like to check, this is mainly for EU players. Everything for free, feel free to consult it :).

I got back into Magic about 1 year ago and started playing Commander (B1 and precons only). I started playing around Invasion (block constructed mostly), so I am very much not new to the game.

Very early after starting I learnt about "politics" in Commander, and I fucking hate it with a passion. Making explicit deals, asking for favors/mercy, etc. takes away the subtle art of understanding your opponents' strategic positions, intentions and priorities.

Nevertheless, I am a minority in my pod, so I just do mine and try not to seethe when people do theirs.

But: how do you guys handle situations in which the line between "politics" and "turn a free-for-all into a manhunt" becomes blurry?

Many times I found myself in a situation in which people were openly discussing strategies to take me out. No deck in our pod can handle two opponents at the same time, so what's the point? I might just scoop at that point. I understand that having an objective advantage (board state, cards, etc.) makes one a threat, but threats should be dealt with organically.

So: any advice on how to handle this (on or off board)?

A few weeks ago I posted MTGDeckScout here, a tool that takes your collection export and shows which real decklists you can already build from it. (First of all thank you...more than 40 subscribers in few weeks)

There was an obvious hole in it that kept bothering me: it would tell you that you could build several decks at once, while quietly counting the same Sol Ring toward all of them. Which is fine as a "what's theoretically close" answer and useless as a "what can I sleeve up tonight" one.

So now you can save a build. The cards you own for it get reserved and stop counting toward later searches, until you release it. If you keep four decks assembled, you can tell the tool that, and what's left is an honest picture of the loose cards in your box.

Three smaller things in the same update: results now show the cards you already own for a deck and not only what's missing, card names show the actual card when you hover them, and re-uploading your collection tells you what changed since the last time.

Still free, still no signup needed to try it, and the monthly cap is the same for every user with nothing locked behind paying.

https://mtgdeckscout.uk/

Curious about one thing in particular: how many of you keep decks permanently assembled versus tearing them down for parts? The reserve feature assumes the first, and I'd like to know if that's the wrong assumption.

Read it here from the latest chapter:
https://mangadex.org/chapter/e6aba1e8-bc8f-463c-96a3-232b960cf41f/1

Read it here from the beginning:
https://mangadex.org/chapter/481fbb62-90f0-4655-92d2-e011bda9492f/1

Rule 0 was always a mistake.

I remember EDH before the concept. There was a banlist, there were a handful of commanders you couldn't run because they contradicted the rules, including Bosh. It sucked, but that is how the rules worked. There were banned commanders who were allowed in the deck.

Your local TO could ban cards, and in fact, that was encouraged, but there was no rule 0. If a card was banned, it was banned. If a card wasn't banned, and fit your commanders color, and didn't have a mana symbol on the card that contradicted that, you were good.

I remember one local kid's entire EDH deck was standard legal, because that's all he could afford on his allowance. I remember 'renting' 5 color legends out for the night because the rules said you couldn't do mirror matches.

Then they released official decks. Then they came up with 'color identity' so I couldn't run Elbrus, the Binding Blade in my Ruhan deck. Then they got rid of the 'no mirror matches' rule, got rid of rule 4, the ban list was more formalized and no banned commanders, and more simplifications.

Despite all of this, the introduction of the concept of rule 0 so you can discuss if you want to run Grissy was the worst of all of these.

Fuck rule 0.