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CaptnIrony

CaptnIrony

frostymoose said:
The guy who ran magiccards.info didn't want to run the site anymore. Here's his own message about it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/94aa62/scryfall_acquires_magiccardsinfo/e3kt0iu/
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Everyone is aware of everything. The issue is they didn't do what is often done in the situation, where you keep both sites. MCI could be still used, and updated, which makes it better than before. It could also be kept running, but never updated, slowly fading into obscurity, with its code used to upgrade Scryfall. Or you could acquire it, instantly shut it down, so that everyone is forced to use your site.
 
Velrun

Velrun

Onderzeeboot said:
Still, I wonder, what use do you have for knowing when exactly a card appeared? I'm just wondering, what is that knowledge useful for. The same thing for having one page where you can see all cards of a certain name. There's exactly five cards for which all the prints don't fit on a single page, namely the five basic lands. The only other cards that come "close" are Evolving Wilds, Giant Growth, Llanowar Elves, and Serra Angel, and those have all been printed less than 40 times. Since Scryfall fits 60 images on a page, it's going to take a while before those will hit that threshold.

Harping on these two downsides seems, to me, like nitpicking. The likelihood of either of these downsides ever affecting my use of Scryfall in a meaningful way is basically zero percent.
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I understand that it is nitpicking. I agree that I am nitpicking.

However if you look at it from my perspective: It was the only thing that I was using that page for. It is also, to my knowledge, the only thing besides large images that those pages did better than other Magic pages.

To answer your question: I use those functions for my cube. All my Basic lands are different and carefully selected over the years. Each pick during drafting gives the player two cards. Usually a mono-colored card and the corresponding Basic land. The spells and lands are tied together (An Amonkhet spell gives an Amonkhet Basic land) and all Basic lands are pimped. Some are full art foil from Unhinged, Zendikar, Battle for Zendikar, Judge, Amonkhet, Hour of Devastation or Unstable. Some are Guru. Some are promotional foils from different set. And finally some are altered to be full art. I keep an order on these lands digitally on Cubetutor where they are ordered by their release date.

It is that last part that is quite important to me. I caaaan use Scryfall and now I am going to have to but I really preferences Magiccards’s Basic land functions.

The world doesn’t revolve around my head but in this case I wish it did :p Or at least that Magiccards had kept their page or that Skynet..sorry Scryfall had taken over but KEPT Magiccards the way it used to be.
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
This was obviously done in mutual agreement between both parties. Maintaining one codebase is already a big enough job, I honestly am not surprised they chose to close the old site down. Saves them a lot of maintenance work, which means they can spend more time improving their main site. These are also two sites that serve more or less exactly the same purpose. Despite some features in either site not being present in the other, there really is no use case from the developer's point of view to maintain two functionally identical sites, other than to appease long time users of the site that was shut down. Now, fostering some goodwill is nice and all, but they've got a perfectly serviceable alternative, and there's an actual cost to keeping the old site up and running.
 
frostymoose

frostymoose

CaptnIrony said:
Everyone is aware of everything.
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I have seen no reason to believe that.

CaptnIrony said:
The issue is they didn't do what is often done in the situation, where you keep both sites. MCI could be still used, and updated, which makes it better than before. It could also be kept running, but never updated, slowly fading into obscurity, with its code used to upgrade Scryfall. Or you could acquire it, instantly shut it down, so that everyone is forced to use your site.
Click to expand...


I think it's reasonable to assume (yes, I'm assuming) that the additional traffic scryfall will get from magiccards.info would not make up for the additional work of maintaining both databases in perpetuity. I don't think scryfall is a behemoth business venture. They serve no ads, and appear to run solely on referral links to card vendors.

From the language in the scryfall blog post (which was posted in this thread and I can reasonably assume people participating in this thread know about) it sounds like scryfall did buy magiccards.info from its former owner. It does not benefit scryfall, as the new proprietors to leave an out-of-date magiccards.info online. It reflects poorly on them by not updating it and they incur all of the costs of running it, without the benefits of revenue from traffic to scryfall.

I guess what it will boil down to here is that we'll have to agree to disagree. There is nothing I've ever wanted to do with scryfall that I was unable to accomplish.

Also, Velrun that sounds really wild. Do drafters have to get all their basics that way? No basic land box?
 
Velrun

Velrun

frostymoose said:
Also, Velrun that sounds really wild. Do drafters have to get all their basics that way? No basic land box?
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Yep. The Basic Land Box is gathering dust :p

There are rarely any large upsides or downsides to this model but there are mostly upsides. About the downisde: I have only ever once seen a player not being able to include the Basic lands he wanted and that was the first time I ran this model. It was largely my fault because I actually forgot 60 % of the cube and has accidentally signed up 10 players for the tournament. This has never happened before or since. That player was not super happy that he could not play the deck he wanted and I understand that situation. All 8 players got the next tournament for free to pay for my mistake.

The biggest upsides to this model are:
1. It feels so much cooler to pick a card if you also get the right Basic land attached. Example:

Capture.PNG

2. Sometimes a draft pick can open up a new archetype because the player will get a full package with only one pick. Example:

1.PNG

3. Token-creating cards will include the right token and will not have to be fetched from a pile of tokens. The player will get the token right away. Example:

2.PNG

4. It also provides a higher ceiling for skill-rewarding plays. No example to show here :)
 
Aston

Aston

How do you put all this together? Are the two cards in the same sleeve? It sounds like an interesting thing to explore.
 
Rowan_CB

Rowan_CB

I'm also curious about the mechanics! I've wondered about putting tokens into the same sleeves as their generators, just because I'm always annoyed when my players don't want to take the time to fetch the proper token!
 
Velrun

Velrun

Aston said:
How do you put all this together? Are the two cards in the same sleeve? It sounds like an interesting thing to explore.
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It took some time. And tons of money.

I had a printer company make some black-colored postcards for me. I had a ‘creative’ company make some customized sleeves for me. I still had to cut them a little bit though even after having them designed. Imagine the cards right next to each other like the pictures I attached above. They open on the side that is touching the other card. So the left Basic land sleeve opens on the right side that is touching the Jace. And Jace’s sleeve is opening on the left side that touches the Island.

Inside the oversized customized sleeve there are the black postcards to stiffen the sleeves. You can’t feel them other than the enhanced strength from the postcards. Had they not been there it would have been a poor experience holding soft wiggling cards in your hands like that. Especially when a booster pack is somewhere between 12 and 16 cards depending on which cube you run. Mine has 14/pack.

Inside each of the cusomized sleeves there is room for 6 sleeved cards; 3 on the left and 3 on the right. This is also a way I am ‘squadroning’ Squadron Hawks and the likes. If a card makes several tokens like Alara Elspeth there are both the Emblem and the corresponding Soldier tokens inside the package.

I will take a picture next time I have the cube at hand.
 
Velrun

Velrun

Didn't know where to post this, so here goes:

Does anyone know if there is a website that is better than www.starcitygames.com when it comes to the quality of the foil artwork?

I mean the actual artwork of the digital foil card, you can find on the webpage.

Example: www.scryfall.com has much higher quality artwork compared to www.starcitygames.com when it comes to normal non-foil cards. Here are two pictures to show the difference:

SCG:
DauntlessBodyguard.jpg

Scryfall:
Dauntless.jpg
 
Peter LaCara

Peter LaCara

Velrun said:
It took some time. And tons of money.

I had a printer company make some black-colored postcards for me. I had a ‘creative’ company make some customized sleeves for me. I still had to cut them a little bit though even after having them designed. Imagine the cards right next to each other like the pictures I attached above. They open on the side that is touching the other card. So the left Basic land sleeve opens on the right side that is touching the Jace. And Jace’s sleeve is opening on the left side that touches the Island.

Inside the oversized customized sleeve there are the black postcards to stiffen the sleeves. You can’t feel them other than the enhanced strength from the postcards. Had they not been there it would have been a poor experience holding soft wiggling cards in your hands like that. Especially when a booster pack is somewhere between 12 and 16 cards depending on which cube you run. Mine has 14/pack.

Inside each of the cusomized sleeves there is room for 6 sleeved cards; 3 on the left and 3 on the right. This is also a way I am ‘squadroning’ Squadron Hawks and the likes. If a card makes several tokens like Alara Elspeth there are both the Emblem and the corresponding Soldier tokens inside the package.

I will take a picture next time I have the cube at hand.
Click to expand...
Are we *sure* we're not on Balduvian Trading Post?
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Off the top of my head, isn't that the art for...



Edit: Hehehe, I have recently been updating my Bant token commander deck, I believe I cut this card, or had it in my maybe pile. I don't know. Anyway, I was right! :D
 
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