Update 1.7 – Holiday Cube

Ho ho ho!

Is it Christmas already? No! But while everybody is getting into the mood, here we are releasing another update. Holiday 2012 Cube, completely FREE!!!

Finally Wizards have decided to bring the Power Nine to the online cube. Black Lotus, the Moxen, Time Walk, Ancestral Recall, Timetwister and Library of Alexandria, … You name it, it’s in there. So if you want to get ready for the online tournaments starting December 19^th, practice drafting with MTG Booster.

And that’s all for now. You will hear from us again when Gatecrash comes out (January 26^th). Until then, happy drafting, merry Christmas and a happy new year.

Cheers,

AweDroid

Update 1.6 – Return to Ravnica AND Cube!!!

Hi everyone!

Another update double feature is out: Return to Ravnica AND free Cube drafting!

Two days before long-expected Return to Ravnica comes out, we got our hands on the card texts and images, so now you can even use MTG Booster to practice before the pre-release events! Just in case you open MTG Booster and can’t find the new edition: so far we only have English texts and images, so if you want to play now, change your user card settings to English or wait one or two days and Return to Ravnica will automatically appear in your language when the translations are finished.

And in case you are not familiar with cube drafting: It is played exactly like a normal booster draft, but it has one major difference: Instead of opening regular booster packs (with 1 rare, 3 uncommons and a lot of commons), packs are being generated randomly from a pool of the 720 strongest Magic cards ever printed (we are using the latest Magic Online Cube list we could find, July '12). There is no restriction on colors, rarity etc. and each card can appear only once in all opened "packs". Cube only works on English, mainly because most cards are so old that they don’t exist in all languages our app supports.

Another feature request that we finally have included in MTG Booster is long-clicking on image thumbnails! If you play MTG Booster in grid mode, longclick on an image and you will see it in full screen. No more eye pain.

And that’s all. Ravnica AND Cube, we hope you enjoy both. Please let us know if anything is not working as expected. And don’t forget to “like” us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

Cheers,

AweDroid

Update 1.5 – Sealed Deck Mode

Hello everybody!

Another update is out, with its top feature being the new mode “Sealed Deck”. It might not be quite as exciting as simulating a booster draft, but it should still be fun and help you prepare for pre-release and release events, where sealed deck is a popular format. In case you are not familiar with this format, it consists of opening 6 booster packs at once and building the best 40-card deck from the cards you found.

Sealed Deck is not the only new feature though. We also would like to be closer to the MTG Booster community, so we set up a Facebook page and also created a Twitter account. It would be awesome if you “like” us on Facebook and if you follow us on Twitter. And if you have comments, feature requests or questions and prefer not to post it here in the blog, just let us know via Facebook (or email).

We also included a feature that should help beginners find a good card during a draft. When you click the “Suggestion” button, the AI gives you a list of the top 3 cards it would recommend picking. Of course, the AI is not human and could never give an accurate advice like a real magic player, so please consider that this feature is not for pros.

Also, this update includes support for a very old block: Ravnica City of Guilds, Dissension and Guildpact. We are simply curious if players would enjoy drafting with classic sets. So it actually is a test: If lots of players download the Ravnica block, we will provide more classic popular sets (maybe Alpha, the Urza block, you name it), but if nobody really cares, we are likely to stick to new releases. As always, please don’t be upset about the 99c price tag as it would hardly be a valid popularity comparison (M13 vs. RAV) if it was free. OK?

More new features: You now have color distribution statistics for your drafted or sealed decks, which should help you tweak your main and splash colors. If you want to manually set the basic lands, the mana symbol distribution graphics should be helpful. We also improved some performance issues, so we hope the app starts and loads decks faster now. Last but not least, the wishlist is now exportable to MWS.

And that’s it for now. Please let us know if anything is not working as expected. And don’t forget to “like” us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See you there!

Cheers,

AweDroid

Update 1.4.1 – Deckbuilding fixed

Hi!

This is just a quick note for you regarding another update we published last night. Turns out that deckbuilding didn’t work well when you sorted the cards, resulting in card cloning in your sideboard as well as in your main deck. Now we hope the issue is fixed and you can reliably use all deckbuilding features.

Apart from the deckbuilding issues, we also improved sorting, added a quick message of your spell count when building your deck (so you don’t have to open the deck statistics for counting), fixed the MWS export, improved the tablet graphics, fixed a grid issue and removed lands from the mana curve. Special thanks to all the feedback we got with bug reports and ideas for future improvements. This really helped us tremendously and kept our spirits up!

Finally thanks to all of you that have supported us by downloading the M13 edition and installing Rage of Bahamut. Unfortunately it seems that we have outraged some players with those 99 cents who gave us a 1-star rating on Google Play in return as an act of revenge. We can only repeat what we said before:

1. We are not doing anything illegal, because we are only selling a “service” to draft.
2. Our “competitors” on various platforms are a lot more expensive
3. Really, it’s just 99 cents. Winning even a single booster pack on your FNM event through practicing with MTG Booster will return your “investment” by 4!
4. Developing MTG Booster has taken hundreds of hours. Please consider the tremendous effort we are putting into this project in our free time.

Closing words: Those of you that respect our new path, we would kindly ask you to go to Google Play and submit a fair rating to MTG Booster, as all those 1-star insults start to hurt us a little. We would appreciate that.

Cheers,

AweDroid

Update 1.4 – M13, M12, deck building features and so much more

Hi everyone!

We know it’s been a while since the last time you heard from us, but we took our time and are proud to announce that this update is HUGE: Deck building abilities, deck statistics, sample hand, Magic 2012 and Magic 2013 support, foil cards and the list goes on…

When you finish drafting probably you are always looking at your card pool and asking yourself how good the actual deck would be and which cards would be relegated to the sideboard. Now you can exactly do that. By default your complete card pool forms part of your deck. Then, by clicking on a card you can relegate it to your sideboard. As a rule of thumb you should keep sideboarding cards until you have approximately 23 cards left in your main deck. Then open the “land manager” and add lands (you can have the app automatically calculate the ideal number for you). And that’s it, you have your deck ready. Look at its statistics and its mana curve, draw a sample hand of 7 cards and export it to Magic Workstation.

If you’ve gotten this far, you might have noticed that foil (premium) cards are now supported. In fact they always were, but without any visual clues. The app always took the existence of foil cards into consideration when generating boosters and that’s why you would sometimes end up with a booster pack with 2 basic lands, 2 rares or 4 uncommons, but now you can finally see the foil cards with a visual effect.

What else is new? Right! When you open MTG Booster, you will see a popup asking you to download Rage of Bahamut. We are totally against random irrelevant popup-ads, but Rage of Bahamut is actually a trading card game (and an extremely popular one, too!), so we thought that some of you might actually want to try it. And if you don’t, just mark the checkbox “don’t show again” and the popup will never bother you again. Promised!

So many new features, but let’s come to the painful part of today’s post: paid content. MTG Booster is free and will always remain free, but from now on, new sets require a purchase from Google Play to unlock the content in MTG Booster. Priced 99 cents in the US, this is about one tenth of what you would have to spend on playing one single round of drafting at your local store. And if you think that this price is abusive, please check out in the iTunes store what iPhone users have to pay. We think and honestly hope that you find that those 99 cents are worth it. For many many months we have been putting endless hours of programming efforts into this tool, on weekends and after work and now we finally believe that we have created a product of some value, deserving a minor monetary reward. If you reckon the contrary, please let us know and we will try to improve. We honestly hope to not offend anyone with these measures and apologize if we do!

Cheers,

AweDroid