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
I love your app and the improvements you keep adding. They're always just what I've been looking for, but before sending cash your way, i have to ask, is your usage of the card images in this manor ok under copyright laws once momey gets involved? Id hate to see you sunk
ReplyDeleteBah. Damned phone
DeleteI love your app and the improvements you keep adding. They're always just what I've been looking for, but before sending cash your way, i have to ask, is your usage of the card images in this manner ok under copyright laws once money gets involved? Id hate to see you torpedoed by wotc, OR going ahead without their blessing
ReplyDeleteHey Psychosmiley,
DeleteThanks for adressing your concern. I’m not a lawyer myself and basing my studies more on google than on anything else, but let me try to explain anyway.
From my understanding, there is a huge difference between copyrighted symbols and the products of a company (stuff the company actually wants to sell). For example you shouldn’t use a Coca-Cola logo in your app, but you can include pictures of coca-cola cans all day long and shouldn’t get into trouble for that. And as you can see, we carefully removed all mana symbols and MTG logos from our app, just to make sure. Which leaves card images and card texts, which are obviously the intellectual property of Wizards.
Regarding money: Money does not influence the situation a lot, as long as it flows into the right direction. MTG fan apps should be (and so far are) tolerated by Wizards as long as they do not make Wizards lose money and ideally even promote playing the game (and in consequence allowing Wizards to sell more cards). So it is like sticking the ground rules: Even without official permission, make Magic more popular without stepping into Wizards core business and they tolerate you. The day that Wizards will publish a drafting app, we might have to shut down our app, but so far nothing points toward Wizards developing a drafting app. In fact the opposite seems to be the case as they removed their own deckbuilding app called Toolbox from google play.
What else could be legally relevant? Card images. If you are really picky (and I think the law is), you don’t pay for the card images. Firstly, the card images do not ship with the app but instead are downloaded from public servers. Secondly you can see all M12 and M13 images if you use the “EDITION” and the “BOOSTER” button. So you are actually paying for a service, not for the cards (the service would be allowing you to practice with the cards and play against our draft AI – this is exactly where actually a lot of our effort goes into).
Lastly you can stroll through the iTunes store and Google Play and you will find an enormous amount of MTG apps that cost money. In fact on the iTunes store there’s an app that has been doing for ages what we just started: Allowing you to practice drafts for free and unlocking new sets through in-app-purchases (they charge 3 times our price though). Not that this makes anything more legal, but at least we can see that it’s common practice.
Hope to have clarified some issues!
Cheers,
Alex
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much. Very well written response, consider me sold!
ReplyDelete