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

Update 1.3.1

Hello everybody!

Another update is out: Call it the Avacyn Restored Improvement Update. Two weeks ago, we were only guessing about each card’s strength on the battle field (and stack ;-)), but now we have learned our lessons. We know how fast (or slow) the format really is and how each new ability works in practice. The Soulbond ability is much more “stable” than anticipated, also due to the inherent lack of removal spells in the set. And Miracle spells… well, their effects seriously affect the board, but also expect to hard cast them more often than you would hope. All in all, that is the first and main improvement that comes with this update, the revised card ratings for a more realistic drafting experience.

Also we had the opportunity to sit down with former MTG pro Sergio Salas from Barcelona in order to discuss the AI. This invaluable feedback has pointed us to a weakness in the AI, which until now ignored mana curve considerations. From now on, all AI players are attracted to drafting a “perfect” mana curve. We hope that works out well. Thanks again, Sergio!

Apart from those gameplay issues, we also fixed a rare bug that caused the booster generator to crash due to an error while loading the database. Should you be one of the very few unlucky ones, we apologize and ask you to please update to the current version 1.3.1.

And that’s it again for now. We might be offline for a month or so, but when we come back, expect to see a new sweet feature: Convert pool to deck. Select the best 23 cards, move the rest to the sideboard and add basic lands. Until then, happy drafting!

Cheers,

AweDroid

Update 1. 3 – Avacyn Restored

Hey there!

We have another update for you: Avacyn Restored drafting! With prerelease events taking place all over the world, we thought it was about time to launch an MTG Booster update on the very same day the new set hits stores shelves. And here it is, ready for drafting.

Only time will tell the real strength of each Avacyn card, so for now the simulated players pick according to their judgment of how cards will perform, without those cards having seen play ever. So, if some opponent’s picks are a bit off, please be patient. In about two weeks there will be another update to improve opponent’s gameplay, as the experience with the new set will allow us to up-rate and down-rate some of the cards. Especially the new Miracle mechanism will have to be explored.

More new features in MTG Booster: You can now freely choose the editions you want to draft. We have configured some typical presets (triple Innistrad, triple Avacyn Restored and Dark Ascension-Innistrad-Innistrad), but if you want to draft a different crazy format, go ahead.

Also we have received some complaints about booster randomness. Players have reported that the same cards keep showing up in the boosters. Truth is, we have not been able to confirm and reproduce the bug. We tested this, programming a routine that opens 1000 virtual packs and counts how often each card shows up. The analysis shows that every card in the set shows up in a frequency according to its rarity. In any case we have done some research on the topic of pseudo-random number generation and have replaced the random-generator we were using by a random-generator widely accepted as the one with most randomized results. In any case, please let us know if boosters are still un-random and in what way (repeating rares? Repeating double-sided cards? Always the same common artifact?) and we will investigate the case. 

And that’s it for now. If you have any question or suggestion, do not hesitate to write us an email. Enjoy drafting Avacyn Restored and take care.

Cheers,

AweDroid

Update 1.2.3 – FNM mode available

Hi everyone!

Two weeks ago we launched the Dark Ascension update and as we were overwhelmed by your (generally positive) feedback. But everybody asked us the same thing: Why can’t one simulate a real draft, like on Friday Night Magic, consisting of first pack Dark Ascension and second and third pack Innistrad. Well, here it is, update 1.2.3 gives you the opportunity to practice for your FNM drafts. :-) After updating the app you probably won’t notice any obvious difference. In fact, in order to draft DKA-ISD-ISD, please open the menu, click preferences and mark the “FNM mode” checkbox. That one disables the triple Dark Ascension mode, which still remains the default setting.

What else? In this new version, we revised several features to improve game play. First of all, we revised all card ratings, as experience has shown that some cards are less powerful than they first seemed and others are much more effective than initially expected. Also, the simulated opponents now draft smarter: We fine-tuned their “desire” to stick to their archetype and colors drafted so far, but at the same they are flexible enough to not constantly pass powerful cards. And lastly, we improved the booster generation algorithm. Up to now, boosters were 100% random, which meant that despite all improbabilities you could open a booster with all uncommons and rares being of the same color. That is hardly realistic, so from now on we dismiss all boosters that are color-wise unbalanced.

Unless anything goes terribly wrong, the next time you will hear from us will be at the Avacyn Restored release. Until then, please drop us a note if you have any suggestion for new features or if you have technical problems with the app and enjoy practicing for your FNM sessions!

Cheers,
AweDroid

Release 1.2 – Dark Ascension

Hello everybody, dear MTG Booster community!

A new release is out! Finally! It has taken us way longer than expected and we would like to apologize for that, but the good news is: Dark Ascension is now available for drafting.

And that is not the only new feature! It is no longer necessary to download all card images prior to first use. That means in four clicks and ten seconds you are good to go and ready for drafting. And if you prefer downloading all pictures at home where you have wireless LAN, no problem at all. Just download them all at once, using the new download service we have implemented (open the menu and click “Load card images”).

Aside from Dark Ascension, the other most notable improvement we have made in this new version is the draft algorithm itself. CPU players draft in a more realistic manner now. If you still believe that CPU players underestimate certain cards or draft archetypes, please let us know and we will keep improving their artificial intelligence.

Okay, so much for the good news. Unfortunately we also have some bad news as well. As you might be aware, after years of ignoring mobile app development, Wizards of the Coast have finally released their own Magic: the Gathering app. For now it is only available for iPhone, but it won’t be long till it comes out on Android. Why is that a concern at all? Well, it turns out that WotC have started to take legal action and forced Apple and Google to remove most MTG apps, claiming that those apps were infringing copyrights. As of now, we are still on Google Play, so that is good news. But still we do not want to go on just like nothing had happened and that is why we have revised MTG Booster and have removed all copyrighted logos and graphics we could renounce. We are sorry that with this update the app has lost some of its original beauty and “Magic-ness”, but we feel that this is the only way to keep this project alive. 

For further reading on this issue, we recommend the following blog post by Platty Soft, which describes quite well the dilemma that independent MTG app developers like us are in. Here it is:

 http://www.plattysoft.com/2012/01/30/why-there-are-no-good-mtg-free-apps-for-android/

And that's all for now. As always we would like to encourage you to participate by giving us feedback, it is greatly appreciated. Until then, happy Easter and have fun drafting Dark Ascension!

Cheers,
AweDroid

Release 1.1.4 - 5000 Downloads

Hi everyone,

First of all, we are happy to announce the 5,000th download of MTG Booster, only very few months after initial release. Thank you so much to every one of you that downloaded the app!

Since we have received some great feedback from some of you, we owe you some kind of "road map" of our future releases. So, here it is:

Version 1.1.4: Released today, we (hopefully) managed to fix all remaining stability issues, most of them caused when the app was not closed properly but instead just moved to the background. Anyway, the app should be very stable by now, any of you that encountered issues like crashes should give this new version a try (actually version 1.1.3 was already a HUGE step in terms of stability)!

Version 1.2: We have already started to work on this one and will get it released in a couple of weeks (quite a precise prediction, we know). That version will include the latest MTG set Dark Ascension. Having to support multiple editions comes along with very deep structural changes in the code (for example a new user would not be happy to be required a 40MB initial download just in order to generate a booster). That is why we are not sure if that next update will have many more features apart from the new edition - which we want to release as quickly as possible without any delays due to new features. Because we know how excited you are to draft with the new expansion...

Version 1.3: Work on that will start once that version 1.2 runs smoothly (whenever that will be). On that version we want to improve the overall user experience. In fact, that release will include many of the suggestions we have received from all of you. Among the most notable features we are planning in that version is "Booster to Deck" (choosing the best cards of your drafted pool and fill up the remaining slots with basic lands) and somehow include card prices.

And that's all for now. As always we would like to encourage you to participate by giving us invaluable feedback, it is greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
AweDroid