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

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