Update 1.8.1

Hi everyone,

Still enjoying Gatecrash drafts? We just launched a minor update for MTG Booster (version 1.8.1) that most importantly improves the drafting behaviour of the simulated opponents for Gatecrash. As it always happens, some of the cards were highly underrated and others overrated. Now everything should be fine.

Apart from the Gatecrash revision, we also added some small improvements. If you draft and build your deck in the “grid” mode (where you can see several cards on the screen), the sample hand simulator also uses that mode. That’s a great plus especially for tablets that up till now could display the sample hand only in full-screen mode. 10-inch magic cards just didn’t make any sense. As requested by some users, you can also now draw additional cards one by one in the same simulator. It’s a good way to test your mulligan skills.

The update is rounded up by a new sorting feature (by card type: Planeswalker, Creatures, Instants, etc.) and by automatically remembering the last view setting you were using.

Unless something unexpected happens, you’ll hear from us again in April when the last set “Dragon’s Maze” of the Ravnica block comes out.

Until then,
Happy Drafting!

Update 1.8 – Gatecrash

Hello everyone!

News from MTG Booster: Record breaking ten days before the official release and 3 days before prerelease-events, we are happy to have finished the MTG Booster update for the new Gatecrash set, the second set in the Return to Ravnica block.

As always, since nobody has played with all those new cards and game mechanics yet, some of the AI’s picks might be a bit off. That’s why you can expect to see another game balancing update in 2 or 3 weeks, when we have less uncertainty about some cards’ real quality. After all we can only speculate whether the new abilities Extort, Bloodrush, Evolve, Battalion and Cipher rule in practice or not.

And that’s if for now, we’ll keep this post a short one. Time for Gatecrash drafting!

Cheers,

AweDroid

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