Community

Wizards is almost certainly within their legal rights to shut down these third party apps, but that doesn't mean they should, or that people who use those apps should be happy about it.

Shutting down the apps sends a clear signal to the community: If you want to do something with Magic, don't. We'll come after you. And that's an incredibly bad message to send, because the magic community has benefited immensley from third parties creating resources for the game. And so has Wizards.

I mean, consider, say, the variety of single-player drafting simulators out there online. If these hadn't existed, there's no way I would have gotten back into the game--I'd have felt too intimidated to go and draft. WOTC would be out thousands of dollars from me alone. Wizards hasn't gone after those online programs specifically, but if they didn't already exist, and someone was considering making one, they would be a lot less likely to after this move by Wizards.

Then there are all the strategy and article sites. Most are hooked up to stores and have access to card images for that reason, but if a new one opened up that wasn't, would WOTC really want to take it down? Of course not. It's healthy for the game for people to have a place to learn about and discuss the game, even though Wizards has a competing product (DailyMTG). If sites like that didn't exist, we'd never have Commander, which has been a huge moneymaker for Wizards.

Magic is a more fun game to play because of all the third-party resources available to us. When players see an opportunity they go for it. And that's what all these third-party mobile apps did. They said, "Man, it would be sweet if there was a deck builder for iOS." So they made one. And some were indeed great. Stifling that kind of innovation is a bad thing.

WOTC's app could easily blow these other apps out of the water. It already looks like a pretty slick piece of software. I suspect most people who already owned these other apps would have downloaded it anyway--I sure would have, if it had actually been for iPad as advertised. I was eagerly awaiting it. Now, I'm furious and don't want to give them a dime because they're trying to take away something I find useful that enhances my enjoyment of the game. At the very least, they should have extended an olive branch to some of the top apps (Decked, iMTG) and offered a licensing deal of some kind. Yeah, they don't have to. But it would have been the decent thing to do.

Good PR is worth some quantity of money. That's why companies pay PR departments. I kind of doubt that whatever money they're going to make on microtransactions from people using their deck builder is going to be worth it if enough of the people the app is targeting are mad because their other apps, which had features this doesn't, are dead.

Commander damage... but no multiplayer support?









Useless. 

I'd like to see a few additional features from the app:

1.  Price Guide functionality.  Allow the user to use TCGplayer aggregate, SCG, or some other online dealers to price thier cards.  I expect Wizards won't do this because they don't want to officially endorse any single pricing system.  If WoTC can't do this with thier app then they should be especially careful not to shut down other apps on the market that have this functionality.  Example: Magic:TCG, Orcish Librarian, Cards Inventory.

2.  Collection Tracker.  Allow user to keep track of how many cards are in thier collection with a simple "swipe to add" ability.  Example:  Cards Inventory or to a lesser extent iMtG.

3.  Easier search and building functionality on the deck builder.

4.  Judge Section that includes the comprehensive rules, penalty guidelines, layers reminders, banned lists for formats, Oracle link, decklist counter, and draft timer.  Example: MTGJudge, MTG Rules.

I use Decked Builder almost every day, and while I hoped they'd dodge the bullet, I figured the app was living on borrowed time from the get-go. Still sad to hear that it's going to be a shadow of its former self in the near future.

If WOTC is going to apply this kind of pressure to MTG app developers, they should be able to offer a competitive or superior product. Having played with MTG Toolbox, it's clear they haven't, IMO.

- The app is laggy all over, and there are many design choices that seem to sacrifice performance for flashy effects. (Selecting an option from the main menu causes one screen to fade into the next -- those fractions of seconds add up quickly when you're moving around a lot.) I've gotten used to flashy effects with snappy response times on iOS; this app should have jettisoned the flashiness if it couldn't deliver on speed.

- Live-searching the card database as you type is foolish. This is another choice that negatively affects performance -- I don't need matching cards to auto-update everytime I type a new letter in the search bar! This causes typing itself to become frustratingly slow. At the very least, there should be an option to disable live-search-as-you-type. (If it already exists, I haven't been ale to find it.)

- The store locator just opening that page in Safari is pretty useless. This isn't solely this app's fault; that page is horribly out-of-date. I've been burned two or three times hunting down the address of card shops listed on that page, only to get there & find them out of business long, long ago.

- The background textures used throughout the app offer up a lot of visual noise, to a degree that outweighs their aesthetic value. I expect a much "slicker" appearance from a professional iOS app.

- Phyrexian mana symbols seem to be completely non-functional, and don't appear when searching up cards or looking at their rules text in detail, unless you're looking directly at the card image itself.

- When adding cards to a deck, you find an individual card page, hit the "+" button in the top right (not a necessarily obvious function -- why not just use the word "Add" in its place?), toggle the number of cards to be added up & down, then tap a deck in the "Select a deck:" list below. This seems to have 1- or 2-too-many steps. I'm usually only building one deck at a time; it's rare that I want to add 4 of a specific card to multiple decks at once.

- The confusion deepens when you are viewing a deck, and want to remove cards. How to do it? I tried tapping the card I wanted to remove, then... Hm. The only option is the "+" button. Huh?? I want to take cards away, not add them! Worse still, "remove cards" isn't an option from the menu that drops down from the "+" button. Instead, you must back up, tap the "Setttings" gear icon in the deck view, then tap "Edit cards". Doing so introduces some buttons to toggle the number of copies a card up or down. I'd suggest not using the "red circle with minus sign" icon here -- that's meant as a delete symbol across all of iOS; its incusion here made me think tapping it would delete all 4 of a card at once, not lower it by one at a time.

- The way the little home button sticks down from the UI when viewing Daily MTG content is a little annoying -- you can't scroll down as far as you'd like while reading, because that yellow bulge will overlap the middle of a sentence.

- When searching for cards, the app frequently seems to forget my filter settings and defaults to "Standard". This is frustrating when deck building for other formats.

- Currently, I can't seem to return any results for cards from Dark Ascension, despite having that set info downloaded. The filter is set to "All", not "Standard", yet for instance only mono-black Sorin is returned when I search his name (along with his spells from M12). 

Sadly, I feel like this is just the tip of the iceberg for now. I absolutely think the app will improve, but here's my ultimate point: Why not just hire the developer of Decked Builder as a freelancer for MTG Toolbox, or offer to buy his code/app outright? Or if not Decked, one of the other successful apps that's out there. Decked Builder has gotten pretty much everything I want from such an app right; couldn't WOTC have saved themselves some trouble this way? They contracted digital design outside of the company for DOTP -- and the difference shows! I wish WOTC's in-house programs had that level of polish. If contracting outside WOTC meant the app was $.99, $1.99, etc. instead of free, I'd pay the difference in a heartbeat.

I don't begrudge WOTC the desire to profit from the MTG app market, and I think their pricing scheme at $3-$4 a year is quite fair. That's a single booster pack! Chump change. I'd gladly pay it, if only I believed it would do what I needed. So far, that just isn't true.