Concept

The most powerful decks in MTG will always those that prioritize the power of cards and their combinations above every other aspect of game play. Making the most powerful deck no-matter what is interesting, but contrary to my (fred) notion of fun. For me it is more fun to try and make a deck that honors the lore of the game, which now has decades of official content available. Not to mention a thriving fan art community making token cards, play mats and custom art to go along with the cards. But it is also not fun to play a deck like that against any deck that was made without such constraints. Losing, for sure and no matter what, is not good time. Wondering if you are going to win, based on your own brewing efforts, is much more of challenge and much more interesting to me personally. (this is why I prefer Limited formats like Booster Draft, over other formats where professional or near-professional deck designers have already demonstrated the best way of designing a deck and figuring out how to play it well.

Given that it makes sense to create a scoring system that helps to enable a kind of "par" system for decks that go to extra lengths to have lore-compatible cards. However, this, in turn requires to think about the data about the cards in a different way. Thanks to Scryfalls incredible API, and the fact that Delver App can POST to urls when it identifies a card with an android cell phone... It is pretty simple to build a set of tools to think about that data differently.

To be clear, this is a hobby project, mostly intended for me to test data tools that I work on at work, and to enable those tools to have a public dataset to show the underlying power of the approaches that we take. CareSet works with patient data, so it is hard to show our data approaches to the public with the data that we work with from day to day, which very frequently has privacy conrstraints. MTG is the perfect, already public dataset with lots of nuances to explore. For now, please to not expect any stability with this website, since its purpose is to learn and test approaches, I expect that it will break frequently.

Thanks

Thanks to ScryFall for all of the wonderful data and to WoTC for the wonderful game. Also to Gamepedia for making the comprehenisve MTG Wiki where the entire knowledge-base of a whole community of enthusiasts is mainted and updated!!

This site is an experiment from Fred Trotter to test out the Zermelo and DURC data processing and reporting systems both sponsored and released from CareSet. The goal is it to eventually become a fully fledged method of examining the lore-compatibility of specific decks of MTG cards.

But even if that never happens, it is extremely useful way to teach how our specific tools, and SQL more generally functions to manage and model data.

All cards and card art are copyright Hasbro/WoTC or respective artists. Used under the unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Wizards of the Coast Fan Content Policy.