Since we last spoke, we've made two big steps toward v1.0.0.

But first, a note about future releases: from this point forward, mitb will adopt a continuous delivery release schedule. Traditionally, a release bundles many features together, but the changes that are done at the beginning don't see production until the last change is finished. That could be months later. Continuous delivery means releasing code as soon as it's done.

While in beta, we will uptick the minor version by 1 for each new major feature. Minor features will continue to get released on that same version line until the next major feature is released.

Now, onto the release notes!

Version 0.2.0 (2016-04-13)

• Transform and Flip Card Support (Flagship Feature)

Whenever a flip or transform card is viewed, both sides of the card will be shown together rather than requiring an extra click to flip back and forth.

Both Sides of Transform Card Presented on Screen Together

A transformed/flipped card can be found in the search, but only the untransformed/unflipped version will ever be added to the deck.

• Switch cards between main and sideboard in card list view

You can now hover over the # of copies and wait for a swap icon to appear over the card art.

Switch Between Main and Sideboard Using New Icon

The pause was added to prevent errant clicks from changing the deck. (This feature was already present in the drag and drop view by dragging a card between main and sideboard.)

• Sort Basic Lands After Non-Basic Lands

To make it easier to tell how many basic lands a deck has, they are no longer interleaved with the non-basic lands.

Version 0.3.0 (2016-07-15)

• Advanced Card Search (Flagship Feature)

Advanced search can be displayed by clicking the Advanced Search link or simply searching for a card and clicking the search button (as opposed to using autocomplete).

Advanced Search Slides In and Out from the Left

Full text search is supported over the card name and card text or optionally over one or the other. Partial matching with a prefix is also supported, meaning searching for blast will find Blastoderm but searching for derm will not.

A number of other filters exist in the form of drop downs. Format will default to the current deck's format. It also takes into account any banned or restricted cards by excluding them from the results.

Toggle buttons exist to filter by color. Enabling a few colors will return all cards that have at least one of those colors. To only return cards that have all the selected colors, you can check "Match All Selected Colors". However, this would still include multicolor cards that have additional, unselected colors. To restrict results to exactly match the selected colors, you can check "Exclude Unselected Colors."

• Smarter Sort-By-Type for Multi-Type Cards

When a card has multiple types, it will now be sorted with the "dominant" type's category. A few examples:

Bottle Gnomes will now be put into the Creature bucket rather than the Artifact bucket, Dryad Arbor will now be put into the Land bucket rather than the Creature bucket, and Great Furnace will now be put into the Land bucket rather than the Artifact bucket.

You can also view the open issues in our issues repository for the most up-to-date information on current work.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for v0.4.0 and its flagship feature: Solitaire Mode!

Six years of development has led to this announcement... At last.

Dial back the clocks to 2009-- I just graduated from college. You can't imagine the vacuum that leaves in your day-to-day routine. (Or maybe you can.) It was only natural that this void would be filled by a combination of my two favorite hobbies: Magic: the Gathering and JavaScript.

The Magic software landscape of the day (Apprentice and Magic Workstation) left much to be desired. The obvious evolution was a web application that sidestepped the hassle of installing a program and manually updating new expansions. The next few years were spent working on a never-released version (v0.0.0, if you will) largely not knowing what the hell I was doing. At that point, it had a chatroom, a deck editor, and solitaire play mode. Functional? yes. Robust? Not quite.

OLD VERSION: Solitaire mode for playtesting two decks against each other

The amount of technical debt that early project had accumulated was unsustainable. Beginning in 2012, I declared technical bankruptcy and restarted fresh. I laid a new foundation of broadened experience and open source web frameworks. And nearly 4 years later, here we are.

Releasing this first version has been a struggle. In the past, I've made the big mistake of promising release dates and then coming up short-- of releasing something "just to release" trading proper QA for an abundance of "loose" functionality. Where does one draw the line? How does one determine the minimally viable product? We obviously want enough functionality for users to gain something, and those features we do have should be high quality and (nearly) bug-free. The devil is in the details, though, and there was always that one last fix I wanted to squeeze in. Any potential bugfix or "necessary" feature ehancement sparked an internal conflict: To fix or not to fix before releasing?

Today, the state of mitb in my state of mind has finally reached an equilibrium. Now presenting Magic in the Browser beta v0.1.0:

Deck Editor

The two deck list views: drag and drop (top) and card list (bottom)

The cornerstone of mitb is the deck editor, and it has two primary goals: rich user experience and rapid deck construction. A deck can be manipulated in either one of two views. The first view is an image-based drag-and-drop view (similar to magic online). The second view is closer to a traditional text-based list but augmented with card art and mana costs. Deck construction was engineered to be lightning fast through its first-class keyboard support.

Sharing Decks

A deck can be made public and accessed by a URL

By default, all decks are private. Once a deck is made public, it can be shared with others via a URL. Viewers of your deck get access to the same two views available to the deck editor. Twitter and Facebook icons allow sharing across social media.

News

Updates will be made available on the news page

We will be posting updates to the news section. It has a minimalist commenting system, which will be primary avenue for user feedback.

Preferences

The Display Preferences tab allows you to choose any card's art as an avatar

The preferences page currently administers a few customization options (background, avatar) as well as some boilerplate account management (change password, change email, etc.).

Roadmap

Here are some of the higher priority enhancements we will be focusing on

• Advanced Card Search

  Today, users must know a card's name in order to add it to a deck

• Search Public Decks

  Users should be able to search for public decks by other users

• Solitaire Mode

  Being able to goldfish a deck is helpful for making tweaks and understanding the matchups

• Profile Pages

  Tell others more about yourself and learn more about others

• Performance

  Loading of pages should be instantaneous and all features should be highly responsive

Thank you for trying out mitb. Please leave your feedback in the comments or log a bug in our issue tracker! Expect ongoing development! We're dedicated to making mitb the best it can be!

https://mitb.io

In 2012, Ron Paul ran on a platform of real spending cuts. His plan sliced the federal budget by a trillion dollars year one. The pundits claimed he would crash the economy. When you need to level a condemned building, do you do so through a controlled demolition, or do you allow the building to collapse on its own terms (while occupied)?

Congress does not believe in real cuts. They've duped the public into believing that "averting disaster" means raising the debt-ceiling. (What good is a ceiling that is so easily raised?) All manner of temporary fixes are preferable to actual problem solving. Elections are decided by who can promise the most free stuff to the largest number of people while keeping the straightest face. Incumbent "public servants" must also justify their previous terms in office. If you repeat a lie long enough, people will start to believe it. Likewise, career politicians are really good at getting re-elected.

But it's not just our elected officials that are to blame. Some are just money and/or power junkies in search of their next hit (God bless 'em). The bigger blame lies on their suppliers- the unelected officials of the private Federal Reserve. For government, the Fed enables unfettered debt monetization. For banks, the Fed administers "quantitative easing" (spoooky language). The Fed chair, Janet Yellen, has the power to send shock-waves through the entire financial market with one poorly chosen word. (If that's not the sign of a healthy financial system, I don't know what is.) Here's a question: What would we ever do without the Federal Reserve? "Well," you say, "without the Fed, the markets would be quite volatile, leading to market crashes and potentially even depressions." Wait.

Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it.-Ben S. Bernanke

The Fed has begun easing the easing, and now, we wait with bated breath for what could be a tsunami of financial ruin. Assuming that the current "recovery" is only the short-term result of massive stimulus spending (an "interest-rate recovery" as Gerald Celente puts it), the Fed will soon be forced to pause the tapering before reversing course, increasing stimulus even more dramatically. That reversal will leave the markets quaking. Continuing to taper will dissipate the mirage of a recovery.

But, it's not like other countries are free from their own economic problems. Central banks the world over have employed usury to subjugate their populations, and governments are printing money left and right. When debt that is mathematically impossible to repay goes exponential, countries can choose to default on their obligations or inflate their currency. Since inflation can keep the ponzi scheme going, is harder to detect, and can be explained away by the experts, it is undoubtedly where we're headed. As debt climbs steeply, so too inflation to pay it off. That dollar just won't buy what it used to, and people might need to retire later than planned. Not to mention, high taxes and huge income gaps is the stuff of revolutions. Do you believe "target practice" is the reason Homeland Security bought a billion bullets?

When currencies are being debased in a race to the bottom, who is going to come out on top? The weaker currencies will go from a backing of confidence to a backing of paper. Assuming a massive blow to the confidence in fiat currencies, currencies backed partially by gold may even return to prominence. Regardless, when currencies and trade are at war, holding gold is an excellent hedge. Last year, Germany tried to repatriate a small fraction of its gold holdings from US soil. The US wants seven years to ship it. Why? The vaults are empty. People understand this, and now the value of gold incorporates speed of delivery.

Why can't we see the gold in Fort Knox? Because it's invisible!

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, former assistant to the Secretary of the Treasurey under Reagan, exposed the Fed's rigging of the gold market. Paper claims to gold (that vastly outnumber the amount of available physical gold) are used to drive down the price of physical gold by selling the paper claims short on a massive scale- a form of naked short-selling. A strong gold price reflects a weakening dollar and threatens the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency. Asia's demand for physical gold will eventually implode this manipulation.

The Fed is testing the limits of this economy. Creating so much wealth without creating value is a recipe for financial Armageddon. If 2008 is any indication, they could again be caught off guard. The petrodollar and the dollar's status as reserve currency have really been the Fed's saving grace. Once countries start dumping their dollar holdings (China), start accepting other currencies for oil (Russia), or start trading in other currencies (BRICS) or directly in gold (Iran), the dollar will be under even more pressure. The Fed's tapering or gold manipulation will also force a correction in the not too distant future. Now is the calm before the storm.

Following its humiliating defeat by Russian, English, and American hands, Washington was forced to rescind its demonization campaign of the Syrian regime. Syria agreed to disarmament, and Iran quickly followed suit, proclaiming a willingness to ease its own nuclear endeavors. Without skipping a beat, Obama changed his tune from bellicose rhetoric to peaceful diplomacy and was hailed. The planned destabilization of the region was put on hold, but not before triggering the totalitarian alarm clock- an alarm clock that awoke millions of Americans from apathy. Battle-hardened America awaited its next challenge- defending against an attack on its healthcare.

Officially titled "The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act," the bill (unsurprisingly) neither protects patients nor negotiates affordable healthcare. Again, we are presented with another gross abuse of language revealing just how lawmakers perceive the public (malleable idiots). Our Conmander-in-Chief went on tour across the country, painting half-truths and misdirection on a canvas of trust and naïveté.

Stephanopoulos: But you reject that it’s a tax increase? Obama: I absolutely reject that notion.

Obama said the penalty is not a tax, but then it is. It is an unapportioned direct tax, yet it's legal. The supreme court argues that it's not a direct tax because not everyone is required to pay it- "it is triggered by specific circumstances." Note the colorless, indirect language. What they meant to say is, "it is triggered by a refusal to purchase private health insurance." I'm pretty sure that's called fascism.

If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. Period.

Patients were quickly informed by their insurance companies that they could keep their plan... if they didn't mind paying double the price. The individual mandate and universal coverage creates artificial demand for health services, and increasing demand without proportionately increasing supply means increasing price. Add in a couple rolls of red-tape, and you've got a de facto 100% increase in price.

Here's a paradigm shift: why not actually spend that money to improve health. Buy quality food, vitamins, health books, and club memberships. What did people do before health insurance? Moreso than today, they were their own doctors. The problem isn't insurance companies. Insurance companies are, ironically, a symptom of a flawed medical system. There's no real incentive in finding a cure when you're dealing in a trillion-dollar-a-year industry. Modern medicine is set up to nurse symptoms until the patient runs dry. Did you really think the apex of modern medicine was epidemic levels of debilitating disease? Now that the insurance companies have us mandated, they're going to try their hardest to convince us it's worthwhile. How would finding cures and promoting true health make insurance worthwhile? It doesn't fit the for-profit model. There's a reason we still drive cars that run on gasoline.

If they're seriously counting on the young adults of this country to offset the increased costs, they're living in a fantasy land. Young people are already debt-enslaved from the allure of a college investment that, in many cases, won't be paying dividends in this faltering economy. They're concerned with paying off that debt, not spending an extra $2500 a year for what is essentially zero value. Social Security and Medicare payments are already fleeting before their eyes. Most young people will undoubtedly pay the tax for the first two years. Of course, human behavior is not hard to predict, and they would have seen this coming from a mile away. This begs the question: was it designed to self-destruct from the beginning?

Financial collapse is the ultimate goal but not before the public has accrued an unsustainable amount of debt. The dark agenda of Obamacare is to further tighten the shackles of voluntary debt-slavery. When the economy collapses, the public will be so broke that it will have no choice but to accept the lawmakers' most finely crafted, tyrannical legislation. What will trigger such a collapse? It may be a bail-out of the struggling health insurance companies. The world would bear witness to the government's repeated failure and the dollar's fragility. The question is whether the American people would submit to yet another bail-out.

The sheer amount of red-tape creates a belief that the government is interfering with the insurance companies to their detriment. Obama essentially rewrites the law through decree and now the insurance companies have to adjust. But let's be clear- it's definitely in their favor. Just check out the health insurance index on the NYSE. This belief will fuel sympathy (misdirected) towards the health insurance companies and potentially beget a public opinion that is more accepting of an insurance company bail-out. Problem-reaction-solution at its finest.

They're betting on Americans remaining silent. Surely this is the straw that breaks the camel's back. Will America stand for it?