We've been doing hard time for the past year, paying off tech debt. While this type of thing slows down development in the short term, it speeds up all future development and extends the useful life of the product. With v0.4.0, we started the migration to a new tech stack. That new tech stack has now been applied to the rest of the application. Please join me for a tour.

Version 0.5.0 (2019-01-11)

• New Tech Stack & UI Overhaul (Flagship Feature)

New Home Screen

Logging in brings you to the new home screen dashboard, providing quick access to your recently modified decks and recently posted news.

New Home Screen

You'll also notice a change to the outer shell. We moved the user avatar to the bottom left, increased the size of the logo, and reorganized the menu options. We hope this provides a more intuitive user experience.

Decks Page

The old, table-based decks page got a makeover. Decks are now represented by tiles, and each format has its own scrollable carousel of decks.

New Decks Screen

Deck Editor

The UI of the deck editor got shuffled around a bit.

New Deck Editor

All of the deck editor changes:

• The deck's name is now the prominent part of the screen (with support for inline editing)
• The search input got moved into the Deck tab where it contextually makes more sense
• The sideboard panel now appears to the right of the maindeck rather than underneath
• Removing cards from the drag and drop deck view has been made more intuitive with a drop target
• The Add Cards Dialog has become the Update Number of Copies Dialog
• Added ability to sort cards in deck in descending order (e.g. by type)
• Share Deck is temporarily unavailable as we rethink the sharing experience
• Filter by Color has been removed. Please use Sort by Color instead

• Install as App

On the Display Preferences page, a new Install App option appears. Here, App refers to Progressive Web App (PWA), technology allowing websites to be installed like native apps. When MITB is installed as an app, it can be launched from the desktop in its own full-screen window, giving more real estate to deck building and solitaire mode.

In addition to the changes listed, we've made many bug fixes and performance improvements. This was our biggest release to date! We're very happy to be freed from the old tech stack (RIP YUI 3).

Stay tuned for v0.6.0 and a return to new features! Expect more improvements to the deck editor and solitaire mode! Thanks for reading!

After a long year of tinkering in the lab, v0.4.0 has landed. Thanks for sticking with us. I hope you find it was worth the wait.

Version 0.4.0 (2017-11-12)

• Solitaire Mode (Flagship Feature)

Paper magic is great for playing, but not for prototyping decks. Think about paper magic goldfishing:

Finding the cards in your collection, making proxies, sleeving. HEADACHE

Shuffling, mulliganning, searching, untapping. TIME SINK

Solitaire mode was designed to increase the speed and efficiency with which you can playtest a deck.

Upon editing a deck, a new tab appears: Playtest.

Solitaire Mode Accessed Under the Playtest Tab

Drag and Drop Support

Cards can be dragged and dropped to move them between zones. If multiple cards are selected (via Ctrl+Click or via the drag selection box), all of those cards will be moved to the new zone. Cards can even be dragged from the top of the library (e.g. for a quick mill).

Autoplacement of Cards on Battlfield

Lands and nonlands will be automatically positioned onto the battlefield and change in size to take up the most space possible. No need to drag and drop to a specific position. Placements will be updated if the window size changes. Multiples of the same card will be grouped automatically.

Grouped cards can be easily tapped or untapped by clicking the group (rather than needing to click each card individually). If multiple cards are selected, all of those cards will become tapped or untapped at once. Clicking the untap button will untap all cards.

Library Manipulation

Clicking the search button will show the contents of the library, optionally sorted by type and card.

Searching Library with Cards Unsorted

Lands are sorted to the top as a concession to fetch lands and other land-searching effects. (True order of the cards can be shown by unchecking the Show Cards Sorted checkbox.) The Library will be shuffled automatically when it is closed.

Clicking the eye button (think Look) allows you to look at the top x cards of your library.

Looking at the Top 3 Cards of Library

The first screen asks how many cards you would like to view. Once selected, those cards will be shown, each with an option to put the card to the top or bottom of the deck.

Other library features include milling arbitrary numbers of cards off the top and playing with the top card revealed.

Keyboard Shortcuts

The keyboard can be used in tandem with the mouse to quickly execute common game actions. Take as an example, cracking a fetch land:

1. Click card to tap
2. Drag card to Graveyard
3. Ctrl+Mousewheel: -1 to life
3. F (Search your library, think F for find)
4. Drag land onto battlefield (with all lands in deck automatically sorted to top)

Other notable keyboard shortcuts include

• Q (or U) for untapping all permanents (think Q as untap symbol)
• D for drawing a card
• V for looking the top cards of your Library (think V for view)
• Ctrl+Z to undo
• Ctrl+R to redo
• ? to show all keyboard shortcuts

• Card Data Updates

Since the release of v0.3.0, the remaining sets/expansions/products have been added such that all competitive cards should now be available. This includes the Commander products, Conspiracy products, and Masters products. Duel decks or other promotional products will not be added for as long as they do not contain unique cards. Additionally, all card texts have been updated with Oracle changes through Kaladesh.

• Marketing Pages Overhaul

The homepage got an overhaul in appearance, performance, and responsiveness. Expect continued migration to this new tech stack!

Thanks for reading! We plan to flesh out the solitaire mode features in future releases. Stay tuned for v0.5.0!

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