Play Equestria Girls-themed Magic: the Gathering with me! · 3:13pm Feb 13th, 2020
I'm a huge fan of FanOfMostEverything. Not only does he write delightful stories and insightful blog posts on every episode and movie and many more things besides, but he also creates lots and lots of custom Magic: the Gathering cards, in his "Friendship Is Card Games" blog series.
I love designing custom Magic cards, but even more I love designing custom Magic sets. And so when someone asked on a recent FiCG post of FOME's "When is the FiCG card set coming out?", I thought "That sounds like a fun challenge of compilation and balancing. I wanna try!"
Looking at the numbers, I reckoned that to get enough designs to make a colour-balanced Magic set of with the standard size rarity distributions, I'd need to use all of FOME's Equestria Girls card blogs. Then I think I can get three more cardsets from the blogs for seasons 1-3, 4-6 and 7-9.
A month or two of card selection, coordination and deliberation later, I have a cardset: Friendship is Card Games: Equestria Girls! There's an introduction here, and you can even generate boosters from it. But can I really claim the cardset is complete if it's not been playtested? Of course I can't!
So I would love to find some people to play a few sealed FICG Magic games with me! And conveniently, thanks to hawthornbunny's great site PonyMTG, we ought to be able to use Cockatrice to play with them.
Specifically, the plan would be:
- People wanting to play get in touch with me, initially via comments or PM.
- You install Cockatrice and follow PonyMTG's instructions to install the whole Friendship Is Card Games "set".
- If you want to do your own sealed deck deckbuilding, you generate 6 boosters from the Equestria Girls cardset, noting down the cards somewhere (such as into Cockatrice), then build yourself a 40-card deck from those cards plus whatever basic lands you want to add.
- If you'd prefer to build a 60-card constructed deck from the set, feel free. The Visual Spoiler is probably the most useful view to do that from.
- If you'd rather just play a deck I already built, you can take one of the sealed decks from the Multiverse Decklists page and enter that into Cockatrice. I have a few of them already in Cockatrice decklist form for you to download here.
- Optional but recommended: you download this 12MB zip file and unzip it into the location that Cockatrice shows you when you select the menu item "Open custom image folder", so that you'll get card art where it's selected.
- We arrange a time to meet online, connect our Cockatrice clients together to the same server, and have fun playing Equestria Girls Magic!
If this sounds good to you, leave a comment below or send me a message! Or feel free to have a look around Multiverse and/or try out Cockatrice first.
How can I say no? I'll be sure to boost the signal when I get home as well. Plus, this gives me an excuse to install Cockatrice; I've been meaning to for years.
If the point is trying to test the format's balance, wouldn't it be better to do block constructed? I'm interested either way, though, and will install everything over the weekend.
5202482
Well, it depends what you mean by "the format". I'm trying to balance the set for both limited and constructed. I am interested in playing it in both formats, so if you have a preference for playing 60-card constructed, by all means let's do that
At the moment there's not much of a "block": there is one single set. The way I'm envisaging the overall project going is that I will indeed treat the 4ish sets I'm planning to make as one "block", with deliberate cross-set synergies and certain recurring themes like Songs. And block constructed will be a bit more meaningful once there's more than one set to build from.
That said, I have tried throwing together a few 60-card constructed decks from this one set: you can see a couple of them on the decklists page. The two playtests I've done so far are of those two 60-card decks against each other, and that was certainly fun. The decks felt a little awkward, but the constraints of building a 60-card deck from a single set will always feel a bit awkward.
The thing about limited is that a set lives or dies on its commons. And finding commons was the hardest part of this project. The most frequent "natural" rarity for Fan's cards is uncommon, followed by rare. There are plenty of cards that are common, or could be made common if you squint a little, but when you add in the extra restriction of wanting them distributed across mana costs in each colour, it gets quite tricky. Fan himself freely admits that most creatures in the source material naturally fall at about 3-4 mana.
So the biggest question to me is whether limited feels right. Sealed is the easiest limited format to test, so that's where I'm most inclined to focus my efforts. And my solo efforts at building sealed decks have also been a lot of fun.
But if you'd prefer to build a 60-card deck from the set, I am most definitely up for playing against that as well
That is too many instructions and links for me to handle. I'm in!
Ok how do I fave journals?
I'd love to try this out, even though I'm not much good at Magic. Is there a tentative schedule?
I am having a little trouble downloading the file. When I get to the second page It's not generating the cockatrice card file. I tried it with multiple browsers. Is it just me doing something wrong?
5202798
Not working for me either, I'll let you know if I figure it out.
If you want, you can try going to http://www.planesculptors.net/ I haven't actually used the site to help design a magic set yet, so I can't vouch for their community. Some of the sets that I've seen there, however, are very impressively tested and polished.
5202798
5202904
Sorry! My fault... I broke it literally ten days ago when I was doing some site updates, so of course this would be the time people actually need to use it.
Should be working now!
Note that the XML is generated on the client-side (ie. in browser) so it might take a minute or so for it to fully render (because FICG is huge), and don't forget to save the file with a .xml extension.
5202798
5202904
As an alternative to trying to download it from PonyMTG (which I did also have some difficulty with), you can download my copy from this link. Inside Cockatrice if you click the menu options "Card Database" -> "Open custom sets folder", it'll open a folder on your computer. I think it'll work to just download my file straight into that folder, then restart Cockatrice.
5202905
Thanks for the offer. It's interesting to see that site. I prefer to use MagicMultiverse.net: that site is designed more around the ongoing development process, with individual discussion threads for each card, which has resulted in big arguments over whether The Time Twirler is broken or not and whether Piecake Eating is playable or not; and also provides me a place to publish decklists and record my reasoning for, say, which uncommon artifacts to include. PlaneSculptors does seem to have some intriguing builtin draft options though.
5202925
Thanks for fixing it so quick man, got it to load just fine now.
5202947
It's good to go now, put me in coach
I got the worst deck ever ready to lose.
Excellent! Let's see if we can arrange a time when we're online!
I can generally be available most nights between 8pm-midnight UK time, which is 3pm-7pm US East Coast or noon-4pm US West Coast. Of course, if two of you who are based further west want to play each other after I'm in bed, that works too
It might make sense to coordinate with each other on a more real-time chat channel... Maybe the FimFiction Discord. The channel named "Voice Chat" seems available at the moment. I'm user AlexTFish#4271 on Discord if anyone wants to contact me over there.
5203546
I'll keep an eye on it, if you want though just message me directly Star1wars3#2379. I can probably do sometime between 4-7pm EST tomorrow otherwise I'm a bit all over the place, usually free later unfortunately.
5202698
Okay, I've got the program and the set. I've never used Cockatrice before, but I did use a similar unofficial client a while back, so learning how everything works shouldn't be too hard. Once I've got it down, and I've built my deck, we can schedule some time for games. I'm free most evenings. Given your reasoning, yeah, we'll do sealed. If FoME and others are also free during that timeframe, we could even do a little tournament or sorts. Who knows, maybe we could do some hole-filling and design new commons to help the set once we've pinpointed any issues.
5202698
Okay, ready when you are. Shoot me a PM with the time and server details, or however it works on Cockatrice.
Yay! We played a match! My red-blue aggro kinda trounced poor Thought Prism's slower deck, but it was still fun.
The flavour was awesome though. In the first game, Rainbow Dash the Eager Troublemaker gets in Mortal Peril. The only way out? Hop through a portal to Equestria to become a pegasus! Then beat the opponent for 5 flying damage a turn till he dies.
In the second game, Thought Prism dubbed my deck "hounds on bicycles.deck" because of how Spike the dog and Cranky Doodle's dog teamed up to ride a Tandem Bicycle (with another in reserve). When the bike crashed into Fluttershy covered in seaweed, the dogs formed a touring band: it turns out two Surly Hounds are the perfect team to fix up the Rainbooms' Tour Bus. One of the dogs got in Mortal Peril and wasn't as good at escaping Peril as Rainbow Dash, so the hamster stepped in as a roadie so that they could get the bus back on the road next turn.
5202378 can certainly be proud of the flavourful adventures we have.
In other news: I have found a way to export a bunch of card images from Multiverse. If you download this 12MB zip file and unzip it into the folder Cockatrice shows you when you select the menu item "Open custom image folder", you'll get card art, at least for the ~60% of cards for which I've selected it. (Once you click "Image" or "Both" in Cockatrice's "Card info" pane.)
5204599
Sorry I missed it, I was pretty busy yesterday unfortunately.
5204927
No problem. That was quite short notice, so let's try to arrange things with slightly more notice this time.
I'm available each evening for the rest of this week. So for anyone who's up for playtesting some day this week, at any time between 8pm-midnight UK time = 3pm-7pm EST = noon-4pm PST, send me a PM saying which day you can do and roughly when in that time window you expect to be available, and we can plan to meet online!