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MTG Manager & Player

MTG Manager is an application to track your Magic The Gathering card and deck collection. It connects to Wizards of the Coast’s Gatherer website to retrieve card images, text, mana costs, type, etc. You merely need to enter the card name and quantity you own.

MTG Player lets you take decks you've created in the Manager and play them online against your friends. It can theoretically support 100s of players per game. However, I wouldn't recommend trying it. I've been using it to play 3 - 5 player games consistently.

The player doesn't try to interpret any of the card rules. It's basically a virtual card table. Actions such as managing life counters, turn order, play order, etc. needs to be managed manually by the players. As such it's crucial that all players have live voice chat during play. It's funner that way, anyway. Skype and Ventrillo are excellent choices for this.

I haven't written up any instructions for the player yet. I'm not sure when I'll get around to it either. I'd rather spend time playing and/or adding features. I have recorded a tutorial video for the Manager and the Player.

When you will find bugs. Please report them to me at mtg@andrewfaust.com.

Card Search

MTG Manager allows you to search and view your card collection by Name, Rarity, Color, Type & Text. You can also sort by Name, Color, Rarity, Converted Mana Cost and Quantity Owned.

When you have the Owned option selected it will search your local collection and only return cards you own. When you uncheck that it will use Wizard’s Gatherer to search all Magic cards from all editions. This allows you to create “wish list” decks using cards you don’t own. When you are ready to build the deck you can easily see the cards you’ll need to buy from a store that sells singles.

To change the quantity you own of a card, simply set the value in the textbox under the card picture. Then right-click the card and select "save".

Decks

MTG Manager allows you to visually create and manage decks. To make deck creation easier it shows you a breakdown of Total Number of Cards, Card Color Percentage and Card Type Percentages. No more need to shuffle through thousands of cards to build a deck. Even better, you can add cards to a deck even if you don’t own any of them. Build your dream deck virtually, then purchase the singles needed for the deck when you are happy with it.

To add a card to the currently selected deck, simply right click on a card in the main display window and select "add to deck".

Caching

The first time you search for a card with many editions (such as Basic Lands), it can take a long time. This is because it’s downloading the card details and the images for all editions the card is in. Thereafter the card image and details will be retrieved from your local cache making the search much faster.

Import

The more cards you own, the more useful MTG Manager will be for you. Unfortunately, it means it will take longer to enter all your cards. MTG Manager strives to make this processes as simple as possible. Using the Import capabilities, you can provide a simple text file with  your cards. This text file will include one card name and quantity per line in the form of Card Name<Tab>Quantity. You can see a sample here. I find the quickest way is to enter the cards in to Excel then “Save As” a Text (Tab Delimited) file.

Don’t worry too much about misspellings or edition. If there are multiple versions of a card or the card isn’t found, the import process will give you an opportunity to correct it.

Import Deck

The import screen will allow you to import a batch of cards and assign them to a new deck. This is particularly handy if you purchase a theme deck or to enter existing decks. Should you create a new deck using cards you already have tracked in MTG Manager, you can uncheck the Update Owned Quantity option to prevent double-counting your cards.