Thursday, April 9, 2009

What Magic Programs Do You Use?

This will be just a quick post. What Magic programs do you use? I'm sure many people have used Magic Online. How popular is Magic Workstation? And have you ever used Incantus or Firemox?

Incantus looks great and here is a screenshot with many abilities on the stack.

5 comments:

willow said...

I use Wagic on my PSP, I don't play that much on the PC.
I have Incantus and Forge on my PC though.

I haven't tried Deckbot in a while but I believe it must be pretty fun with if associated to a GUI, I should give it a try again.

Incantus looks cool, but since I play alone, games without an AI are a "no go" for me. If I were to play against other humans, I would probably go with MWS. This is sad, but a program with rules enforcement will never have the flexibility of a game such as MWS. There's always a huge risk of bugs, or not having the cards you want in your deck (because they are not implemented), that will make it less attractive to me than MWS.

I wanted to try MTGO, but the fact that it cost 10$ to even get started made me uninstall the app. I was pissed off to not even get a free trial, which most online games offer nowadays.

In terms of AI apps, MagMa's number of cards impressed me a while ago, but I believe Wagic will reach similar numbers in a few months. I think incantus does already handle more than 4000 cards, and it is probably the case for Deckbot too. So after all, MagMa doesn't sound that impressive anymore, although I never tried it to see if the AI was ok or not...

What else? Firemox seems to have very little activity nowadays, I've never tried it...

I'm thinking that all our programs with rules enforcement should have a mode with "no rules" to allow people to play against humans even with cards that are not implemented :p

I sometimes use the windows version of Wagic to run an infinite loop of AI vs AI matches...what other MTG application can be used as a screensaver ? :p (plus the noise made by goblins when they come into play scares my wife, which is always funny to see)

Luke said...

Besides MTGForge, MWS and NetDraft. Those two are very simple and easy to use, but the main reason to use them is because their community is apparently the most active (besides MO's, which I'm thinking about buying). All of my Magic-playing friends have MWS on their computer, and it's the official software to play with in magic-league and liga-magic. I've tried others, but there's hardly anything special about them when compared to MWS, and the community never seems as active.

billc said...

I play MTGO. Hate the interface. I have not tried any others. I tried to install Incantus and got an error. They told me to wait for the next version, but I have not been back.

Forge said...

Community is crucial for player vs player games. I spend much of my time offline, so I really enjoy playing against the AI. MTG Forge is just Shandalar with more/newer cards.

Kevin said...

I tried playing around with Magic Suitcase for awhile to do some library tracking, but that ended up being unsatisfying. A couple friends and I have actually started trying to work on a library tracking/sharing site so that we can figure out what we actually have, but that's a little down the road.