New Version and Updating Instructions

Approximately once a month I proclaim Forge's new cards and features.  Forge now has 9,383 cards which means 200 new cards were added.  Forge has 225 cards from Innistrad and is only missing 50 cards from that set.

Some of the new cards include: Behemoth's Herald (cost: G, creature, 1/1) which lets you put the gigantic Godsire (cost: 4RGGW, 8/8, vigilance) for only 2G if you sacrifice 3 creatures.  (And yes Forge has Godsire.)  White’s mages will relish Charge Across the Araba (cost: 4W, instant) that lets you return any number of plains that you have in order to give your creatures +1/+1 for each plain.  Forge also has two other sweep cards: Barrel Down Sokenzan (cost: 2R, instant) and Sink into Takenuma (cost: 3B, sorcery).

Bronze Bombshell (cost: 4, 4/1) that deals 7 damage to your opponent if you can “give” it to him.  Obviously you will have to think about this challenge and choose your cards carefully.  The Future Sight expansion was very “futuristic” with new keywords like delve which were mentioned on only 1 or 2 cards.  Delve means “You may exile any number of cards from your graveyard as you cast this spell. It costs 1 less to cast for each card exiled this way.”  Forge now has Death Rattle (cost: 5B, instant, delve) which destroys a non-green creature.  Forge also has the only other card with delve, Tombstalker (cost: 6BB, 5/5, flying, delve) which is very impressive.

Provoke is always a fun keyword to use.  Provoke means “When this [creature] attacks, you may have target creature defending player controls untap and block it if able.”  Basically you get to choose which creature blocks your creature.  The new card is Crested Craghorn (cost: 4R, 4/1, haste) which basically kills any X/4 creature.  Forge has 3 other provoking creatures, to find those cards in the deck editor type “provoke” in the “text” field.

Downloads

Link - Forge 10-17 - (Windows, Linux) 30 MB and can be
unzipped with Winzip or 7-Zip (free, open source)

Link - Forge 10-17  (Mac) 32 MB - Use Keka to uncompress 7z files

Download - Card Pictures (160 MB) - These are some of the low-quality (LQ) card pictures.    

Forum Post - Quest opponent pictures, booster pack pictures, and pet pictures can be downloaded.  Scroll to the bottom of the first post.

Java - Forge requires Java in order to run

If you have any questions/comments, please post them to the forum.

Thanks for reading,
mtgrares

p.s.  Below is valuable additional info that I wasn't sure where to put.  I know that using and upgrading Forge can be complicated so I'm including this info in order to try to be as easy as possible.

How to download the card pictures
To download all of the card pictures, from the New Game screen, click on the menu named "Menu" and select "Download Card LQ Pictures".  LQ stands for low quality.  The "Download Card Set LQ Pictures" downloads each time the card was printed.  For example Shock has been printed in 10 different sets, so Forge would download all 10 pictures.  Forge can use high quality card pictures but you need to ask about them on the forum.

To move your card pictures read "Installation and Updating to a newer version" which is below.


Picture location info
by Chris. H.

The quest opponent icons jpg picture files go into your /res/pics/icons folder. The quest pet icons jpg picture files go into your /res/pics/icons folder. The quest booster package jpg picture files go into your /res/pics/booster folder. The card token jpg picture files go into your /res/pics/tokens folder.

Your forge game may not come with one or more of these three folders as part of the forge archive. In this case you should use your computer's OS file system to create the proper folders with the correct names and they must be located inside of the /res/pics/ folder.

Installation and Updating to a newer version:

by Chris. H.

We have changed the archival format used for the Forge distributions from ".zip" to ".tar.bz2". There are utilities for Windows, Mac OS and the various *nix's that can be used to decompress these ".tar.bz2" archives. We recommend that you decompress the Forge archive into a new and unused folder.

Once the Forge archive has been decompressed you should then be able to launch Forge by using the included launcher. Launching Forge by double clicking on the forge jar file will cause a java heap space error. Forge's memory requirements have increased over time and the launchers increase the java heap space available to Forge.

After downloading and installing a newer version of Forge you may want to move certain files from the older version over to the newer version of Forge. You should maintain your older version of Forge as a back up incase you make a mistake while installing the newer version.

1) The /res/pics/ folder contains the card pictures, token pictures, quest opponent icons, quest pet icons and the booster package images.

2) The /res/decks/ folder contains your deck files. The /res/draft/ and the /res/sealed/ folders contains files for the sealed and draft mode. You should copy over your files inside of these folders that end in the extension ".draft" or ".zsealed".

3) The /res/quest/ folder contains your questdata file. This file includes all of the information for your current quest.

4) The Forge root folder contains a preference file named "forge.preferences" and you should also move a copy of this file over to the newer version.

To make Forge look better (in my opinion):

1. Run Forge
2. Open the menu, which is named "Menu"
3. Select "Display Options"
4. Scroll to the bottom and select "Nimbus"

Many people helped with this version. A special thank you goes out to them.   

(Names listed alphabetically)

Asret

Chris H
Dave
Doublestrike
Friar Sol
Hellfish
Iran
Jeff Wadsworth
Marc
Max mtg
Slapshot5
Sloth
Zirbert