MTGGoldfish

Since I play on MODO more regularly than before which was more of 'rarely' I needed a site to check on prices.

I started using MTGGoldfish to see the prices of a larger amount of cards. But with time I started using the site for more things. I added some decklists I wanted to share in a text form (because it clearly shows the prices in tix and one can see price of each card at once). Later I ventured on and read some of the statistics articles and became hooked. I don't usually read Magic articles unless it is something very strange usually not talking about Magic but rather its players, psychology or such. But when seeing numbers and reading some of the analysis I realized that this is something my brain can actually work with and interests me. Even the interpretation of the data is a completely different chapter.

MTG Goldfish has become a site I most of the time have opened in my browser I check the new content. I still do not watch Magic videos but I might actually start doing that. I sometimes watch games on MODO so I don't see a problem why I couldn't watch something that was actually screen captured for the audience.

One of the things that I actually like about MTGGoldfish is the fact that it is mostly plain text and shows all the data well unlike other sites (and exports decklists in plain text!). So if someone decides to make the site more graphically pleasing I hope this clarity will be maintained. (the webmaster is certainly someone who knows what he wants and can formulate what he wants).

While being on the site I accidentally clicked on some link and I ended up on MTGGoldfish Facebook page. I clicked on 'Like' because they deserve it and then noticed that they were looking for a graphics designer. So I decided to sent them an email with something like my portfolio and see if they would contant me.

A bit later I received an email asking me if I could do what they envision. I found out that what they plan to do is have some nice visualization of decks that they can post on FB, Instagram etc.

I decided to do it no matter what they give me (not so much work at work so I was glad to work on anything). During the process of coming up with a layout and design I certainly learned few things (since I really did not expect doing graphs and using zillion of layers...).

I wanted to do the first draft functional and I wanted to have an idea how something like a visual deck view could look like and I wanted to keep the MTGGOldfish orange color present. It turned out functional but not 'awesome' or anything. The second draft was an attempt to make it look better - in terms of visually pleasing. But I struggled a lot with showing the data. I was trying to figure out what kind of graphs could be used and what graphs wouldn't look dull. The second draft wasn't good enough but it lead me to the final draft which finally started looking nice and flashy actually a fourth one). Textures and graphics was added, more icons and figuring out how to make it look coherent (I spent way more time doing stuff in illustrator than I would expect. I spent hours doing something that I don't even know was worth doing that). In the end the simplest solution showed up to be the best and the visual deck view for MTGGoldfish was done.

So I thank MTGGoldfish for letting me do this and hope the players enjoy it.

Draft no. 1