Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Deck Generator, Draft Parser and Hover link generator

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Magic: The Gathering is a card game that requires us to present information in some form, sometimes textual, sometimes visual. Readers need to know what we are writing about without the need to look elsewhere and in order to have the information ready on your own page I decided to write several tools that could help authors writing about Magic: The Gathering.

Deck generator

I was trying to figure out how to easily generate decklists for a while and I ended up having one written in Google Sheets but that is not particularly easy to use and takes time to generate the code since it is also linked with database. By accident (posting the output on my Facebook wall) I found out that Paul Leicht created his own decklist generator to use in his articles on PureMTGO, written in JavaScript. He let me scavenge the code and I decided to use it and create a decklist generator that everybody could use.

I created two versions. One that can be used online and one offline version. The difference between the two is that the online version doesn't sort cards and the offline one does. Both generators can be accessed from http://stsungalters.com/deckgen/index.html

The decklist generator can produce a visual deck view and a text view (on the screenshot).

Magic Online's Draft log Parser

When I tried to write an article about of my drafts I took zillions of screenshots from Magic Online and put that up. It took ages though so I thought that something that can show the picks in a visual way would be neat too. I had no idea how to do that so something was suggested to me. If you wish you can use this to show your drafts. To navigate to it go here

Hover links generator

The last thing that I was using on PureMTGO is something that generates links and hovers for cards. It seems to be the Standard for many Magic sites and there is no reason why you wouldn't want to have that on your site too. I used it from time to time on this blog and will use it in all my following posts. What it does is that if you hover over a card name (which is a link) it will show you the card's image. If interested in that you can try it out - Hover Generator.

Big thanks to Paul because without him I wouldn't create any of this. Thanks to Aspallar who was so kind answering my dumb questions about JavaScript. Thanks to April King for writing PDF Decklist generator from which I got the idea how to do the deck gen linked above.