Thursday, September 15, 2011

Exporting MSE to Wizard's Familiar

You can load your custom sets from Magic Set Editor into the free online deck tool, Wizard's Familiar.com for deck-building, playtesting and even sharing. Here's an example. (Click the Enter button from the main page to enter the tool and see the deck). Now let me show you how.

Download this file and uncompress it. Put the folder "magic-wf.mse-export-template" into your MSE data directory hereabouts: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Magic Set Editor 2\data"

Open or reboot MSE and go to File > Export > HTML

From the prompt, choose "WF Export for Online" and click OK.

A folder will be generated with all of the image files as well as the XML files that WF needs.

Load that entire folder to any web space and note the full URL to the set.xml file. For example, my latest set of white commons for M13 is at "http://wizardsfamiliar.com/M13_for_WF/white_05/set.xml"

In Wizard's Familiar, go to Find/CARDS > Load Custom, paste that URL in the textbox and click the arrow.

All your custom cards will be loaded in the collection area below. You can click and shift-click them to add them to your deck and start a new game to play with them. You can add existing cards to your deck as well.

Because Wizard's Familiar automatically remembers your last deck, it will also automatically remember the last custom set you loaded when you return. Only one custom set can be effectively handled at once.

Unlike official cards, which are tracked by multiverse ID, custom cards are tracked by name, which makes updating a deck with a newer version of your custom set a bit easier. You can load the new version of the set while your current deck is visible, remove cards with old names, add cards with new names and keep cards with the same name. When you reload, it will only remember the newest set and automatically update any cards whose names never changed.

If you see a Magic card back in the deck or collection area, then there was a loading error. The most likely cause is freaky characters in the card name. Try renaming it.

This works, but it hasn't been tested much so I wouldn't be surprised or concerned if you see something wrong. Just let me know and I'll try to help you sort it out when I've got the time.

1 comment:

  1. It seems an incredibly basic thing, but any advice on single-directories in which to upload? I've got the red commons XML, but am bizarrely stymied at getting an uncompressed folder up this morning.

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