As Garfield Intended

I’m a big fan of variant formats. Not only do they add some spice and variety for long time players, but they also allow for more flexibility when scheduling Magic events with your friends (I’m always looking for more limited formats that don’t require 8 people in the same place for multiple hours). When I saw the most recent episode of Enter the Battlefield about Richard Garfield and the Alpha Playtesters, I became inspired. The “original” Magic format they described, full of surprises and built around trading, sounded like a lot of fun! It got me thinking: how can we best recreate that original Magic environment using modern technology and design sensibilities? In this article I’m going to explore the best way to play Magic “as Garfield intended”, literally.

MtGO UI Mockup—Collections and Trading

Magic: the Gathering Online UI Mockup

MtGO has come a long way since it started and the newest client is the best yet, but there's still a lot of room for improvement. As my day job involves software development and a good deal of UI (User Interaction) design, I've often thought about ways to make MtGO a better experience. That's actually what led to my deck-building web-application, Wizard's Familiar. I identified a number of aspects of the MtGO deck-building interface and made something that is faster, more intuitive, visually appealing and functional.

Hopefully that's all old news to you (if not, go check it out, for serious). Today I'm presenting a very rough mock up of how the collection screen could work and how trading could work. It's available right here. So you're not confused, the only things you can do in this mocked-up version are: click on a card in the collection area to go to the trading details screen; click from those details to the offer confirmation panel; and click to go back to the collection screen. The purpose of a mock is not like a prototype: we're not trying to make things actually work, we just want to show you the steps the user would see.