Searching for Cards in a Large Deck

[Crovack]

One of the most unpleasant aspects of Lackey, compared to say Magic Online's engine, is searching for cards in your deck.  Anyone who's used fetch lands to try and find a specific 1-of land in their deck can probably empathize.

What I propose is a rather simple function, one which you click to "search" your deck, to which you get an alphabetical list (could be made into a popup window) of the cards in your deck.  The drag and drop interface makes it easy to grab a desired card, put it into your hand/play/whichever zone you want.  On close of the popup window, the deck autoshuffles itself and all is well.  If someone needs to do searching of a limited section of their deck, there's already a mechanism for that.

As a side question, is there any way to create a slash (/) macro for "reveal top X cards to owner".  Anyone who's played with sensei's diving top would probably love a /revealtoowner top 3 function.  As the function already exists, it seems it wouldn't be difficult to add a slash command (or if there is a slash command, I'm simply unaware of its format).  Creating these commands for multiple functions could be extremely nice, including /revealtoothers seat3 top 1 as a possible macro for Jace, tMS +2 ability.

[Crovack]

Oh, I thought I'd also add: there's a reveal to owner, all and others command but this is rather limited in multiplayer (3+).  Is there any way "others" could be changed to "me" or a reveal-to-me function could be added?

Again I'll use Jace, tMS as an example: just because I know what someone's top card is, or isn't, doesn't mean everyone else should as well.

[Trevor]

"/revealtoowner top 3"
I will add that and lots of other things. My plans for commands is to allow you to do anything with commands that you could do otherwise. I will implement "/revealtoowner top 3" that, but the command syntax will be: /revealtoowner GAMEZONENAME top N, where GAMEZONENAME is the name of the zone, such as deck. And N is the number to reveal. Also, if you don't specify top or bottom, "top" will be assumed. Also, if you don't specify GAMEZONENAME, the main deck will be assumed. And if you don't specify a number, the entire deck will be revealed. So you could type "/revealtoowner 3" and that would reveal the top 3 of your deck to you. I am not sure that is actually easier than using the right click menus, but since adding commands doesn't complicate the interface, there isn't really a downside to doing it, other than potentially confusing people who think they need to be using commands to do it.

I am not sure I agree that searching for a card in a deck is hard. You can reveal all cards and see their images. Compared with searching for a card in a real life deck, I think it's no more or less difficult. I could make some command to find the card, but I'm not sure it would make it easier to find a card. Looking for a card manually is not any more difficult than typing out something like "/search Deck Castle".

I could make a little Search field for the vertical card list (the one to the right of the table) that works just like the search input field for the tokens, and I suppose that would help you find the card in the manner you are requesting, but still I am not convinced that this minor utility is worth the increased complexity of the interface it entails.

I await additional feedback from more people. If the consensus is that some additional functionality should be added to the game to assist searching for cards, I will add that.

[Trevor]

As of yet, I haven't made a good way to reveal cards to a single opponent (which would only be useful in a game with more than 2 players). There are many ways to do it, but nothing really seems like the "correct and intended" way.

I am going to allow this to be done with a command. I will use "/peek GAMEZONE top N". When no argument is given, GAMEZONE will be assumed to be the main deck, and "top" will also be assumed. What this will do is give you (and only you) a message in the log listing the names of those N cards.

[Crovack]

Awesome.  Just a few minor requests.

The search feature isn't an issue for most 60 card decks running 4-of's.  However in EDH/Commander 99 card decks running all 1-of's it can be somewhat frustrating to find things.  Even allowing the right side menu to list cards by name, rather than their entire picture, could allow for a clearer search feature.  This is just my opinion tho.

I will add that I know there's difficultly levels in programming that can scale drastically and that a simple addition can be a programming nightmare while a complex addition can sometimes be rather simple.  I appreciate whatever you do add and thanks for a great program.

PS: I'll just point out that if you've ever seen the popup that comes up on Magic Online when you search, the cards are all stacked in collums with similar cards grouped together (at least cards with the same name) and all you can see is the name line of the cards.  You can see an example of how they stack their cards here: http://www.mtgoacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Free-Cards.jpg
But you don't even need a specific 'search' feature.  Even just a text box like the one used for the Tokens that listed all the cards by name could make searching far easier.  (Particularly if you can sort them alphabetically)

[Crovack]

Also, you mentioned the commands with the GAMEZONE value, but will it include a value for which player as well?
IE: /peek 1 will tell you your top card
But could /peek seat2 graveyard 2 tell me the top 2 cards of the person in seat2's graveyard?
(More to the practical point, will /peek seat2 1 tell me my opponent's top card)

Same with /revealtoothers seat2 deck top 1

I assume your current seat will be the default seat unless otherwise specified in this case.

[Trevor]

I don't know if you knew this, but you can display the list of a deck as a list of the card names.
Use the card list to the right of the table and reveal it to you.
Click the Text ON button below the list, and you probably want to hit the text color button to cycle through the colors to make the text color easy for you to read.
Then fan the cards to make them as compact as the interface will allow. (You can either scrollwheel click and drag up/down, or click the fan button and left click up/down.) As long as your window isn't super tiny, you should be able to see the card names of every card in your deck.

[Crovack]

That's exactly what I was looking for, and I did not know.  Thanks!