The Closing Times Johannes Radmer, July 12, 2022

A Visual Studio Code extension for Magic the Gathering

mtg-code is an extension for building Magic the Gathering decks in Visual Studio Code. It features auto completion of card names and advanced card search using scryfall's API.

I started playing Magic the Gathering in 2017 when a friend told me to give it a try. So I bought an Amonkhet deck builder's toolkit to get started. Ever since I love playing Magic, finding new deck ideas and building decks around them. For the most part I used deckstats.net to tinker with my decks and ideas. The site has a lot of cool features that help you fine tune your deck. For instance it shows you the mana curve, mana source distribution, card type distribution and card drawing probabilities, just to name a few features. Overall it is a great tool for building Magic decks and there are many other great sites like it.

But I am a programmer, so at some point I found myself wanting a deck building workflow that feels more natural to me. That is why I decided to build a Visual Studio Code extension for building Magic decks. That way I could keep all my decks as deck lists in a github repo, while editing them in VSCode. The long term goal of the extension is to allow building decks without ever leaving VSCode. But that is a long ways away.

For now the extension has the following features:

  1. Syntax Highlighting.
  2. Adds basic card information as decoration to each card line.
  3. Card preview on hover.
  4. Auto completion of card names and search queries.
  5. Advanced card search using scryfall's search API.
  6. Card counting.

Basic features of mtg-code.

With time I would like to add more of the features that sites like deckstat.net have. But since this is a side project I do not know when I will find the time to do so and for me it works well enough with the current set of features. If you would like to give it a try, the extension can be installed like any other through Visual Studio Code's marketplace. Just search for mtg-code. If you would like to look at the source code or even better would like to contribute to it head over to the github repo.

Oh and a big shout out to the guys over at scryfall for the great API! The scryfall API is used for everything from getting basic card information to the advanced card search feature.

HR