Mindless - Magic: The Gathering (of dorks)
Yesterday, my periodic addiction to Magic: The Gathering was renewed again by my roommate. It is a really awesome game, and anyone who passes up playing because of the dorky stigma is just missing out.
Along with playing MTG again comes playing around with mindless again. Mindless is a posix/GTK clone of apprentice. And by clone I mean it has a compatible protocol with apprentice, but has a significantly better interface. For those that don’t know, apprentice and mindless are deck prototyping tools. They allow players to simply provide desk lists to the program, and emulate playing a game with another player over the network. The program itself does not actually enforce any game rules - it simply provides a way for the two players to maintain the essentials for a game - a table, a life counter, a hand, deck, graveyard, etc. Whether or not these things are used within the game rules is up only to the two players. Basically it provides a virtual means for two people to play over a network, and without actually owning the cards. Mindless and apprentice essentially operate on the honour system - and also there’s no way to stop someone from building a deck out of rare cards that would costs hundeds of dollars - but it is still fun to play around with your decks on a casual basis.
On the downside, mindless doesn’t appear to be actively maintained anymore, and you can’t find an up-to-date card database for it - until now - read on. The only working link provided in the mindless FAQ is from 2005. I don’t know if apprentice ever used a plaintext card database, but it certainly doesn’t anymore, so that avenue is cut off. I wasn’t able to find a more recent database dump from WOTC.
Fortunately, not all hope is lost quite yet. With some brute force, it is possible to update the database from 2005 with the cards from the newer blocks. Gatherer refuses to output the entire card database (i.e. when you search with an empty string), but it will accept it when you do that for entire blocks. So, it was possible for me to take the dump from 2005 and copy-paste the extra blocks onto the end. It was somewhat tedious but thankfully only three blocks have been released since then, as far as I can tell. Apparently mindless doesn’t care about sorting, which is nice - no post-processing required on the card database file. So, as long as I hang onto this file, I can just update it with the new cards from each block when they’re released. I 7zipped this file and uploaded it for everyone to enjoy: Updated mindless card database.
So, if you ever played MTG before and are interested in giving it a try again (or have a newfound interest for it now), grab mindless or apprentice, and get my attention. I’m always looking for people to play casual games with.
