As a player of Magic: The Gathering trading card game, Alena Laskavaia owned a lot of cards. To manage her decks she tried out some commercial applications, but they didn’t do everything she wanted. So about two years ago she began putting together a program herself to manage cards, build decks, and organize tournaments. Today Magic Assistant offers filtering, searching, and grouping for cards and decks, and includes deck analyzers that can plot graphs of deck characteristics, such as card type and cost distributions. It also lets tournament organizers arrange schedules and keep scores for in-house MTG tournaments.
Laskavaia built Magic Assistant in Java, to take advantage of its multiplatform architecture, using Eclipse. In addition to the program and its source code, the project provides a user manual, which Laskavaia says documents “a bunch of hidden features.”
Laskavaia continues to develop the program, addressing player requests in the project’s tracker along with a laundry list of other plans.