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The latest set, Dominaria, is the best in years. Richard Garfield worked on it. Magic: Online is slowly being bled out by Wizards in favor of their new Hearth

The latest set, Dominaria, is the best in years. Richard Garfield worked on it. Magic: Online is slowly being bled out by Wizards in favor of their new Hearthstone-like digital client. That said, the best way to play today is Vintage Cube drafts on Cockatrice. Free. High level of play. The best cards. There’s almost always a game going.

lvspiff 8y ago
>> Vintage Cube drafts on Cockatrice What/where can I find this? never heard of it and never had much fun/luck with magic online but would love to be able to play online
- brandnewlow 8y ago
  https://cockatrice.us/ https://cockatrice.us/ Install. Log on. Make a deck and join a game or jump into a draft. There's two Dominaria drafts filling up right now. There's no rules engine and it's a bit janky at first, but you can play magic against a real human 24/7 for free.
  - brandnewlow 8y ago
    Also, the cockatrice drafting community relies on opensource apps like http://dr4ft.info http://dr4ft.info to run the actual drafts. There's always room for improvement and anyone can host a fork. It'd be great to get more HNers tinkering with them. https://github.com/dr4fters/dr4ft https://github.com/dr4fters/dr4ft
  - anthonybullard 8y ago
    Is this basically the modern version of Apprentice? I spent a lot of time during tourney prep on Apprentice, it helped me figure out deck concepts really quickly and let me know what cards i needed to buy(as well as strategies to counter the most popular decks in the format). Apprentice was super basic, but the P2P gameplay really felt futuristic even on dial-up.
sincerely 8y ago
> High level of play. On cockatrice...? I love doing a cockatrice cube but this is simply not true.
derivagral 8y ago
XMage is similar to Cockatrice but also has rules enforcement and drafting in-client. Just the Java download gets you the game, but you do have to scrape the images yourself (within their software) if you want those.

lvspiff 8y ago

>> Vintage Cube drafts on Cockatrice What/where can I find this? never heard of it and never had much fun/luck with magic online but would love to be able to play online

brandnewlow 8y ago
https://cockatrice.us/ https://cockatrice.us/ Install. Log on. Make a deck and join a game or jump into a draft. There's two Dominaria drafts filling up right now. There's no rules engine and it's a bit janky at first, but you can play magic against a real human 24/7 for free.
- brandnewlow 8y ago
  Also, the cockatrice drafting community relies on opensource apps like http://dr4ft.info http://dr4ft.info to run the actual drafts. There's always room for improvement and anyone can host a fork. It'd be great to get more HNers tinkering with them. https://github.com/dr4fters/dr4ft https://github.com/dr4fters/dr4ft
- anthonybullard 8y ago
  Is this basically the modern version of Apprentice? I spent a lot of time during tourney prep on Apprentice, it helped me figure out deck concepts really quickly and let me know what cards i needed to buy(as well as strategies to counter the most popular decks in the format). Apprentice was super basic, but the P2P gameplay really felt futuristic even on dial-up.

sincerely 8y ago

> High level of play. On cockatrice...? I love doing a cockatrice cube but this is simply not true.

derivagral 8y ago

XMage is similar to Cockatrice but also has rules enforcement and drafting in-client. Just the Java download gets you the game, but you do have to scrape the images yourself (within their software) if you want those.