mtg-meld

Generates a sheet of Magic: the Gathering proxies with 2 cards melded together to allow for deck variance.

Use Case

I have two main use cases behind developing this script. The first is that Magic: the Gathering cards are expensive! I'm not made of fetch lands. So this part of the plan is to have one copy of expensive cards sleeved in a psuedo-sideboard where I can grab the copy of, let's say, Mana Crypt, that I need without having to resleeve it depending upon which deck I decided to play any given day.

While we're talking about Mana Crypt, it's important to note this is a pretty powerful card. Commander, one of my favorite formats, is all about the social experience, and it's important to get a good idea the relative power level of the decks at your table before choosing which deck to play. Sometimes, though, you REALLY want to play a certain commander. I've recently wanted to play around with having a transformable deck, which led me to design the melded proxies you can generate with this tool. Here's a great example for this use case: I have an Ezuri, Claw of Progress deck based around the morph mechanic. Ezuri, once you have 5 experience counters, goes infinite with Sage of Hours. Some playgroups may not want to play with infinite combos. But rather than have to resleeve my deck after replacing a card, I can simply say that for the game, I am using only the bottom half of my proxy cards, which replaces the card in the deck with a less powerful one. This allows me to change my deck's power level on the fly depending upon my group.

How to use

There are two main ways to use the script. First, you can pass a -t flag with a card name to generate a proxy for that card. Optionally passing a -b flag with a card name will meld a proxy for you. If you pass the optional -o flag, it will generate the current oracle text onto the melded proxy.

./meld.sh -t "Thornwood Falls" -b "Tropical Island"

The second way is to pass a list of cards in a file using the -f parameter. This looks like a properties file, with the left side of the equals sign the top of the card and the right, if provided, the bottom of a melded proxy. Note: you must pass the = either way. Similar to the first option, passing -o will generate the current oracle text onto all melded proxies.

./meld.sh -f SampleList.txt -o

Dependencies

curl
imagemagick
That's it!

Data

All data is pulled from scryfall.com in accordance with their API usage.

Future

At some future point, I hope to provide some sort of cross-platform/hosted version.