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Introducing MTGUrl.com for sharing your decks

By Trick Jarrett ⋅ October 5, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

Back in 2007 we first launched mtgurl.com as a link short­en­ing ser­vice aimed at Magic the Gath­er­ing play­ers. Then in 2008 we relaunched it as a rss aggre­gater for Magic web­sites, but then again it never took off and we returned it back to a link short­ener. Then this past week we relaunched it qui­etly as a deck shar­ing site, and per some requests, we want to intro­duce you to it and some of its features.

I’ve seen sev­eral peo­ple share decks over twit­ter in var­i­ous forms. Some would com­press and abbre­vi­ate the card names to try and fit it into one or two tweets, then oth­ers would uti­lize third party sites not aimed at Magic play­ers such as shorttext.com. With the explo­sion of Magic play­ers and the Magic com­mu­nity on twit­ter we wanted to build an appli­ca­tion which took people’s decks and eas­ily (and shortly) shared them online.

So now we are proud to bring you a beta ver­sion of this sys­tem. Let’s look it over.

In its sim­plest form you just copy and paste the deck into the text area. It parses lines that begin with a num­ber as a card entry, so even if there is only 1 of a card in the deck, you must pref­ace the line with a “1.” We will be fix­ing this in the future as we fin­ish our data­base of Magic cards. Also cur­rently, the sys­tem does not val­i­date card names. So if you typo it, or use a nick­name, the link pro­vided will only bring up an error page.

Half way through our first offi­cial launch day, we rolled out a num­ber of more fea­tures. We added spe­cific fields for title, author, and password.

1. Title — This is an optional field, and in it you can define the title of the deck.
2. Author — If there is an author to be cred­ited, then you may enter it in this field. Again, it is optional.
3. Pass­word — This allows a user to set their pass­word and use it to come back and edit the deck later.

But once the deck is entered and saved, you will be directed to a page to view the deck such that it will look like as follows.

On this deck you’re view­ing the deck list as our sys­tem parses it. Pro­vid­ing an easy to use check­box view. At the bot­tom are two but­tons, the left one will take you to our spon­sor CoolStuffInc.com and allow you to pur­chase the entire deck from them. Or you can check spe­cific cards and click the right but­ton to get only those from CoolStuffInc.com.

Also on this view you’ll see the big easy to find short link (shorter than most bit.ly links) for this page. Also above it you’ll see the Tweet­meme but­ton which shows you how much it has been tweeted. And then next to it is a but­ton to allow you to send this deck via email to your­self or a friend.

And that wraps up most of the cur­rent fea­tures, we’ve got a num­ber more in the works:

• API — We’re work­ing on an api so that other devel­op­ers can build and expand on our system.
• Card val­i­da­tion — Once Wiz­ards pub­lishes the updated Ora­cle changes we’ll go through and set up the card data­base to use for validation.
• Pub­lic / Pri­vate decks — Allow users to define whether the deck is “pub­lic” or “pri­vate.” In this case it means whether we can adver­tise the deck else­where or on mtgurl.com, if some­one types in the url it will still be vis­i­ble. This fea­ture could also include a pass­word for access­ing, though this might be con­fus­ing with the edit­ing password.
• Deck For­mats — Along with the card val­i­da­tion we’ll be able to define the deck for­mat legality.
• Deck Analy­sis — Also tied with the card val­i­da­tion we’ll be shar­ing some deck stats includ­ing mana curve and other stats.
• Export Decks — Allow you to export the decks in var­i­ous for­mats for pro­grams such as Magic Online, Magic Work­sta­tion and other formats.
• Embed­d­a­ble Wid­gets — For easy embed­ding in your own per­sonal blogs.
• Deeper Twit­ter inte­gra­tion — Have embed­ded twit­ter search to see who is tweet­ing about the deck.
• Face­book inte­gra­tion — For allow­ing the shar­ing of decks over Facebook.
• Com­ments — Allow peo­ple to leave com­ments or notes about decks.

As you can see, lots to do. So stay tuned!

Trick Jarrett is the host and founder of ManaNation.com, he writes, edits, covers, and spoils Magic for a living. Playing it whenever he can manage to find the time. He is engaged to a lovely woman who refuses to learn Magic, and they have a cute cocker-spaniel puppy who is all too eager to play Magic.

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