r/Cockatrice

Hey everyone,

Update 3.0 was huge and we've changed a lot of things. As always, we've kept things as backwards compatible as possible because we know that some of you guys simply prefer doing things 'the old way'. I'm here to shed some light on the new changes, how to use them and how to return back to the old way of doing things, if the changes still don't appeal.

Let's start with one of the biggest new changes:

The Visual Deck Editor

The visual deck editor offers pretty much all the functionality of the 'classic' deck editor, plus some extras that you couldn't get in the classic deck editor.

You might say "But Ascor, it looks completely different! What do you mean?"

By default, the VDE starts in 'Deck display' mode.

It looks like this.

To browse the database, click on the tab 'Visual Database Display'. Note that this tab is below the regular tab bar, adjacent to the other visual deck editor tabs.

It looks like this.

If you'd rather browse the database as a table than visually, click the button on the right of the search bar in this tab.

It looks like this.

At this point, your deck editor now looks exactly the same as the classic deck editor (try resetting your layout if you are missing dock widgets).

It looks like this.

One of the main benefits, is that you now gain filter buttons, to easily filter the database. You also gain the 'Deck analytics' and 'Sample Hand' tabs, as well as the visual deck view.

If you really dislike this change, you can instruct Cockatrice to continue using the classic deck editor.

The relevant setting is under 'Settings -> User Interface -> Deck Editor/Storage Settings ->Default deck editor type'

The Home Screen

We changed the first thing you see when launching the application.

Many of you are familiar with the classic deck editor being the first thing you see when launching the application.

We recognize that there were certain use cases where this was convenient.

However, we had good reason for introducing the home screen.

One of the reasons is to streamline the interaction flow when the user intent on starting the application was anything other than brewing a new deck.

We reasoned that, on average, a user is far more likely to want to play with a new deck than brew a completely new deck when launching the application.

Another big reason for the change was to give all of the new features introduced in 3.0 a home. Many of these integrations and features that make Cockatrice a true TCG platform qualify as 'user intents'.

You could open Cockatrice to browse EDHRec and add cards to your deck.

You could open Cockatrice to browse Archidekt to import decks to then play with.

However, one of the things we've observed in the past release is that many people were unaware that new features had been introduced.

The EDHRec integration has been a feature of Cockatrice for a couple releases now. However, it had been hidden away behind the 'Tabs' menu, waiting for people to stumble upon it.

One of the other reasons why we introduced the home screen is to give Cockatrice an identity. We realize that the default background is not much but themes are able to edit it and we look forward to the fun and creative backgrounds our community will come up with.

As an aside, you can change the background of the home screen to be a (rotating) art crop of a random card from a card in the database. You can also choose to use random cards from a deck called 'background.cod', which must be in your decks/ folder. This allows you to choose specific cards to have as your background and to shuffle through them if desired.

The Game Filter Toolbar

We've added a new toolbar above the game filters in the room tab, which allows you to easily search for games by name, as well as some other options. If you don't like this feature, you can disable it in 'Appearance -> Menu settings'

The Card Database

Rejoice! You don't really need to care about the card database going forward. We've automated many a things.

First and foremost, you can now configure your client to automatically update the card database in the background every X days.

It is recommended you do this. Do so under 'Settings -> General -> Check for card database updates on startup'

If your computer has trouble parsing the files or hangs during card database updates, we recommend using mtgxml as your update source, which should make card database updates blazing fast and lightweight.

You can also now choose to 'Always enable new sets', which should make the card database update process fully automatic in the future.

Tokens and Token Printings

We've added the ability for tokens to have printings now. With this comes some discussion about how these should be handled so while we wait for your input, let me illuminate the system we have chosen:

Tokens created from the context menu of another card will attempt to use the token printing from the set that matches the card. If no matching set is found, it will use the local players highest preference set.

Tokens created through the Ctrl + T dialog will always use the highest preference (or pinned) token set by the user.