Magic: The Gathering Companion

I absolutely loved the advanced card search, and I would use it in the brewing of every deck I made. Unfortunately for whatever reason, someone made the call to completely remove nearly all the options from the advanced card search, making it basically useless. Beforehand, I was able to explicitly use modifiers such as “is” “or” “not”, and multiple individual phrases in the rules text box to narrow down different effects I needed for a deck but didn’t know if it existed. The only limit for discovery was myself, and the advanced card search could be utilized incredibly to discover new cards among the tens of thousands for some exact scenario you might need. I love building jank decks so finding jank combos was extremely important, and often utilized many cards and effect not often seen or known. Now the only way you can use the advanced search is if you know a near exact phrase of a card, so the potential for card discovery no longer exists. It’s really sad to see because it was such an incredible tool; and I have found no other website or third party app that can accomplish what the old advanced search could. I really hope that a developer or someone at wizards sees the comments and complaints about this new change and motions to revert the advanced search to what it used to be. Deck building is a lot more difficult now.

First, I’d like to say that I’ve been playing magic for years. Spent a vast amount of time and money on this game that I love. And when I heard that an app was made to play? I was overjoyed. But after playing, and paying, for months now? I’m at the point of utter disbelief and frustration. You guys must make money hand over fist with this and magic as a whole, yet you can’t come up with a better shuffle algorithm? Do not try and tell me that it is “randomized” because I can nearly call ever hand I will get once I play for a certain amount of time. If I play best of three for instance? And my opening hand is three or more land? I know that I will be getting mostly lands that game. And as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, the next game I play? I will get maybe two lands if I’m lucky and have land problems all that game. There comes a point in time where you see patterns like this, playing multiple colors of manna in a deck and only get one, or go on a win streak where you are actually getting a fair hand then go on a hard losing streak where your hands are the only reason why you lose, that make me swear that I will never pay another penny into this application. Why can’t you just make this fair play? Are you actually telling me that this is actually the best way to do this? Just completely ruin the experience with whatever your algorithm is doing? If the goal is to keep people playing, then why would you want your customers so frustrated that they stop altogether? I’m sure I’m not the only one who see this. In fact, real magic players at game shops? Nine out of ten of them don’t play this application because of the shuffling mechanic of this game. Why?

I mostly use this as a life counter and it’s great. They have some small features that really make a difference. Tracking commander damage, floating mana, infect, etc. is just one swipe away. Most other apps have a really clunky process to get to these features but it’s quite smooth in the companion app. When you subtract life, the screen shows another number that counts up which makes it easier to double check your math. You can save the life totals of the current game and pick up where you left off, which might be nice occasionally. The only thing that is missing is a dice roll feature but that’s ok. I’d use this over Lifelinker for sure.