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Monday, May 28, 2018

Preconstructed Magic Decks on mtg.wtf

2018-05-28-13 by RobynAnderson from flickr (CC-NC-ND)

There's now a number of search engines for Magic cards, but some information is still missing from them all.

I just fixed one of such areas. mtg.wtf now has searchable contents of all preconstructed decks ever released. They contain cards from correct set, so viewing a decklist like this you can see actual cards which are in the deck. Every other decklist visualizer I've ever seen just gives you the most recent scans (like this for example), which looks really weird, especially for older decks.

You can view the decks, download decklists, or mix deck queries with other queries. For example to see which cards from Feline Ferocity are Modern-legal, just use deck:"Feline Ferocity" f:modern.

All this information is available in simple machine readable format.

Raw data is in magic-preconstructed-decks, and compiled jsons are in magic-search-engine repository.

Future enhancements

There's still room for improvement - information which cards are foil is missing, but easy to add. In theory it should be possible to find exact card printing instead of just set it's from (how many copies of which basic land etc.), in practice it might be a bit too much work.

Decklist visualizer could get extra features like sample hand, mana curve statistics etc.

And inevitably like with every project, there's going to be some errors. If you find any, please report them on github.

Monday, May 07, 2018

Wonder Woman review

Superkitty! by swxxii from flickr (CC-NC)

The movie is bad. Everything about it is bad. Like Star Wars prequels tier bad, but there won't even be any memes.

It's not about Wonder Woman

First of all, it's not even about Wonder Woman, it's all about her boyfriend. He's driving the whole plot, and she just tags along, without any sense of what's going on.

Diana (the "Wonder Woman") doesn't make any choices in the whole movie. The closest she gets to doing something on her own is choosing an outfit in a pointless shopping scene, and then she decides to dress up like him. Just wow.

Every time she suggests something (usually "omg, we got to help those people"), he just shuts her down, and then she does things his way.

The world makes no sense

Obviously the movie shits at actual Greek mythology.

As far as I can tell, the Amazons on the island are just some mortals. They have no children, and seem to be aging, so between ancient Greek times and World War 1, they should all be dead, right? Or is it some Star Trek time bubble? And how do they even speak English and all the other modern languages if they've been isolated from the world for who knows how long?

Then there's a framing device with pointless email from Batman. Like, what the hell? Greek Gods and Batman do not belong in the same movie in any way whatsoever. The comics tend to be stupid like that, but it served no purpose whatsoever.

And of course there are unexplained black Amazons, Hollywood has racial quotas to fill.

Action scenes are few and bad

There are three action sequences in this 2h 21min "action" movie.

Early on there's German army landing on Amazons' island, where the Amazons dance-fight, doing bows trick shot, and combo moves with spears, leashes, and such. Wearing the kind of "female armor" everyone has been making fun of for last 30 years. It's all rather silly, but probably still the best part of the movie.

Then about an hour of bad acting later there's storming of No Man's Land. Wonder Woman runs into machine gun fire, and the movie gives up on any internal logic. I couldn't tell - is she bullet proof or not? If she is, then why the hell is she tying to block bullets one by one with whatever piece of token armor is on her forearms? It's ridiculous every time she does it. And if she's not bulletproof, then how isn't she dead exactly? There's a lot of bullets out there, and she's not exactly waving her arms to block.

Anyway, leaving extent of her powers aside, somehow here mere presence makes all bullets miss everyone in the whole British army, who all decide to run after her, without anyone getting even a scratch.

Another hour of bad acting later, there's final boss fight which is basically shitty CGI, and least entertaining of all three.

The villain

Invincible superheroes are inherently rather boring, and decent superhero movies rely on an interesting villain to work. Wonder Woman's is about the worst, as the main villain gets like a minute of screen time within the first two hours before an obvious surprise plot twist reveal.

Villain's two henchmen get a bit more screen time, one of which Wonder Woman decided to kill, the other one to spare, for pretty much no reason whatsoever.

So instead the fighting is mostly against random German and occasionally Turkish conscripts who have absolutely no idea what the hell is going on around them. Then again, there's not that much fighting in the movie.

Morality

I think the movie attempts to have some moral message about violence being bad, but delivery is so ridiculously poor I'm not even sure what they've been going for. In the end, she ignores her moral intuitions and does whatever her boyfriend asks for. Is that the message perhaps? Do what your boyfriend says?

Sidekicks

At some point the boyfriend and his sidekick Diana assemble a team. None of them does anything. Some Native American "chief" sends smoke signals at some point, it's not very clear why. They try to do some fighting, but Wonder Woman does all the work anyway.

Acting

The only person who got any kind of character development is the boyfriend with his heroic sacrifice. Diana starts the movie as Wonder Woman, ends the movie as Wonder Woman, and her character development is, I guess getting her first boyfriend?

All the acting from Gal Gadot playing Wonder Woman was bad, so maybe they tried to salvage the movie by giving somewhat more tolerable Chris Pine playing the boyfriend more to do, until he took over the whole movie?

Conclusion

The movie has are no redeeming qualities. I watched it yesterday, and it's already rapidly fading in my memory other than the silly dance fight scene.

The only thing you'll achieve by watching it is convince yourself that critics (who for some reason love it) are all idiots, but you should probably know that by now.