Cockatrice

[Alex]

Tonight I stumbled on an MTG program called Cockatrice. In a nutshell, it's open-source MWS-like software that lets you edit decks and play Magic online. It's available for Windows, Mac and Linux (Linux users have to self-compile the software) and it's ad-free.

Cockatrice seems like it was designed by MTG players, with lots of little things that happen during a game. It lets you set counters for various things (including storm!), you can set a card to not untap normally, you can clone a card, and even set an annotation on a card that will appear if you mouse over it. The battlefield also expands and shrinks depending on how many cards are on the table and there's a zone to show cards on the stack.

Some other nice things are the game browser, the ability to import MWS decks and auto-downloading of card images. On that last point, the images aren't brilliant quality (I think they're downloaded from Gatherer) but they do the job. The deck editor is also really nice to use.

I'm not a fan of the buttons, they're a bit big and generic-looking. Also, the software looks a bit boring (albeit clean) by default, although you can set your own table background, card back etc. It's also important to note that, like MWS, Cockatrice doesn't enforce the rules.

The authors say that the software isn't tournament-ready yet, but I did some quick solitaire testing and it seems nice enough. I haven't tried an online game yet. Oh, the screenshots on the site are in German, but it installed on my PC in English.

I like Cockatrice. It seems well-designed for MTG players, is actively developed and could become something quite cool!

[browncoat]

I saw Cockatrice on an EDH forum a few months ago. I was optimistic as MWS is pretty buggy and unfinished and cockatrice had the promise of a better program with multiplayer support. The program itself feels better than MWS but the interface is pretty bad. While I like the concept of a multiplayer program, cockatrice ended up being frustrating and simply unpleasant to work with. The main problem is the play area as it has little space and scales poorly especially with 4 players (admittedly this was not online but against myself). MWS was not designed exclusively for MTG, allowing it to be flexible and have a stupid number of options. Cockatrice feels far more constrictive with far fewer options even if I would rarely use them (not to mention the disorganization of the MWS interface).

With that said I do think that Cockatrice has a lot of promise but needs a bit of work before it is worth switching from MWS to.