I don’t have an Xbox 360 and don’t plan to get one, but this is still interesting because there are two articles about the development of the game:

• Duels of the Planeswalkers: The Magic Engine
• Duels of the Planeswalkers: All about AI

(I don’t think there is any relation to Microprose Magic, which had an upgraded version that was also called Duels of the Planeswalkers.)

Today’s treat is Magicripper, a tool to extract Magic card data from Gatherer. There’s a catch, of course… it used to work with the original version of Gatherer, but since they’ve upgraded the site, it no longer does. I am making it available anyway for two reasons:

1. The tarball includes pre-generated XML files with card data, which may be useful to someone.

2. Looking around on github, I noticed that I am not the only one interested in stuff like this (CCGs etc), so maybe enough people will pester me to update the code so it works with the new site as well. (Passive-aggressive motivation technique ;-)

There was a program called Spellweaver as well, that lets you search the data, much like Magi-Nation Search. (Well, sort of… Magic has a lot more cards than MND, and is much more complex. Wizards likes to come up with new features that break existing assumptions. (Hybrid mana, anyone?)) … Since the new version of Gatherer is much better than the old one, Spellweaver has probably become obsolete.

Anyway, these five colors can also be seen as psychological profiles. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and applying it to some situations (which caused a friend to call it “uncharacteristically nerdy”, or something to that effect :-). Apparently I’m not the only one who does this; this appeared today on the Wizards site: What Magic color or colors best describe your personality, and why?

Here are a few articles that describe the colors. Note that these are fairly long, and not everything necessarily applies to personalities, at least not without some tweaking. (For example, one of black’s characteristics is that it’s “parasitic”… that does not mean that everyone who associates with black is a parasite! On the other hand, someone who shows parasitic and abusive behavior does have a black streak, at the very least.)

• green
• red
• black
• blue
• white

Also, there’s this article about opposing colors. (Again, this is written from a gaming perspective.)

For those who don’t want to read the articles, here’s a summary, adapted from Wikipedia:

• White is the color of order, equality, righteousness, healing, law, community, absolutism/totalitarianism, and light, although not necessarily “good”.

• Blue is the color of intellect, reason, illusion, logic, knowledge, manipulation, and trickery, as well as the classical elements of air and water.

• Black is the color of power, ambition, greed, death, corruption, and amorality, although not necessarily “evil”. 

• Red is the color of freedom, chaos, passion, creativity, impulse, fury, lightning, the classical element of fire, and the non-living geological aspects of the classical element earth.

• Green is the color of life, instinct, nature, evolution, ecology and interdependence.

Personally, I am mostly blue/white, while my wife is red/green, and my evil stepdaughter is red/black. (Which explains a lot, as red opposes blue and white, and black opposes white… :-)

Like all personality type indicators, this shouldn’t be taken too seriously… especially not this one. :-) But I think it’s an interesting alternative to the more traditional ones.