New game mode: Budget decks

[drmDev]

From reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/XMage/comments/4hm01s/budget_game_mode/

"A game mode where a deck had to have a total 'cost' under a set value. I know half the fun of this is to play decks that you could never run in paper magic, but trying to brew off beat decks and just getting wrecked by same (nearly) $1,000 superfriends deck over and over is getting old."

Looks like it would need a few things to be done:

1. A source to determine current card prices - and calls to it regularly, or cached on a daily basis to get the latest information for all the cards. Then when someone tries to create/join the game the deck is checked against this information to see if it exceeds the Max.
2. When creating the game, a Max Amount field so they can limit it to decks that are < $100 or < $1000 etc

[drmDev]

I didn't really think about having the prices show in the deck edit mode, but that sounds like another pain in trying to accomplish this for sure. Maybe just a "total value" somewhere instead. And for each card, whatever the price source is, it would need an API that is called at least daily to fetch all the prices for all cards (or alternatively, make far more calls to the API constantly asking for the price). The price used should probably just be whatever the cheapest set that card is available in. ex Khans fetch prices instead of their original set's fetch prices.

I agree it definitely is difficult to do. Alternatively, the XMage subreddit is trying to get more of a community going, so can ask the mod there to try to setup a Budget event where someone just checks the decks before the tournament or something.

[marthinwurer]

I've looked into this, and the main problem is getting accurate pricing data. I know that TCGPlayer has an API to grab prices, but I doubt that they would be fine with us using it for a potential competitor. Their basic average price call is a bit wonky too; it gives the average of all editions, including alpha, beta, and other promo sets, which makes Serra Angel, a $.20 card, show up as $17.00!

[emerald000]

I think mtgprice.com's API is better in that regard. Quite simple, but efficient.