Time is money. If this adage is true they you’re probably spending even more money than you think when you’re playing Magic Online. The client is buggy. Tournaments crash. Nothing is simple when it comes to the premiere digital incarnation of our favorite trading card game. Today we’re going to help make a little bit of your MTGO experience smoother.
Sorry, I can’t implement leagues for you.
What I can do is make some wicked Google Calendars and what I have done is create a collection of Google Calendars which contain the entirety of the MTGO Schedule. Why did I do this, you might ask? Well in case you’ve never given it a try, looking up when a tournament is scheduled on MTGO without running the (buggy) client is actually an incredibly painful chore. Try Googling “MTGO Schedule” and tell me when the next online PTQ weekend is. I’ll wait for however long it takes you.
That was probably a painful experience, so let’s not speak of it again. Instead, let me introduce you to our new Hipsters of the Coast Magic Online Schedule Page. That’s much nicer isn’t it? Look at all those colors, and that sleek interface, and all the tournaments! Oh wow, there are so many tournaments! Don’t worry, I’m here to break it down for you. In total we’ve created 13 calendars and will be adding more and removing some over time to fit your needs.
- 2015 MOCS Seasons: This calendar gives you the month-long seasons at the top of the calendar when in day, week, or month view. Use this calendar to see which MOCS season any given day’s tournaments contribute to, or to see which day the season changes.
- 2015 MOCS Events: This calendar gives you the qualifier and finals tournaments for each MOCS season along with the player of the year and last chance qualifier tournaments. Use this calendar if you want to be able to see any of those events.
- DTK Prerelease & Release Events: This calendar has entries for the tournament windows (e.g. when the fire-on-demand queues are running) and also the scheduled release events, such as the 64-player drafts. Use this calendar if you want to play in the Prerelease and Release events.
- MTGO Player Rewards Schedule: This calendar contains the MPR season entries which more-or-less overlap the MOCS Seasons. Use this calendar if you want to know when each rewards season ends/begins.
- Temporary Fire-on-Demand Queues: This calendar has entries for the windows in which temporary queues, such as the Legacy Cube or throwback Rise of the Eldrazi drafts are available. Use this calendar if you want to know when these events begin and end.
- MTGO Pro Tour Magic Origins PTQ Events: This calendar has the qualifier and finals tournaments for each PTQ event on MTGO which feeds Pro Tour Magic Origins. Use this calendar if you want to qualify for the Pro Tour using Magic Online.
- MTGO Daily <Format> Events: There are seven more calendars which cover each of the different formats of Daily events currently being offered. This includes Legacy, Modern, Pauper, Sealed, Standard, Vintage, and New Player. Use these calendars if you want to keep on-top of Daily events.
While this doesn’t give you the full filtering power of the MTGO Client, it gives it to you without having to actually run MTGO. This means you can check the schedule from a browser or on the go at your convenience, either using our website here or by copying the calendars to your own Google calendar.
So where do we go from here? For now, we will continue to make updates to these calendars as needed, such as when Wizards announces they’re shifting around daily events, something that has been happening a lot over the past few months. We’ll also create new calendars for you when appropriate, such as when the PTQ events for Battle For Zendikar are announced, or the Prerelease events for Magic Origins, or the 2016 MOCS schedule.
In the long-term, if people have a use for this, we’ll look to enhance this into a web application on top of the Google Calendars which will give you much more powerful searching and filtering options and also contain much more information about the tournaments. If there are some complex features people are interested in we can look into them, but we don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves.
As always we would appreciate any feedback you have for us either in the comments below or by Tweeting us @HotCBlog.
Grinding it Out is a periodic feature here at Hipsters of the Coast. Today’s installment is written by former amateur Magic Player Rich Stein, who came really close to making day two of a Grand Prix on several occasions. Each week we will take a look at the past seven days of major events, big news items, and community happenings so that you can keep up-to-date on all the latest and greatest Magic: the Gathering community news.