<commit_before>---
layout: post
title: MTG, or&#58; how to be really, really, really cool
excerpt: "In which our hero struggles to game a multi-thousand-dollar game about goblins"
keywords: "hack, mtg, magic, gathering, superfly, web, scraping"
series: mtg
part: 1
---

The coolest thing about me, probably, is my love for a novelty card game about fantasy battles. Think pokeman for lord of the rings fans. For the record, I don't really like just about anything about the fantasy genre *outside* of the context of "Magic: The Gathering." I don't even like the fact that the name of the game is "Magic: The Gathering." I suppose I'm trying to hard to distance myself from the game, here; playing a little too cool for school. So let me just drop the coolness factor on down to 0 and bring the realness factor up to 100: I love this silly fantasy card game.

Unfortunately, however, my wallet doesn't fell the same way. Magic cards are *ridiculously expensive* (see, e.g., one of the '[power nine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Nine)', [black lotus](http://www.mtgprice.com/sets/Alpha/Black_Lotus)). You're reading that right -- we're in the *tens of thousands* for that piece of cardboard. Like, desired enough to make a [grownass adult cry out of joy](https://youtu.be/WRxCeO2KIS8?t=8m18s). Personally, five minutes in MS Paint and some understanding playing partners seems like a reasonable reaction to that price, but, hey, [Wizards of the Coast](http://company.wizards.com/) has to fleece the humble neckbeard residents of The Nerderlands somehow.

So to the point: why am I talking about this game on my ostensibly tech-themed blog? Easy: with neither the wealth of America-great-ifier Donald Trump nor the skill of [whomever is good at mtg this week], I am left with only my trusty debian dev environment and my pythonic wits to attempt to eek out some kind of competitive advantage -- so eek I shall.

In this series, my goal is to do the following:

+ obtain data on cards and, in particular, their possible membership in high-performing decks (collections of 60 or so cards with some compositions regulations),
+ develop a metric that ranks cards based on previous success and various synergies,
+ predict which cards of the next set release will perform well or be particularly popular,
+ and, finally, attempt to use that information to get some sort of competitive advantage<commit_msg>mtg proj: type in previous post<commit_after>---
layout: post
title: MTG, or&#58; how to be really, really, really cool
excerpt: "In which our hero struggles to game a multi-thousand-dollar game about goblins"
keywords: "hack, mtg, magic, gathering, superfly, web, scraping"
series: mtg
part: 1
---

The coolest thing about me, probably, is my love for a novelty card game about fantasy battles. Think pokeman for lord of the rings fans. For the record, I don't really like just about anything about the fantasy genre *outside* of the context of "Magic: The Gathering." I don't even like the fact that the name of the game is "Magic: The Gathering." I suppose I'm trying too hard to distance myself from the game, here; playing a little too cool for school. So let me just drop the coolness factor on down to 0 and bring the realness factor up to 100: I love this silly fantasy card game.

Unfortunately, however, my wallet doesn't fell the same way. Magic cards are *ridiculously expensive* (see, e.g., one of the '[power nine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Nine)', [black lotus](http://www.mtgprice.com/sets/Alpha/Black_Lotus)). You're reading that right -- we're in the *tens of thousands* for that piece of cardboard. Like, desired enough to make a [grownass adult cry out of joy](https://youtu.be/WRxCeO2KIS8?t=8m18s). Personally, five minutes in MS Paint and some understanding playing partners seems like a reasonable reaction to that price, but, hey, [Wizards of the Coast](http://company.wizards.com/) has to fleece the humble neckbeard residents of The Nerderlands somehow.

So to the point: why am I talking about this game on my ostensibly tech-themed blog? Easy: with neither the wealth of America-great-ifier Donald Trump nor the skill of [whomever is good at mtg this week], I am left with only my trusty debian dev environment and my pythonic wits to attempt to eek out some kind of competitive advantage -- so eek I shall.

In this series, my goal is to do the following:

+ obtain data on cards and, in particular, their possible membership in high-performing decks (collections of 60 or so cards with some compositions regulations),
+ develop a metric that ranks cards based on previous success and various synergies,
+ predict which cards of the next set release will perform well or be particularly popular,
+ and, finally, attempt to use that information to get some sort of competitive advantage
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