/* CAT(1) */
When Magic the Gathering (MtG) came out I was beyond excited. As a fairly young kid, this was unlike anything I'd ever seen before and for a few years I would spend every penny from chores, lunch money, and birthday cards to round out my collection. It was a blast, I really enjoyed it, and developed many fond memories around playing and collecting the cards.
Alas, as with all good things, that came to an end as life started to kick in. Fast forward 20+ years to today and I'm free to indulge myself in my old(new) hobbies again. One thing I always wanted to do was buy a booster box. SO.MANY.CARDS! But holy shit is it not cheap, or at least not for past-me, so it was always a pipe dream until now.
I've been shitposting with friends at work about doing a MtG draft at a conference we'll be attending one night, rehashing old memories, and then I felt a familiar feeling...an itch that needed to be scratched. I read up on the latest Amonkhet set and fell in love with the theme of it so I went out and bought an Amonkhet Booster Box, the Amonkhet Deck Builder's Toolkit, and an Amonkhet Bundle Box. Indulge I shall.
It's a metric crap top of cards, espceially going from 0, and I found myself with an overwhelming amount of information to take in and try to process. Tons of new rules, new abilities, new everything. I spent the majority of time looking up card rules to try and get a grasp of the game, not even knowing where to begin with building a new deck. I cobbled together some decks as I opened packs but I wondered if, within my cache of newfound cards, there may already be a deck someone else has built and posted online. Surely that would be the case with 1,100 cards, right?
TL;DR don't buy packs and expect to have any semblance of a pre-constructed deck, official or otherwise.
To come to this conclusion, which I admittedly already thought may be the case before buying all of these (still didn't deter me from making the purchase though, at least to do it once) I created a script to essentially search decks I scrape online and attempt to match my library against. The script mtgdeckhunter.py is up on Github with usage examples and output data. You can skip everything below if you're just interested in that instead of my rambling about it.
After some time on the net looking up new MtG rules, I came across three main sites (Deckbox, MtG Goldfish, and MtG Top 8) that had tons of decks available to peruse in all kinds of formats. The problem then became not finding the decks, but identifying which decks I might have most of the cards for. The idea being I could then just craft some decks other people put thought into, give them a whirl, see if I liked that style, then maybe go from there. Unfortunately none of these sites have that feature available except for MtG Goldfish - part of their monthly pay service.
I decided I'd try to craft something simple in Python to scrape the publicly available decks and see if I had any matches. What I've now realized is that if you just have one "set" (eg Amonkhet) then you're pretty much SoL on finding pre-made decks. Since there are so many editions in rotation, you rarely find real decks solely focused on just one set except the officially released ones. In hindsight, I'd have bought a few of the "Deck Builder's Toolkits" and Bundle Boxes for maybe the most recent 2-3 sets or just a couple of the official pre-constructed ones that actually don't seem too bad. Initially the idea of buying a pre-constructed deck had me sticking my nose up as if I'm some kind of MtG legend (I'm not).
Anywho, I'm not providing the decks I've pulled from these sites, that is an exercise left to the user, but if you have a ton of cards that you've got listed out on your computer, then maybe this program will prove helpful to you. I ended up not really using it at all...go figure...and built two EDH decks that have been pretty fun in my limited playing. I may revisit this once I have a more well rounded collection.
You can see my cards from the three purchases mentioned previously on Deckbox or in text format here, if you're interested in what I got. Deckbox says the total value of cards in the set is $283.95, which I think is pretty good since it's about 2x what I paid (doesn't account for the foils I got). The new formats (eg EDH) seem really fun and I'm excited to get back into this hobby.
Enjoy!
*NOTE: I likely won't be updating this code anytime soon for the reasons above. It's probably quite a bit buggy and after having collected 100,000+ decks, I quickly recognized using JSON as the storage format as being a terrible idea (80MB+ file). Also I'd say it's not particularly stable as it relies upon parsing these sites which can change their code at any moment.