DevLog #5 - Banned & Restricted Cards

Welcome our MTG Doctor DevLogs where we cover the changes that are being made to MTG Doctor as part of our Phoenix release coming later this year. Today we’ll be going over the new experiences we are adding to the Banned/Restricted cards feature. 

Banned/Restricted Cards

For our revision of the Banned/Restricted Cards feature we aimed to improve both its usability and make the results more glanceable. 

The first change we decided to make was to move the format selector from the top of the screen where it currently resides in MTG Doctor to a position closer to the bottom of the screen where it is now close to the thumb making it more accessible specially when using MTG Doctor with one hand. As an added bonus the new design we developed for this screen allowed us to place this format selector right in the middle making it equally accessible whether you are right handed or left handed. Switching between banned or restricted cards before required scrolling past all the banned cards and now simply requires a single swipe either to the left or right.

That new design direction we took for displaying the list of banned or restricted cards is one that emphasizes the beautiful art from Magic: The Gathering. So for this update we moved away from a simple list of names and towards displaying the full card image.

The card viewer for this feature has also been reworked to make better use of the screen real estate while also having more “information in the world”. When viewing a card it is now clear at a glance whether the card is banned or restricted by displaying the restriction type on the modal title. Finally we removed the pricing segment we had originally as we found over time that it was not adding much value to the feature whose main intent is to provide quick access to what cards are banned or restricted in a format.

Last but not least we improved the overall format selection by providing a bit more information about the action being performed.

Closing Thoughts

And that is all for today’s DevLog. Thank you for reading this far and for being a member of the MTG Doctor community all these years. Subscribe to get the latest updates on all the new experiences we are bringing to MTG Doctor as part of our Phoenix update.

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