* We manually update the Banned and Restricted rules. We also keep information if the card is Legal or has a Legal reprint
* We manually add new game formats
* The process for automated updating legality cache takes 20 hours - since we have 52 000+ cards defined in 60+ formats which is approximately 3.1+ million cached values.
* We add manually Card of the Day details
* We add manually Release Notes for cards
* We add manually Lexicon for cards
* We add manually Functional Reprints, Mana Cost Reprints, Mirrored Pairs, Cycle cards
* We have automated procedures for adding latest Oracle rules
* We spell check every single card rules and flavor text
* We have semi automated procedures for adding the latest MTG Online, TCG Player, Multiverse and Wagic card identifiers
* We have semi automated procedures for "linking" our cards to external card stores for fetching prices
* We have lots of automated data quality checks which run for more than 10 minutes
* We manually add artist contact details
* We manually add the set expansion symbols
* We manually add more than 50 attributes for new editions such as border color, product type, copyright message, card breakdows, popular third party Magic software set abbreviations, set description, recommended market price, design team, development team, codename, expansion symbol description, plane
* We manually add new mechanics, and keyword abilities and Magic terms and link them to cards. This 350+ abilities linked to 52 000+ cards. Which is 18.2+ million cached values.
* We manually add strictly better, strictly worst, functional reprints, and color shifted cards, cycle cards.
* We manually assign the watermark for each card
* We semi-manually mark mana producing cards
* We manually add theme decks and sample decks in various deck file formats
* We perform spell checking against a very custom own developed Magic dictionary
* We mostly manually added 50 000+ combos
* If user interface is built for all those tasks the final distribution would be 100 instead of 30 MB
...and it is not only about data. Whenever a new set comes along Wizards constantly introduce new stuff such as: Guild Mana, Hybrid Mana, 1/2 Power, toughness, new special symbols such as Chaos or Untap. They are really inventive and come with lots of custom stuff which needs to be coded in various areas of thee application.
* Last but not least - the most valuable asset of MTG Studio is its rich content and we are not willing to open source or sell our proprietary database.
We value quality over quantity and we tend to believe MTG Studio is one of the "purest" MTG database in the world.
