demilich 1.1.0

Demilich, the MTG skeleton wizard

Demilich - the MTG skeleton wizard

A tool for quickly scaffolding a custom MTG set.

For designers of custom Magic: the Gathering sets, the designers of canon Magic suggest starting from a design skeleton. This is a set of "slots" which have some standard creatures, keywords, and spells to make the limited game work, at least at a base level. I've found that the act of mechanically filling out a design skeleton (15 commons per color, 14 uncommons per color, plus artifacts and signposts) is draining. In fact, I've never successfully completed a design skeleton by hand.

Enter demilich. Demilich encodes the suggested distributions of things and generates a randomized set of initial slots. This takes the drudgery and thinking out of the process and makes it a simple, mechanical starting point. From there, you can start assigning your own mechanics and creative to your new set!

Installation

The fastest way to simply generate a basic skeleton is to run demilich using pipx.

1. Install pipx
2. Run demilich: pipx run demilich play-booster > skeleton.csv

If you intend to use more of its features (like generating a skeleton programmatically), you can also install the package.

# first make a virtualenv however you normally do
% python -m venv env
% . env/bin/activate
# then install demilich
% pip install demilich

Basic use

% demilich play-booster > skeleton.csv

Then open skeleton.csv in the editor of your choice.

Custom skeleton

You can use demilich with your custom skeleton definition. I recommend you copy pb2024.toml to use as a starting point. Once you have your my-custom-skeleton.toml ready to go, run:

% demilich custom-skeleton my-custom-skeleton.toml

Output formats

By default, demilich generates a CSV. You can ask for a pretty-printed table instead with the --format option.

% demilich play-booster --format=table
# or
% demilich custom-skeleton my-custom-skeleton.toml --format=table

Suppressing or including big columns

CSV mode includes all columns by default.

Table mode suppresses the "instruction" column by default. You can bring it back with --include-instruction. (You'll want a pretty wide terminal for this to make sense.)

% demilich play-booster --format=table --include-instruction

You can additionally suppress card text with --no-include-text:

% demilich play-booster --format=table --no-include-text

Programmatically building a skeleton

The API for SkeletonGenerator is documented in docstrings so you can generate skeletons programmatically. See the examples in examples/ for ideas on how to do it.

Each SkeletonGenerator is only responsible for a single section of a full skeleton. It keeps a fixed rarity and frame code, which simplifies the implementation quite a bit. If you need something much fancier, like redistribution keywords that didn't make it into one rarity into another rarity, you can probably achieve that using the programmatic interface.

Fan content policy

demilich is unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Fan Content Policy. Not approved/endorsed by Wizards. Portions of the materials used are property of Wizards of the Coast. ©Wizards of the Coast LLC.