manabase

Landing rock solid mana bases for your decks.

Manabase is a command-line tool that helps you generate a mana base for your Magic: The Gathering decks.

It uses scryfall as its source of truth to find suitable lands and mana rocks for your colors.

Note: Manabase comes pre-configured for Commander decks, but is fully customizable.

Installation

Manabase is available on PyPI Install manabase using pip:

pip install --user manabase

Quickstart

To generate a new manabase with default settings, run the following command:

manabase generate WUB

This will output a manabase of 37 unique lands for a white, blue and black deck.

Usage

Manabase offers a primary command, manabase, that generates a list of lands and optionally rocks for a set of colors.

Colors

Colors must be specified in the command, and are expressed as a string of letters.

Each color has one unique letter assigned:

• White: W
• Blue: U
• Black: B
• Red: R
• Green: G

So if you wanted to generate a red and green manabase, you would use the command manabase generate RG.

Filters

Manabase includes a set of powerful filters, defining which type of lands and rocks are allowed in the output list.

These type of cards are called cycles, and are defined by MTG Gamepedia for both lands and rocks

Following is a list of supported cycles, and the name of the corresponding filter.

Lands:

• battle: Battle for Zendikar dual lands.
• bond: Battlebond and Commander Legends crowd lands.
• bounce: Ravnica bounce lands.
• check: Ixalan and Innistrad check lands.
• cycling: Amonkhet cycling lands.
• fast: Mirrodin and Kaladesh fast lands.
• fetch: Onslaught and Zendikar fetch lands.
• filter: Odyssey and Future Sight filter lands.
• horizon: Future Sight and Modern Horizons horizon lands.
• original: The original dual lands.
• pain: Ice Age and Apocalypse pain lands.
• reveal: Innistrad reveal lands.
• scry: Theros and M21 scry lands.
• shock: Ravnica shock lands.

Rocks:

• banner: Khans of Tarkir banners.
• cluestone: Ravnica clue stones.
• crystal: Ikoria crystals.
• locket: Ravnica lockets.
• obelisk: Alara obelisks.
• signet: Ravnica signets.
• talisman: Mirrodin talismans.

Additionally, two color-related filters are provided:

These are:

• producer: This filter checks if the card produces mana of the given colors.
• reference: This filter checks if a reference to a land type of the given colors is contained in the card text.

Without these filters, all colors could be matched.

Examples:

fetch will accept all fetch lands. producer will accept all cards that can produce your colors.

Operators

Filters can be combined using four operators:

• &: Accepts only cards matching both filters.
• |: Accepts cards matching either filter.
• ^: Accepts cards matching one filter or the other, but not both.
• ~: Inverts the following filter results.

Moreover, you can group operators and filters using parenthesis to control operator precedence.

Examples:

• reference & fetch would match only fetch lands respecting your colors.
• (producer & original) | (reference & fetch) would match either original dual lands producing your colors, or fetch lands of your colors.

Filter arguments

Finally, some filters can take arguments to control their behavior.

producer and reference each take exclusive and minimum_count arguments.

exclusive, which is true by default, prevents cards matching colors other than yours. For example, if you asked for white and blue, a white and red producer would be excluded, because it contains red.

minimum_count sets the number of colors a card should match, among your colors, before being accepted. By default this is 2, which means cards have to produce or reference at least two of your colors to be accepted.

This filters can help you define a better behavior, for example for fetch lands it makes sense to disable the exclusive argument and set the minimum_count to 1, so that all fetch lands matching at least one of your colors are included.

To override arguments, specify your argument values in the right order, between curly braces, separated by commas.

Examples:

• producer { 0, 3 } would match all cards producing at least three of your colors, without excluding other colors.
• reference { 0, 1 } & fetch would match fetch lands producing at least one of your colors, without excluding other colors.

Commands

In the following examples, we are using the manabase command to generate a set of lands for a white, blue and black deck.

Generate a set of lands using default settings:

manabase generate WUB

Generate a set of 23 maximum lands, with 4 occurrence of each land:

manabase generate --lands=23 --occurrences=4 WUB

Generate a list of only fetch lands and original dual lands.

manabase generate --filters="(producer & original) | (reference & fetch)" WUB

Land Fillers

If Manabase cannot find as many lands as you asked for, it will begin filling the list with basic lands.

You have the option to specify weights to refine the distribution of these basic lands.

By default, the same amount of each basic land will be added.

If your mana costs are heavier in one color for example, you might want to add more of one basic land than the others.

The following command will generate a manabase including more Plains than Island or Swamp cards.

manabase generate --filler-weights="4 1 1" WUB

The number of weights must match the number of colors, and express a ratio between the basic land distribution.

In our case, a two thirds of all basic lands should be plains, will the last third will be equally Island and Swamp cards.

Presets

Specifying command-line arguments can be a bit cumbersome, especially for the --filters option.

A generation preset allows you to specify any options the generate command takes in, and apply them automatically.

For the following sections, it is assumed the preset name is default.

Creating a preset

To create a new preset, use the manabase presets new command, with a name for the new preset and any option the generate command can take.

manabase presets new default --filters="(producer & (original | shock)) | (reference & fetch)" --lands=37 --occurrences=1

Selecting the active preset

The active preset is the one used automatically when using the generate command.

You can activate an existing preset with the following command.

manabase presets use default

Note: when you create a new preset, it is automatically activated for you.

Printing the active preset

You can print the active preset with the following command.

manabase presets active

Listing existing presets

You can list existing preset names with the following command.

manabase presets list

Printing a preset

To print a preset content to the terminal, use the following command.

manabase presets show default

Updating a preset

Updating a preset replaces all its options with new ones.

If you meant to add a new option, or update a single option, use the patch subcommand.

manabase presets update default --lands=35

Patching a preset

Patching a preset adds a new option or updates an existing one.

manabase presets patch default --occurrences=4

Deleting a preset

Deleting a presets erases its file from disk.

manabase presets delete default

Contributing

This package uses poetry to manage its dependencies.

Installing

Install poetry.

Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/Aphosis/manabase
cd manabase

Install manabase for development:

poetry install

Tests

Tests are written using pytest.

Once manabase has been installed, you can run tests to check if your changes did not introduce regressions.

To run the test suite, cd into the manabase folder, then run:

pytest

Pytest is configured in pyproject.toml, you do not need to specify any extra arguments.

License

This tool is licensed under MIT.

Non affiliation disclaimer

Manabase is not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with Wizards of the Coast, or any of its subsidiaries or its affiliates.