Welcome to the first entry of what I hope will become a useful resource for those who wish to get into Magic: The Gathering (MTG) as well as those who already play it but lack knowledge on certain aspects of the game. The goal of this guide is to provide a beginner with all he or she will need in order to get started with MTG. Be it finding out what card game is all about, understanding how to play it, getting familiar with the rules and/or building your first deck.
Everything I write here has been put together through my own experiences, the people I played with and also through looking up information on several official sources like Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the basic rules and strategy guides as well as various wikis. Since WotC is changing their policy regarding video content, we will not be making use of any videos in order to better explain certain aspects.
how to draft on cockatrice
In order to play MTG online you will need a tool which simulates a game table and its players. Enter Cockatrice . It is open source software for playing card games over a TCP/IP network against other people. In our case, it will be used to play against other people online.
The first step is to download the client. You can choose between downloading an installer or a portable version for cockatrice . I recommend the latter as you are not bound to install it onto your system, plus you can carry your decks around with you on pen drives/memory cards or what have you.
What is a cockatrice and what do they eat?
Cockatrices are mythological creatures with cock’s combs and wings, they can turn living beings into stone by looking at them. The Cockatrice client is the name of the software that allows you to play MTG online with other people. It consists of a deck editor for creating/editing decks used in games as well as a game simulator.
After you have successfully installed the software, run it. The first thing you will see after the ‘welcome to cockatrice’ screen is the deck editor . You can either load an already made deck or create your own by adding cards one by one into the white boxes on the left side of the program interface. This is necessary if you want to test out a deck before actually playing games with it or just play and not worry about making a deck at all.
How to set up a cockatrice pen drive
Since we are not going to install the software onto our system, we need a way of carrying it around; we will use flash drives or pen drives. Download and run portableapps . You may have to download and install Portable Apps suite itself if you don’t already have it on your computer. In order to set up cockatrice , simply click on the ‘Cockatrice 2.0’ link and drag the file onto a flash drive/pen drive. In order to set up any other software you want as portable, simply follow this same process.
What you need to keep your cockatrice healthy and happy
Cockatrice is not the only thing you are going to want to carry around with you, you will need decks as well. These can be downloaded directly from the Cockatrice client itself by clicking the ‘Download’ button just under the list of currently available cards.
However, you will notice that it is not possible to directly download decks from the Cockatrice client and they must be downloaded and placed manually into a folder on your flash drive/pen drive.
Conclusion
That’s pretty much all there is to know about the Cockatrice client itself. It won’t take any longer than 5 minutes to get it set up and ready for use, just load a deck once you are done with the basic setup process.
Once you have successfully installed Cockatrice, also known as ‘Cocktrice’, all you need to do in order to get started is download a deck. You can download decks directly from the client itself or you could create your own one, whichever suits your needs best.