A new Magic: The Gathering app has hit the market designed for collectors and deck builders alike.
The indie-developed app, Scrollrack, is available for iOS platforms and was created over a multi-year period as a passion project by Jochen Droste. He first started work on the app in 2020 because he wasn't satisfied with the mobile offerings of Magic: The Gathering resources such as Scryfall or Archidekt.
"I was looking for a more integrated way for building decks and immersing myself with Magic on mobile and didn't find an app that fit my need," he says.
WATCH ON YOUTUBE: Magic Untapped Interviews Scrollrack Creator Jochen Droste
So Droste, who has made apps professionally before, decided to make his own. He worked on it off-and-on for nearly six years before finally launching the app onto the Apple iOS store earlier this year.
The Scrollrack app, which is a free download, combines card search, set browsing, and deck building into one single mobile app. It works both online and offline, too, so users don't have to worry if they're somewhere with bad signal or no WiFi, such as at a convention hall or while traveling.
For the app's deck building tool, he constructed it with two ideas in mind: Ensuring it has the features necessary to be useful for experienced deck builders while also being accessible and fun to use for novice players just learning how to build their first decks.
"Building your own first deck...is a very challenging task for new players who have to keep track of so much things like mana curve, card draw...you have to have a balance of creatures, removal, and whatnot and this deck builder offers you tools to guide you through the building," Droste explains.
The app also serves as a catalog of all cards ever made for Magic: The Gathering both physical and digital. It even has a syntax-based search function to help users find the cards they want to find.
"For example, you can filter out cards from digital clients so you're only playing paper cards, or if you're playing on Arena only, you filter out all paper cards and all MTGO cards," he says.
Players can also filter in or out Universes Beyond cards, cards by card frame style, by color, by card type, and so on.
"The app completely supports the expansive Scryfall syntex which is great for finding exactly the cards you'd like," he adds.
While the app itself is free, there is a premium option that players can opt into. Going premium will allow users to create unlimited decks and have access to advanced deckbuilding tools. Droste is also working on a card scanning feature that will be eventually added to the app for premium users as well.
You can find the Scrollrack app for iOS by following this link.
