Magic Workstation
Magic Workstation (MWS) was a popular program created by Magi-Soft that could be used to play Magic online. Many considered it the best alternative to Magic Online. It went out of fashion around 2010 and was later discontinued.
Description
Magic Workstation was not designed for any one particular game system, but it represented a universal engine that supported many popular card games. It could support and use any CCG (Collectable Card Game) or TCG (Trading Card Game). Examples were: Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh! and many more.
Magic Workstation didn't contain any game data except the tutorial game database. All game-specific databases, graphics, dialogs, settings, and scripted routines were a part of the data files provided for a given game system, and those data files were external to the product itself. Game Database files for particular game systems had to be downloaded and installed separately.
Magic Workstation consisted of three separate tools:
- The MWSLibrary module — organizing, inventorying, and analyzing card lists and game collections. With this module, you could easily find any card using many in-depth search criteria. You also could filter cards using a complex filtering function.
- The MWSPlay module — permitted people to play any card game ever made over the Internet. The application itself did not enforce any card game rules. As in real life, the players must know the basic rules of the game that they are going to play. The players connected to a shared virtual desktop where they could see the actions of all the other connected players. This virtual desktop was highly interactive. Players could do pretty much anything that could be done with a real deck of cards| move cards around, flip them, shuffle them, deal them, etc.
- MWSHost — used for when two players could not connect directly to each other (ie. when both are behind firewalls). A third party (a non-firewalled person) then ran MWShost and both players called the third party to set up a game. Magic Workstation had its dedicated server for this purpose located at www.mwsplay.net