MTG Casting - Week of 14 January 2026
/ 2 min read
Table of Contents
What This Is
MTG Casting is a prototype. It exists to validate technical approaches before committing to production architecture. The work described below does not directly add customer value. It lays the foundation for building something that will.
The Week
Development Infrastructure
The bulk of this period went into development infrastructure rather than product features.
We established a contract testing framework - a way to verify that our code works correctly with third-party services like Scryfall (card data), Moxfield (deck lists), and eventually payment processors. When these services change their APIs, our tests catch the drift before it breaks the product. This prevents the classic “it worked yesterday” debugging spiral.
We also formalised an agent quality protocol. This project is built almost entirely by AI agents - personal resources are limited, and full-time attention isn’t available. That reality demands rigorous quality controls. The protocol ensures agents verify their work with actual tests (not code review), escalate when stuck, and never ship changes that haven’t been proven to work. Without these guardrails, AI-generated code tends to look plausible but fail when it matters.
Prototype Progress
The prototype engine has accumulated exploratory work:
- Card recognition using computer vision (not AI image processing) for speed and cost efficiency
- Deck import from Moxfield URLs
- Real-time synchronisation for life totals and game state
- Authentication infrastructure for tournament access control
None of this has been verified end-to-end yet. The components exist; a working product does not.
What Comes Next
We’re now dressing the prototype engine in proper product structure - making it presentable, demo-able, and ready to show. The immediate focus:
- Refining the use cases to ensure we’re building the right thing
- Connecting the pieces into a first end-to-end flow
- Recording a video demonstration
The goal is a working demo that proves the concept to potential tournament organisers and streaming partners.