MTG Arena Exporter

AI makes it practical to build small utilities that would previously have required more time than I was willing to spend. For example, here is a little script that extracts the list of cards a player owns on MTG Arena.

There are other utilities that already do this, but they are annoying. Apparently, at some point, MTGA used to log all cards to the log, which could then be scraped, but Wizards of the Coast, for whatever reason, decided that this wasn’t a good thing and deliberately removed the logging. The existing utilities require inspecting the process memory in order to gather the collection and their free versions don’t allow an export. They also don’t work well on macOS.

This script simulates mouse movement and clicks to page through the collection and takes a screenshot of every page. It segments the card titles and runs them through OCR to collect the names. It also looks at the brightness of the ownership-count indicators at the top of the card to determine the number of copies owned.

This is a creative approach but I don’t think I would have gone for it. It seems like too much effort, both in research and in development. AI has no problem with it.

This is a small, practical example where AI has been useful to make daily life easier. I would not have put in the time and effort to do it without AI, but because it’s so easy, the cost is much lower.