Release Notes: October 12, 2021

By Bill Stark, EventLink Product Manager

Nothing says Halloween like a Two-Headed Giant, and the Companion and EventLink teams are hard at work implementing this tournament format for use later this year. While we’re working on that, here’s a host of other features and issues we delivered in our latest release.

Selecting Random Players and Tables

You can now use Wizards EventLink to select random players or tables at your event. Why might you use this functionality? In a competitive event selecting random tables allows you to determine who might be receiving a deck check during the round to ensure fair play.

Perhaps you have a door prize you like to hand out to a random player or players at Friday Night Magic? Select the number of random players you’d like, and voila! EventLink will automatically pull their names. You can even print out the selected groups for added ease. During the pairings portion of any event, click on the “gear” menu and you’ll see the new option under the title “Select Random:”

After clicking, you select how many random selections you want made and whether you want tables or players:

In this example I selected two players and got this result:

I can print the result or close the screen to get back to scorekeeping my event. We’ll be expanding this feature to work during standings phases in the future, and for now you can generate these results during any pairings phase.

Tournament Maximums Raised to 512

One of our measures of success with EventLink is ensuring no disruptions to your ability to run tournaments through outages. As a result, the maximum number of entrants into a Magic tournament in EventLink during the initial release was 250.

After months of growth and stability monitoring, we’re now happy to increase the maximum tournament capacity to 512. We’ll continue monitoring stability at those levels with an eye towards further increasing the limit to 1,000+ players soon.

Companion Card Database Improvements

Big changes arrived in the Magic: The Gathering Companion card database this sprint! Users doing card searches can now more easily do an additional card search by closing results instead of needing to back out of the search results screen. Clicking the “X” takes you back to your search prompt.

Banned, restricted, and suspended statuses of cards have also been added. When looking at a card’s results the “Legality” section will detail what can be played where:

Here’s the legend of what each icon represents for quick-viewing ease:

Bugs

In addition to all that work, we squashed the following bugs:

• The issue causing Modern Horizons 2 cards to not appear as “legal” in the proper formats using the Companion app’s card database


• The “Format” filter being broken on Locator.Wizards.com


• Timer sometimes needing to be refreshed or having to be restarted in EventLink


• No error notification when a user attempts to assign multiple players to the same table


• Non-Latin characters in usernames sometimes causing logins to loop


• Black Lotus appearing as “legal” in formats in which it was not, in fact, legal

Up Next

Two-Headed Giant development continues as we focus on that as our last major feature in EventLink this year. We’re also wrapping up implementation of the timer being added into Companion so your players can see the active time in the round directly from their mobile devices. With all that and more, see you in two weeks!