Magic: The Gathering Companion 4+

I mostly use this as a life counter and it’s great. They have some small features that really make a difference. Tracking commander damage, floating mana, infect, etc. is just one swipe away. Most other apps have a really clunky process to get to these features but it’s quite smooth in the companion app. When you subtract life, the screen shows another number that counts up which makes it easier to double check your math. You can save the life totals of the current game and pick up where you left off, which might be nice occasionally. The only thing that is missing is a dice roll feature but that’s ok. I’d use this over Lifelinker for sure.

I absolutely loved the advanced card search, and I would use it in the brewing of every deck I made. Unfortunately for whatever reason, someone made the call to completely remove nearly all the options from the advanced card search, making it basically useless. Beforehand, I was able to explicitly use modifiers such as “is” “or” “not”, and multiple individual phrases in the rules text box to narrow down different effects I needed for a deck but didn’t know if it existed. The only limit for discovery was myself, and the advanced card search could be utilized incredibly to discover new cards among the tens of thousands for some exact scenario you might need. I love building jank decks so finding jank combos was extremely important, and often utilized many cards and effect not often seen or known.
Now the only way you can use the advanced search is if you know a near exact phrase of a card, so the potential for card discovery no longer exists. It’s really sad to see because it was such an incredible tool; and I have found no other website or third party app that can accomplish what the old advanced search could.
I really hope that a developer or someone at wizards sees the comments and complaints about this new change and motions to revert the advanced search to what it used to be. Deck building is a lot more difficult now.

The app keeps a record of tournament gameplay only for a very brief period before erasing it (seemingly under 24 hours), and if you navigate away from the score page after a tournament is complete it is impossible to return to the page. I’d say the app would be infinitely more valuable if you were able to access tournament records to track your progress and the progress of opponents who’d played in events with you over a long period of time, such as a few months or a year. I doubt the score charts take up much data, perhaps at the very least you’d be able to store them on your phone as a downloadable image or pdf. Instead I find myself copying scores down in notebooks and considering taking awkward screenshots to record the stats. The app accomplishes it’s most minimal requirements to facilitate magic events but there is lots of room for improvement.