Introduction

Magic: The Gathering is a collectible card game (CCG) that has gained popularity across the world and is probably the most popular game of its genre. A player and an opponent play as "wizards" each having 20 life. The goal is to get the opponent down to zero life by attacking him or her with magical creatures or other spells from your "book of spells", which is your deck of cards. Magic: The Gathering is not the easiest game to learn considering the long list of errata (rule changes) that seems to only get longer after the release of subsequent expansions for the core set. However, it involves as much strategy as chess and is still the most popular CCG in the world.

Ronald acquired an interest in the game in February 1997, shortly after the "Visions" expansion was released. He decided to invest in the game shortly after. Admittedly, Ronald was not the best player to start; however, as time passed, his technique improved. Ronald was more intrigued with playing self-constructed eclectic decks that were excellent for casual games, and was never interested in tournament play. Many of these decks are documented and stored using rdwmagicXML, a card deck language written by Ronald and is exclusively available within this domain.

Unfortunately, because of college duties and miscellaneous obligations, Ronald stopped playing this game in October 1998 after about 18 months of playing and collecting. This occurred a few weeks prior to the release of the "Urza's Saga" expansion.

The complexity of the information involved in the card mechanics of Magic: The Gathering can be quite overwhelming, so Ronald designed and developed his second web application to add to his portfolio. rdwmagicollection - now in its third and final release - features Ronald's favorite cards up to Tenth Edition. Users will be able to interact with a live card listing of Ronald's virtual Magic collection via standardized displays, view actual and "dream" decks as documented using rdwmagicXML, a markup language written by Ronald for basic card deck documentation; or create a customized display using either of the search engines.

To elevate Ronald's skills, rdwmagicollection was reprogrammed using object-oriented PHP, as is the rest of RDWonline v7.0: The Seoquouloxolocadium. In addition, this web application was optimized using XHTML 1.1 web page structural standards, with each page using over 90% CSS2 design.