I've been wanting to do a project to play around with the Ynvisible electrochromic e-paper displays for a while. I also recently have gotten back into Magic: The Gathering. Given some of the products being made with the Ynvisible displays, I was surprised that nothing had been attempted in the trading card game space (at least that I'm aware of). It's seems like a no-brainer but maybe there is a reason it hasn't been done and my goal is to find out.
- Punched card that fits in standard card sleve with PCB rather than a cardboard sleeve
- Can easily make custom styles using proxy card companies like makeplayingcards.com
- More ESD considerations when using plastic vs cardboard for enclosure
- Changed to two 7 segment display
- Technical constraints meant using a single display was no longer really saving any work
- Counters up to 99 instead of 9 provides a lot more value
- Added more counter modification tools in app
- Doubling
The concept image uses some Wizards of the Coast trademarked images for added coolness factor, but unless some kind of licensing is done or Wizards wants to get involved (let me know haha) that stuff will have to be removed and likely will just be plain text. The sleeve specs will be made available so people can customize and make their own personal designs as well. See the tcg-counter-sleeve repo for more information.
The current Magic: The Gathering standard format sets as of June 2024 reference 34 different counter types in card oracle texts. The plot below shows all of the different counters and how frequently they are referenced by cards. Reference count should be a good approximation for how often they are used in an average deck. Of course decks that rely more on a certain counter mechanics would skew towards those counter types. The TCG electronic counter would be most valuable for counters that are targetting permanents, not players, although it could be used for those as well. The Magic Companion app can track player counters and the state can be visible to both players if positioned well. For permanent counters with the TCG electronic counter, both players would be able to clearly see the game state whereas if it was only in an app it'd be harder to track because you couldn't as easily make the association of the counter to the permanent.
