Support for alternative card art

[scheibo]

Many cards have alternative card art, either from their OCG release or due to reprints. This card art has already been committed, but with the suffix <n>.jpg as opposed to just .jpg (eg. Dark Magician.1.jpg). Supporting alternative card art adds a bunch of complexity to the UI with 0 gameplay significance and thus is necessarily low priority, but for feature parity with DB and because user's tend to appreciate this sort of customizability (eg. to let them make their online decks reflect their actual IRL cards) it is worth implementing. There has already been a request for different color sheep tokens which is effectively the same problem (these just become SheepToken.jpg, SheepToken.1.jpg, SheepToken.2.jpg, SheepToken.3.jpg).

There are several questions which influence how the implementation would look.

• should you be able to mix and match card art for any given card (ie. can you have 1 Mystic Tomato with card art 0 in your deck and 2 Mystic Tomato with card art 1?)
• if no to the above, should card art preferences be local only? (ie. user's just say "I always want to see Mystic Tomato card art 1 whether my opponent or I are playing it", and this preference can just be stored in user preferences)

These both result in very different implementations and UIs. If card art preference is just "I just want to change what I see", the preferences can simply be saved as a map in settings which maps from card name -> alternative art number. I'd argue that this is suboptimal - in much the same way people would be disappointed if their sleeve choices were purely local I believe people would want their opponents to be able to see the card art they prefer. We then have several options for representing this in the deck data type. If we don't allow mix-and-matching card art, simply adding a local map of name -> card art for each deck is sufficient (ie. alongside wins, losses, maindeck, sidedeck, etc you would have maybe an art field as well with name -> card art number overrides). However, I think supporting mixing-and-matching of card arts within a deck to allow for maximal expression is desirable, in which case more dramatic changes to the deck type would need to be made.

One option is to change the types for the main and side deck from name -> number to name -> number OR <some other more complex type like an array or object which reflects which card arts are chosen> (I imagine some fusion deck monsters have different card arts but trying to support alternative art there might be too challenging). I don't think this is optimal because it doesn't really lend itself to easy implementation anywhere else. A less intrusive approach would be to add a sentinel value to card names - eg. "Dark Magician|1" and have everything just drop the sentinel/trailing info when dealing with the card but when determining which image to display the correct art can then be parsed out of the name (in this case "Dark Magician.1.jpg"). The Mystic Tomato example above would be represented as:

{
  ...
  maindeck: {
    "Mystic Tomato": 1,
    "Mystic Tomato|1": 2,
    ...
  }
}

Incidentally, this isn't too dissimilar from how Pokémon Showdown handles "cosmetic formes", Pokémon forms such as Furfou's which have 0 competitive relevance.

---

The following areas would need to be changed:

• the card DB needs to have a field for number of card alternatives if > 0 (so that the deck constructor is able to know whether a card has alternative art and how many)
• instead of just doing cards[name] when searching for cards in the cards DB we need to instead add a translation function: cards[foo(name)], where foo here removes | and anything following it from the end of the name
• the deck constructor UI needs to be updated to allow users choose which card art they prefer for each card they select
• card limit checking (in the deck constructor and on the server) becomes slightly more complicated, as it must dedupe across the various arts (ie. you cant have "Mystic Tomato": 2, "Mystic Tomato|1": 2,)
• logic for displaying card art needs to look to see if there is a sentinel in the name and if so choose the correct art to display.

[scheibo]

The remaining work from #234 that is required to finish this is:

• [x] Improved support for reporting the reasons a deck is invalid (currently just lists them in an alert(...), should be a prettier dialog) #285
• [x] The deck constructor needs to allow for selecting between multiple card artworks for cards which have an art field in the cardDB

[scheibo]

Of the remaining card date to be added (#282), the following cards have alternative art:

• Exchange: 3
• Parasite Paracide: 2
• Fruits of Kozarky's Studies: 2

[acpennington]

Is there anything before that needs to be done here? Or can this ticket be closed?

[acpennington]

It seems like everything here has be done, so I'm closing.