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Cardcast.gg – Play paper Magic: The Gathering over webcam

Cardcast.gg – Play paper Magic: The Gathering over webcam

by niothiel·Apr 24, 2026·5 points·1 comment

AI Analysis

●●●BangerWizardrySlick

Webcam MTG player with ViT detection, faster than Spelltable's perceptual hashing.

Strengths
  • Vision Transformer backbone outperforms traditional perceptual hashing accuracy significantly better
  • Decklist import narrows card pool to reduce false positives rate
Weaknesses
  • Detection runs server-side currently instead of client WebGPU inference locally
  • Niche audience limited to paper Magic: The Gathering players only
Category
Target Audience

Magic: The Gathering players

Similar To

Spelltable · Tabletop Simulator

Post Description

I've been building https://cardcast.gg, a web app for playing paper Magic: The Gathering remotely. You point a webcam at your play area and it identifies cards as you put them down. It's an alternative to Spelltable that I built for my friend group to play weekly with.

The main technical difference is detection. Spelltable uses perceptual hashing; cardcast uses modern ViT backbones so it's much faster and more accurate. If you import a decklist from Moxfield, Archidekt, or MTGGoldfish, the search narrows to that deck's card pool, greatly reducing false-positives.

What I have so far:

- Feature-parity with Spelltable. - No signup. Create a game, share the link, play (< 30s to get going). - Life totals, monarch tracking, initiative, turn timer, card info on hover. - Runs in-browser, WebRTC for video/audio, detection happens server-side per request.

Where I want to go with it:

- Push the inference to the client-side (WebGPU / Web Workers). - (provided above works well) Constantly detect cards in an AR-like overlay. - Build more-card intelligence into the product to avoid having to google things mid-game. (main cause of slowness in our pod)

Why I'm posting: the core works and my pod uses it weekly, but I'd like to find a few more enthusiastic users who want to contribute or help shape the roadmap — whether that's code (Python/FastAPI + React/TS), CV work, or just playing regularly and telling me what's broken.

Try it: https://cardcast.gg Discord: https://discord.gg/axRtvbsfAU

Happy to dig into the detection pipeline, hosting economics (Oracle free tier has been super awesome for this!), or anything else in the comments. It's been super fun and educational building this project, now I'm hoping you share it with you all. :)

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