Manamancer’s playtest now gives the whole screen to the board, plays with one thumb on a phone, and handles Scry, Cascade and undo. Plus a first look at multiplayer tables, a work in progress.
Manamancer
The playtest is where a decklist meets a shuffled library, and it used to spend a fair share of the screen on itself: a 64-pixel header across the top, a 108-pixel column of zones down the side, and the battlefield in whatever was left. Version 1.14.0, released on October 21, 2026, rebuilt it. The battlefield now takes the whole window on a desktop, the phone gets a layout of its own rather than a shrunken one, and the library learned to scry, surveil, cascade, discover and explore.
This piece covers the desktop board, the phone, the new library tools and undo — and, briefly, because it is not finished, multiplayer tables. Every picture below is the real app, captured on seeded demo decks on October 22, 2026.
A board that fills the screen
The playtest on a desktop and on a phone: a battlefield of lands, creatures and Treasures, the zones in two docks at the bottom, and the hand fanned between them.
The same Ur-Dragon deck a few turns in, on a desktop and on a phone.
On a desktop the battlefield runs edge to edge under a floating top bar that holds life, the player counters, Untap, Tidy, Shuffle, Mulligan and tokens. The zones moved into two docks in the bottom corners: Exile and Graveyard on the left, the Library and the command zone on the right, under a row of Turn, Surveil, Scry and Mill. The hand fans out between the docks, centred in the gap they leave and spreading to fill it without covering either one.
A few habits worth knowing:
- Click the Library to draw. There is no Draw button; the library is the button.
- Click a permanent to tap it. Right-click it for everything else: counters, Duplicate, face down, another zone.
- The keyboard does the rest. D draws, N starts the next turn, U untaps, T tidies, M mulligans, S shuffles and V opens the library. Hold Shift on the life buttons to move 5 at a time.
- Zoom has four dials. The Zoom menu sizes the interface, the battlefield, the hand and the card previews separately.
On a phone, the hand is the controller
The phone layout is not the desktop one squeezed. The board fills the screen under one glass bar with your life and a ⋯ menu. Exile, Graveyard, Library and Command sit in two docks just above your hand, with Turn between them, and Hide folds the docks away when the board needs the room. Tap the Library to draw, Graveyard or Exile to see what is in them, and a permanent to tap it.
Three phone screens: a thumb sliding across the hand with one card lifted, The Ur-Dragon held up with its actions and two +1/+1 counters, and the frosted More options sheet over it.
Reading the hand with a thumb; a permanent held up with the new counter and Duplicate row; More options over it.
The hand fans along the bottom edge and behaves the way a hand of cards should on glass:
- Slide across it to read. The card under your thumb lifts over the docks at full size.
- Let go to hold it up, with its actions: play it, or send it to the graveyard, exile or the top of the library. Swipe sideways for the next card, or down to put it back.
- Drag it up to drop it anywhere on the board, or onto a pile.
Hold a permanent and it comes up the same way. The held-up card now has a row of Add +1/+1 counter, Add # counter and Duplicate — the counters on the battlefield, Duplicate from any zone — and More options opens the rest of the card's menu as a frosted sheet over it. That sheet leaves the board undimmed and lists only what the buttons on the card do not; the ✕ in the corner puts the card back down. Holding the Library, Graveyard or Exile opens that pile's own menu.
The library does more
Most of what a library does in Commander is now a button or a menu entry, and all of it opens in a small panel beside the library rather than over the board:
- Scry and Surveil. Each press shows one more card from the top. Click a card to send it to the bottom (for surveil, the graveyard), drag to reorder, then press Done.
- Cascade X and Discover X reveal down to the first nonland card with mana value under X (cascade) or at most X (discover), then let you cast it, take it into your hand (discover) or leave it. The rest go to the bottom in a random order, and Times chains several in a row.
- Explore, from the library or from a creature, which then takes the +1/+1 counters.
- Fetch a basic land from the library's menu, which shows how many of each basic are left.
- Peek at the top card, the bottom card or the top X, and drag a peeked card straight onto the board.
Two panels beside the library: Scry 3 with three lands in a row, and Cascade 4 revealing Cultivate with six more cards going to the bottom.
Scry 3, and Cascade 4 finding Cultivate. Both open beside the library, so the board stays in view.
The Graveyard and Exile have trays now: click either pile and its cards line up above the dock, newest first, to read, click or drag out; drop a card on a tray to put it there. Cards also go face down in one move — Play face down for morph, manifest and cloak, To exile face down for foretell and hideaway — showing the new Manamancer card back.
One behaviour changed on purpose. A spell you play — from your hand, or a Cultivate that a cascade just found — goes onto the battlefield like any other card and stays there until you move it. The playtest is a goldfish: it cannot know whether the spell resolved, was countered or was copied, and a board that guessed would be wrong in exactly the games worth testing. Drag it to the graveyard when it is done.
Cards that move like cards, and an undo
Cards travel now. A draw comes off the library face down and turns over on its way into your hand, a mill streams every card across to the graveyard, a shuffle riffles, and a mulligan sweeps the hand back, shuffles and deals again. That is less decoration than bookkeeping you can see: in a game against nobody, you are the only witness to a misclick. Turning on reduced motion in your system settings switches all of it off.
And for the misclick, there is Undo — ⌘Z or Ctrl+Z, or Undo in the phone's ⋯ menu. It takes back the last game action: a misplayed card, a scry, a Move all, a mulligan, even Reset game. Life and counter changes ride along with the action before them rather than costing an undo of their own.
On a desktop, the deck's name in the top bar is now a deck picker too: switch to another of your decks, or paste a public deck's link, without leaving the playtest.
Next: playing together, a work in progress
A four-player playtest table on a desktop: four battlefields in a two-by-two grid, each with a name, deck, life total and commander damage, other players’ cursors labelled by name, and the host’s own hand and docks at the bottom.
Four demo accounts at one table, seen from the host’s seat (bottom left), with the other players’ cursors.
Multiplayer shipped in 1.14.0 behind a WIP tag, and the tag is accurate. Click Host session in the desktop top bar and the board zooms out into a 2×2 table; share the link, and up to four players each play their own deck, with every battlefield, life total and commander damage in view and every cursor moving live. Anyone can change anyone's life or commander damage, and commander damage takes the life with it. Past four players, signed out or on a phone, you watch as a spectator — up to eight of them. The host can pass the role on or end the table, and a refresh puts you back in your seat with your game.
The design choice that matters is where the game goes: straight between the players' browsers. Each browser runs its own game and sends the others a public view of it, so your hand and library never leave your machine — not to the other players, and not to our server. Hosting needs Pro or Max; taking a seat needs a free account.
What it does not do yet:
- Turns and the stack. There is no shared turn order, stack, commander tax or game log. For now a table is four goldfish games that can see each other.
- Phones at the table. A phone can watch, not play.
- Every network. The game has no relay server of its own, so two browsers that cannot connect directly — on some office and mobile networks — send it through the lobby instead, and lose each other's cursors. And as in any peer-to-peer game, the browsers at a table learn each other's network address.
If something at the table or on the new board gets in your way, tell us: signed in, the bug icon in the top bar sends it straight to us; signed out, the Support page does.
What should multiplayer tables learn first?
- Shared turns and a stack
- Playing from a phone
- A shared game log
- Dice and coin flips
Find a deck to playtest — Open any public deck and press Playtest. Your own decks have the same button.
May your goldfish always curve out, and may every misclick be one ⌘Z away.
