Post by Strato Incendus on Jul 10, 2019 21:35:53 GMT
Hi everyone!
I've been playing Magic since 8th Edition / Ravnica: City of Guilds, and I've been using MSE for creating custom cards since those teenage days (I had been toying around with Photoshop a little before, but obviously, the MSE images look far superior in every way!). So first of all a huge thank you to all the developers and template creators who have been working on this amazing software for all these years, and especially to those who created the new version that seems to be a lot more stable! I remember the days when I always had to open a new set first if I wanted to access the "style" tab inside an existing MSE set, because simply clicking the "style" tab right away would result in a crash where I couldn't see any of the selectable templates. So glad to see this issue fixed! 
The way I've actually found out about MSE though is through a user in a German Magic forum who posted purple cards, which he had created using the very first Magic Extra template. Those were the old purple mana symbols, the spiders, some of you may remember them?
I for one always preferred those spider symbols to the purple mana symbols that were added later, so I created backup folders of them, and after every update to the Magic Extra template, I would copy them back into the magic mana large and small folders, as well as replacing the basic land symbol for Purple. I usually also went with the old purple frame, i.e. the one without stars, because I felt it was more in line with the template for Orange, as well as for the five standard colours.
Back when I found out about extra colours, there were "only" Purple and Orange, so I wanted those to look stylistically similar to the frames of the standard colours. With those two colours, you could also form hybrid mana, even triple-hybrid mana. But soon afterwards, I found out about three additional colours: first Yellow, then Brown, then Pink
For Brown, I also ended up replacing the mana symbols (an earth / globe), which for some reason always remained grey, in contrast to the card frame. Thus, I coloured the mana symbols brown via Photoshop. The colour Brown however always had the problem that it didn't have a big textbox mana symbol for creating basic lands.
I've discovered that some of these extra colours were ported to the post-M15 templates, namely Purple and Pink. Udelude's template features all five additional colours - Purple, Orange, Brown, Yellow, and Pink - however, all the mana symbols are completely different, and once again, there aren't big textbox mana symbols for all five.
I'm trying to work out a concept of where in the colour wheel each of those five colours would fit, i.e. a set with ten colours, with each of the new five colours inserted between two of the WUBRG ones. So far, this reads as:
white - yellow - blue - purple - black - pink - red - brown - green - orange
However, creating such a set only makes sense if all of these colours can actually be used on a minimal level, i.e. each of them need to have basic lands. I don't want to go all crazy creating hybrids of everything etc., but basic lands of each new colour are kind of a bare necessity.
I tried to find where the extra templates are stored here by using the search function, however, due to the large multitude of available templates, I'm getting a bunch of results that are only remotely related.
Hence my question: Are the extra templates still being maintained? And if so, is the ultimate goal of that template to have all five colours that have been introduced so far - Purple, Orange, Brown, Yellow, and Pink - fully functional with mana- and basic-land-textbox symbols? Or is it just mainly Purple and Pink now?
And also, if the Udelude template features different-than-standard mana symbols for all the extra colours anyway, have there been any considerations to add the spider symbols for purple again? Just as an alternative option, not a replacement of the standard symbol.