About DoomBladeMTG.com

My name is Sam, welcome to my site! I am an amateur programmer/web developer who tries to get in one project a year in between all of life's other responsibilities.


In the game of Magic: The Gathering, there is a commonly repeated idiom used to evaluate new creatures: No matter how many stats you stuff into your mythic four-drop, naysayers on the internet will simply say, "unplayable, dies to Doom Blade". This statement is shorthand indicating that the evaluator believes the card is not good enough to see competitive play because it doesn't provide value when it enters play, and is easily dealt with using cheaper spot removal. This term came into use around 2012, when the eponymous spot removal spell was printed.

Doom Blade was neither the first nor the last in a long line of cheap, efficient black removal spells, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Typically, a Doom Blade-type spell will have targeting restrictions such as color, mana cost, or creature type. The genesis for this project was to provide a visual guide to help determine which Doom Blade is right for you.


How This Project Came Together

Since this was primarily a coding project for me, I thought I'd provide a few details about the actual making of this project. Doom Blade.com was made using:

  • Flask, a python library for creating lightweight websites, was used for the back end logic
  • Typical Javascript/HTML/CSS was used to create the front end
  • Google Firebase is being used as a data storehouse, accessing it with a typical REST API
  • The site is hosted on Vercel


I set up a Ko-fi for this page in case people see something they like and would be willing to support it! I'm not trying to make a living off of this, I dont have a sob story or anything, I'm just hoping to cover the cost of the domain name.


Future State

In the future I would like to expand the Commander style analysis to take into account general popularity of a given commander. Thanks to the people at EDHRec, I dont think this will be that difficult.

I would also like to do a similar analysis for other competitive formats. I would love to provide some insight into which spell actually kills the most commonly played cards in every format. I dont yet have a way of programmatically accessing that data in a way that wouldn't become quickly outdated.

Thank You