Magic Workstation Assistant is a third party program, to download card art pictures for use in Magic Workstation. Here will be some instructions on how to use this program.

  1. Download the file here.
  2. Unzip the contents to any directory, or onto your desktop using any zip program (WinZip or Winrar works equally well. Winzip can be found at Winzip.com and Winrar can be found at Rarlabs.com.
  3. Open MWSAssistant, and view the options. You will see a screen that should look like this:
    MWS Assistant
  4. First step, is to choose which art you would like: Full or Cropped. (Currently, with the settings at hand, Full pictures are currenly unavailable).
    • Full pictures is a full scan of the entire card, including art, text, and border. Using full pictures in MWS will make the MWS rendered card be replaced by the full scan of the card, which can make the game look more realistic to you. The downside of Full Art is that the download is very large, and may take some time, as well as a lot of space on your hard drive.
    • Cropped art is just the card art itself. This will cause MWS to render the card, and instead of a black box where the art should be, the cropped jpeg will take its place. This will make your cards use whatever theme in MWS you are using, and you will have art.
  5. Second step is to place a checkmark next to any and all sets you want to have in MWS. For example, if you only use T2 in MWS, you can download 8th Edition, Onslaught, Legions, Scourge and Mirrodin pictures only. You can get any card pics you like, but keep in mind that some of the sets here to download are not in MWS (Things like summer Magic, and Misprints). Next to the Full/Cropped choice is a button called “All/None” which is under “Proxy”. This will cause all sets to be either checked or unchecked when you press it.
  6. This is an optional step, and is used with proxy settings. If you do not get your internet through a proxy, you do not need to do this. Press the “Proxy” button above “All/None”, check Use Proxy, and input the proxy server settings. Note: You can only set your proxy settings if your proxy is SOCKS 4/5 compatible. The author of this program is anonymous, so I dont know if any other type will be compatible in the future.
  7. Once you have your sets checkmarked, and your proxy set up (if any), just hit “Start”. Give it time now, since it will be downloading the art for the selected sets, and on slower connections can take some time. It also may appear to crash, or hang, at certain points, but be sure to give it enough time to unzip the file to it’s appropriate directory.

Occasionally you might get errors. Things like “Cannot Write to Temp File” and “Connection Error” are the most common seen. If you get an error, be sure to just close MWS Assistant, and open again. The sets that have already been downloaded will be marked in the checkbox with a small green square. You do not need to redownload these. Only the ones with no check or square are missing. Also, if you re-start the program and it still won’t connect, make sure you try going to the website listed in the program to see if it’s down. As said before, this is a Third Party program, and is not affiliated with MWS or the websites it uses.

Congratulations, you should now have Pictures for any and all sets that you downloaded. If you have any problems (no pics showing for one or more set), please refer to the faq.

Categories: Uncategorized