Cardcast.gg
Play paper Magic: The Gathering over webcam
Details
- External ID
- 47889550
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Cardcast.gg
- Website domain
- cardcast.gg
- Launched
- April 24, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.11182519280205655
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
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/axRtvbsfAUHappy 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. :)
Enrichment
- Theme
- hobby collectibles and gaming tools
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Marketplace
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- webcam magic the gathering play
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial While the WebRTC video rooms and UI are vibe-codeable, performing low-latency real-time MTG card detection and OCR across tens of thousands of cards directly in video streams requires specialized computer vision pipelines.
What it would actually take: The app needs a WebRTC media stack (e.g., LiveKit or Pion) paired with a high-speed client-side or edge computer vision pipeline. The hard part is isolating card bounding boxes under varying webcam lighting, angles, and sleeves, then running perceptual hashing or feature matching (SIFT/ORB or visual embeddings) against a 25,000+ card image database (like Scryfall) at interactive frame rates. This requires computer vision and edge ML deployment expertise beyond typical AI prompts.
Discussion
1 comment analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: ViT (Vision Transformer) models for card recognition, MobileViT-XXS backbone
Concerns raised: WebGPU stability issues on Android with MobileViT-XXS, WebGPU platform reliability for production use
Feature requests: Client-side inference via WebGPU / Web Workers, WASM-optimized ViT backbone for better inference performance
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 96 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #87 of 97 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 164 days after the earliest competitor.
- I taught LLMs to play Magic: The Gathering against each other · hn · 2026-02-17 · 117 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- Card Gallery · ph · 2026-09-28 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- Magic brain · ph · 2026-09-14 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Play Zener Cards · hn · 2026-01-30 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Reel Rogue · hn · 2026-01-25 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Shoot-em-up Deck Building game · hn · 2026-01-06 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Linex · hn · 2026-02-24 · 82 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Draf tDeul Pick Three · ph · 2026-09-23 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.41
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a marketplace tool for Horizontal yet.