Cardcast.gg
Play paper Magic: The Gathering over webcam
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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. :)
HN · launched Apr 24, 2026 · 5 upvotes (top 89%) · 0 views
Niche: online board and casual games · 180 launches, 17 in the last 7 days ▼ -19% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Communication
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 180 launches in online board and casual games →
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 : 191 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #178 of 192 (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
- The Deck Cauldron · ph · 2026-10-21 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- Card Gallery · ph · 2026-09-28 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- Magic brain · ph · 2026-09-14 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Play Zener Cards · hn · 2026-01-30 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Overdesigned Simple Solitaire · hn · 2026-10-21 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Reel Rogue · hn · 2026-01-25 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Shoot-em-up Deck Building game · hn · 2026-01-06 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
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