Why ManaScry's AI features are off by default

The Magic: The Gathering community has a complicated relationship with AI tools. "Complicated" is generous. The honest word is hostile.

Wizards stepped on this rake in 2024 with AI-generated promotional art and got buried for it. Card-art generators, deck-building bots, "AI playtest opponents" — every release in this space gets the same treatment from r/magicTCG and the EDH circles: rejected on arrival, often before anyone reads what the thing actually does. The community sees AI as a threat to the art, the playerbase, and the craft of the game. That's not a misunderstanding. That's a values position.

ManaScry has AI features. I want to be transparent about that, and about how we've decided to handle it.

The short version

• AI features are off by default for every account.
• They are opt-in, paid-only, and never the headline.
• Free-tier users see no AI surfaces at all — no buttons, no prompts, no "try AI!" nags. The features simply don't render.
• Pro subscribers and Credit Pack buyers can use a small set of generation tools (deck suggestions, collection chat, precon upgrade analysis) when they choose to.
• We do not train any model on your collection or deck data. Ever.

That's the whole position. The rest of this post is the reasoning.

Why we built the features at all

A subset of our users — small but real — actively wants generation tools. They paste a precon and want suggestions for what to upgrade. They have a 95-card pile and want help picking the last four. They want to chat with their collection ("what's my best black removal?"). For those users, the value is real and the friction is high without help.

We could have not built these features. The competitive case for not building them is:

• Cleaner brand, no AI association
• No exposure to model-provider lock-in
• No ongoing cost per request to absorb

Those are real. But the people who want the features want them badly enough to pay for them, and the people who don't want them — the overwhelming majority — would rather we simply not show the features at all than not have them exist somewhere in the product.

So we built them, then locked them away.

What "off by default" actually means

A new account on ManaScry today gets created with ai_credits_remaining = 0. That's a hard zero. No trial credits, no one-free-request, no "first one's on us." The number is zero, and every AI surface in the product checks that number before rendering.

If the number is zero, you don't see:

• Any "Generate with AI" button anywhere in the deck builder
• The "Improve Deck" panel on deck detail pages
• The "Upgrade a Precon" flow
• The collection chat dock at the bottom of the dashboard
• The AI-driven collection insights on the home page

These features are not collapsed, hidden behind a tooltip, or grayed out. They literally do not render. A free-tier user who has never read the pricing page would have no way to know AI exists in the product.

What "opt-in" actually means

To get any AI access, you take an explicit action: subscribe to Pro, or buy a Credit Pack. Both of those flow through pricing — the credits land on your account, the surfaces unlock, and you decide per-request whether to use them.

Once unlocked, every request decrements your balance by one credit. You see the balance in Settings. When it hits zero, the surfaces disappear again. It's not a soft sell. It's a real, metered, opt-in tool.

We considered a "free tier with monthly free credits" model — give every user N credits a month, let them try AI casually. We rejected it. The whole point of the stealth-mode approach is that AI isn't the product. It's an optional power-user tool. A monthly free allowance would re-introduce the "try AI!" nag we're explicitly avoiding.

What "paid-only" actually means

There is no path to AI features without paying — no referral hacks, no time-on-site rewards, no engagement-based unlocks. If you want generation tools, you buy them, or you subscribe. If you don't want them, you pay nothing and you never see them.

This pricing is a feature, not a bug. It funds the model API costs (these aren't free for us either) and it filters the user base to people who actually want the tool. Nobody has to defend a free AI feature they didn't ask for.

What "never the headline" actually means

Open ManaScry's landing page, the /pricing page, the FAQ, or the blog index. Search for the word "AI." You'll find it:

• In one tier description on /pricing (Pro)
• In one entry on the FAQ ("Does ManaScry use AI?")
• In one strategy post about the Pro precon upgrade tool
• In Settings (your current credit balance)
• In /dashboard/admin/entitlements if you happen to be an admin

You will not find it:

• In the hero on the landing page
• In the feature grid
• In any blog post title
• In the changelog summary lines
• In any signup, onboarding, or activation copy

The product is positioned as a serious tracker for serious players. AI is one of several tools that exist behind the Pro paywall. It is never the lead.

What we don't do

It's also worth being explicit about what we don't do, because the things you don't do tend to be the things people assume by default.

• We do not train any model on your collection. When you use a generation feature, your input goes to Google Gemini's API for that single request. The provider's standard data-handling rules apply. We don't aggregate user data into a custom model.
• We do not generate card art. No image generation features. No "AI proxy art." Nothing that competes with Magic's actual artists.
• We do not push AI suggestions into the product unsolicited. No "the AI thinks you should buy this card" nudges. No autoplay. No notifications.
• We do not use AI for moderation, search ranking, recommendations, or any place where it could materially affect the experience of users who haven't opted in. Search is keyword-based. Trending is computed from market data. EDHREC integrations use real EDHREC data. There is no hidden AI layer.

If we ever change any of that, we'll say so on this blog before we ship it.

What this looks like in practice

If you're a free-tier user reading this, you can keep using ManaScry exactly as you've been using it. Track your collection. Build decks. Watch prices. Set alerts. Print proxies. Share. Nothing changes for you. You won't see AI surfaces, and you won't be asked about them.

If you're a Pro subscriber or Credit Pack buyer, the AI tools are still there, still opt-in per request, and still on your terms.

If you're somewhere in between — you're free-tier today but might want AI tools sometime — the path is one purchase away. It's not hidden, it's not promoted, it's just available when you decide you want it.

Closing

We don't think AI is good or bad. We think it's a tool that some Magic players actively want, and most actively don't, and the right product decision is to let each user choose without imposing the choice. Off by default. Paid when on. Never the headline.

If that approach sounds reasonable, you're probably going to like the rest of how we run this thing.