With some free time and boredom over the holidays, I decided to retry making an Anki deck using MTG card images. I figured that because I’ve played the game in English for 20 or so years, putting a picture to the Japanese card names can help me conceptualize some difficult words. I’ve put the process I went through and an example card below in case others have interest in a similar project.
My first attempt used my words mined from the novels I’ve read, but there were too many literary words that had no corresponding MTG cards. Then I thought of a better way to do things: if I could get a text file with all of the Japanese names of the cards, I could filter out all of the “easy” names by checking for higher level kanji and throwing out the rest. Then using that filtered list I could pull images from Scryfall to build an Anki deck with.
Unfortunately, I am no coder, and dealing with these databases alone was beyond me, so I turned to our robot overlords for help. They told me to download python, gave me a script to pull just the Japanese name data from the massive json file from MTGJSON. Then I got a text file with all kanji of kanken pre-level 2 or higher, ran another script to filter through the 28000 Japanese cards to find matches, and found around 8000 cards with “difficult” kanji. This was too many and there were like 30 cards with 殺戮 so I ran another script to filter out duplicates and trimmed the list down to 3400 cards. The machine told me a way to politely pull the card image data from Scryfall, which took a bit over 3 hours. Finally, the JP and EN card names, along with the jpg link were compiled into a csv file that I imported to Anki.
The result was my very own Anki deck that has a wonderful variety of vocabulary and kanji. The front of the cards had just the Japanese name, and the back has the card image and original English name:
I’ve only gone through around 100 of the cards, but a funny outcome has been finding out I have been misunderstanding the English names of certain cards for a while. For example Rancor (怨恨) is more about resentment than pure rage, which is why it comes back to your hand, or the Prodigal Pyromancer (放蕩紅蓮術士), who is not a prodigy but rather reckless with his flames.
I don’t know if this is 100% worth it as study material for me, as I imagine just continuing to read novels gives me more knowledge, but seeing nostalgic cards and finding out the Japanese names for them has been immensely fun. Maybe I’ll also tinker with the filter so I get a smaller subset of harder card names, but for now I’m happy with it.
If anyone would like to try the deck out for themselves I can try to get a download link for it, but I think I would need to trim it down somehow first as it is around 330MB and the website says 250MB is the limit.