Telegram: using Magic in chat

I tend to travel quite a bit for work, visiting different countries, meeting new people, and experiencing other cultures. During these travels I've noticed there's not only a difference in language, foods, and social norms, but also different communication technologies and apps.

For example in the Netherlands, where I live, almost everyone uses the app "WhatsApp" on their phones to communicate. As far as I'm aware this app is also popular in neighbouring countries, but it's not necessarily a given. Some countries still rely heavily on regular texting since most phone subscriptions now offer this as a free service; others primarily use Facebook Messenger.

Several years back Facebook acquired "WhatsApp", leading to a lot of controversy. Facebook wanted to link WhatsApp communications to Facebook accounts, and eventually got fined by the European Commission.

You might ask yourself why I'm writing about this on a website related to Magic. Well, here it comes. During this controversy, some people slowly started to migrate from WhatsApp to Telegram. So did I. It's vastly superior to WhatsApp. I'm not going to delve into all the benefits that Telegram provides, but it does support some amazing features, such as the Announcement Channels and bots.

Since I feel the Magic community can benefit from some of these features, I have taken the liberty to apply these Telegram functionalities. In this post, I would like to highlight these.

Announcement Channel

The MTGStocks announcement channel is an open channel in which only the MTGStocks account can send messages. This means you won't get spammed by random people. It will simply notify you when a news article has been posted or when the daily Interests are available.

When the daily Interests are posted, it shows the top three gainers of the day.

Showing cards in chats

Like mentioned earlier, we can use bots within the Telegram app. We have leveraged this feature in order to show cards in any chat you have, both one-on-one and in groups, with the MTGStocksBot.

In any chat, you can type @MTGStocksBot name-of-card. Once you start typing the name of the card, the results will keep updating. The bot will provide you with images of cards matching what you typed. You can then simply click one of the images corresponding to the correct set, to throw that image in the chat.

For example, in the displayed image, I used "Force of W". The bot will then present you with the 4 prints of Force of Will, after which you can select one. In this case, I've chosen the Alliances version.

Telegram is available for Android and iOS. There are also desktop applications available and a web client.

What would you really like to see when using Telegram? How would you like to send a card and/or prices to someone? Let us know, ironically enough, on Twitter.