Formatting guides with markdown

Deck notes and matchup guides are written in markdown, so anything you already know about it will work here. What Pitchstack adds on top is a way to point at things inside the app; cards, printings, sets, and your own decks and collections.

The Syntax button beside the Write and Preview tabs will open this same reference while you are writing.

Pointing at a card

Typing [[ anywhere in the editor opens a picker over the cards, your decks, and your collections. Choosing a result fills the id in for you, which is how this is meant to be used, as the ids are not really made for typing by hand.

• [[card:sink-below-r]] links to a card, showing its name.
• [[printing:WTR_001]] links to one specific printing.
• [[set:WTR]] links to a set by its code.
• Decks, collections, users, and groups work the same way, with ids starting d-, c-, u-, and g-.

Anything after a | replaces the text that gets shown, so [[card:sink-below-r|my go-to defense]] will read as part of a sentence rather than as a card name. This works on every reference.

Note: a reference that cannot be resolved renders as muted, inert text rather than a broken link. On the website, hovering a resolved one previews what it points at.

Showing the card instead

Putting a ! in front turns a card or printing reference into an image. ![[card:sink-below-r]] shows the whole card, and ![[card:sink-below-r|art]] shows just the cropped artwork.

Decks, collections, and users cannot be embedded, and will fall back to a link. After 20 images in one document the rest will render as links too, which keeps a long guide from turning into a gallery.

Card symbols

The symbols from card text are written in braces. Casing does not matter, so {R} and {r} are the same thing.

• {r} resource, {p} power, {d} defense.
• {g} or {h} health, {i} intellect, {c} chi.
• {t} tap, {u} untap.
• {br} forces a line break.

Everything else

Standard markdown covers the rest; bold, italic, inline code, links, headings, lists, quotes, --- for a divider, and fenced code blocks that get left exactly as typed. Tables work too, as long as you include the row of dashes under the header, since that is what separates a table from a paragraph with pipes in it.

A leading backslash makes any of this literal, as in \[[not a link]].

What to avoid

Guides get written on one device and read on both web and mobile, and the two renderers are not quite identical. The following will render in the mobile app but not on the web, so avoid them in anything other people will read...

• Strikethrough and nested lists.
• Standard markdown images. Use ![[card:…]] for card art instead.
• Line breaks made from two trailing spaces. Use {br}.

Task lists never render as checkboxes anywhere.