Terms of Service

Version 2026-08-19 — last updated August 19, 2026

What Manacast is

Manacast is a video table for playing physical Magic: The Gathering cards with other people over live video — four players for a Commander game, or two for a 1v1 duel. It carries video and audio between players and gives you shared, manually-edited counters (life, poison, commander damage, and one counter you can label yourself) that stay in sync and survive a reload.

It does not referee your game. There is no rules engine: Manacast does not know what cards you hold, does not track the stack or priority, and does not enforce or resolve anything about the game you are playing. You and the other players are playing paper Magic; every counter on screen is a number you set yourself, and it means whatever your table agrees it means.

The venue, and who can hear you in it

Manacast also has a venue: a shared game store you walk an avatar around, and the way you find a table. Read this section before you go in, because it works differently from a game room. A game room holds the people you were matched with or invited. The venue holds whoever else is signed in and standing there — people you did not choose and do not know.

In the venue, distance decides who hears you, not invitation. Your microphone is off when you arrive and stays off until you switch it on yourself. Once it is on, the people standing near your avatar hear you, whoever they are, without asking and without announcing themselves — the same way as talking out loud in a shop. Treat anything you say in the venue as something a stranger may hear.

Near means near. Someone within about two steps of your avatar hears you at full volume; past that you get quieter with distance, and from about ten steps away you cannot be heard at all. A little beyond that your audio is still being delivered to their browser at no volume, so that walking into earshot is smooth rather than abrupt — which is why the honest rule is the simple one: if you can see someone in the same part of the room, assume they can hear you.

The venue carries a camera, and it is yours to switch on. The camera button in the venue's footer publishes a small picture of your face — never your board and never your cards — to the people standing near you, on exactly the same terms as your voice: distance decides who sees it, not invitation. It is off every time you arrive and nothing remembers it between visits. Anyone may walk into range at any moment, so treat your camera in the venue the way you would treat your face in a shop. Cameras at the game tables are unchanged, and they are a different thing: those show the board you are playing on, to the players at that table.

Your own browser watches the venue's cameras — yours and everyone else's — and ours does not. If it sees explicit nudity in your own picture it switches your camera off and tells nobody, because those frames never left your machine. If it sees it in somebody else's, it hides that picture from you at once and reports the fact to us: who, and which category, never the picture. Reports from two different people about the same person switch that person's venue camera off for a while; a report from one person never does, and no report ever acts on an account by itself.

Three controls, and between them they are the whole of it. The microphone button in the venue's footer stops you being heard and the camera button stops you being seen. The ghost key — hold G — does more: it hides your avatar and makes you neither heard nor seen nor able to hear. That is deliberate and is not a setting: there is no way on Manacast to listen to a conversation you are invisible to.

We relay venue audio and video and we do not process either. Neither is recorded, stored, transcribed or scanned, by us or by anything we run — the same as every other stream on this site. What the venue does not change is your responsibility for what you say: the conduct rules below apply on the floor exactly as they do at a table.

Who can use it

You must meet the minimum signup age required by applicable law in your jurisdiction before creating an account. We check this once, at signup — see the Privacy Policy for exactly what that check keeps and what it discards.

Your account

Keep your password to yourself; you are responsible for activity on your account. Your username is shown to the other players you interact with. Your email address is not — see the Privacy Policy.

Your conduct

You are responsible for what your camera and microphone show and say while connected. Do not use Manacast to harass anyone, or to transmit unlawful content. Wherever you meet someone — in a game room or on the venue floor — you can block them or report them. Blocking works both ways: neither of you will hear the other, and on the venue floor neither of you will see the other's camera. You will still see each other's avatar, so walk away if you need to. At game tables of three or more you can also vote with the other players to remove someone from the game. We may act on a report, including by suspending or removing an account that violates these terms.

Each player's own device also runs an automated safety check against explicit nudity on camera, entirely on that device — we never receive or process your video for this or any other purpose. When a player's device confirms such content from someone else's camera, it hides that video for them and sends us a short report about the event (who, which room, when, and the category — never any image). If enough players' devices independently report the same person at the same table, that person's video session is ended automatically and the event is set aside for a human on our team to review. Any consequence beyond that moment — suspension or removal of an account — is decided by a person, not by software.

What an account gets

Manacast is free. Every account gets the same thing: join the matchmaking queue for a four-player Commander pod or a two-player duel, and play. There is nothing to buy, no paid tier, and no part of the site held back behind one.

Leaving a matchmaking game before it ends counts as a loss for you. The other players carry on without you, and if they all agree to start a new game they may offer your seat to someone else. You can join a new queue straight away.

No warranty

Manacast is provided as-is, without warranty of any kind, including any warranty that it will be available, uninterrupted, or free of errors. It runs on a single server; treat any given session as something that could drop, and expect the room to try to recover the connection rather than to never fail.

Ending your account

You may delete your account at any time from your account settings. Deletion is permanent and removes the data described in the Privacy Policy. We may also suspend or terminate access for an account that violates these terms.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. Whenever the text changes, the version and date at the top of this page change with it, and that is the version your acceptance record refers to. Continuing to use Manacast after an update means you accept the current version.

Manacast is an independent, unofficial project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Wizards of the Coast. Magic: The Gathering is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast LLC; this site does not use any Wizards of the Coast trademark, logo, or card imagery.