Open source rules engine for Magic: The Gathering

If you want to feel more challenge - try the "experimental" difficulty level for opponents. And maybe enable AI cheating (they would see cards in your hand).

Normally, I believe, AI can blunder or miss some triggers. But with these settings they'll try to play more optimally.

Toxic as in the toxic play styles: turn 3 kills, decks that you wouldn't bring to play in person casually, games where you have near zero chances to win unless you play one of 3 meta decks. Also, I found BM (usually time wasting) is a lot more common on Arena than in other games I play (e.g. Hearthstone).

I’ve done the same thing. I’ll eventually buy the cards, but I don’t want to buy cards, playtest the deck, and then find out that I want to replace this slightly expensive card with this other slightly expensive card. My friends are ok with playing against a proxied deck, in part because I keep the overall price of the deck reasonable (since eventually I’ll probably buy the cards if the deck isn’t an absolute dog).

I made my proxies with some card-stock with a grammage of 300 g/m^2 which is roughly what MTG cards have (had to grab a big pack from a craft store, but that’s ok since I’ll find a use for the rest). I have a guillotine paper cutter, which made things a LOT easier than when I did this in college, and I also had a little corner-rounder-punch thing that made the final product look way better than expected. I have an inkjet printer, so they didn’t look perfect or anything, but they still looked a lot better than expected! And when they were in sleeves the “feel” was pretty close too!

Woah, did you have to hand cut all of those decks or how did you do that?

XMage has a JSON output format, but last I looked it was difficult to parse. The potential effects for Magic are so vast it's extremely difficult to find a sane structured format to record things in, so the JSON format is mostly a couple of identifying fields and a string describing what happened (ie. Source was this permanent, target was this player, what happened is a giant string field).

There’s lots of footage of games, and programs like 17lands to extract games you have played from the arena log, and commentary of games… but no easy-to-ingest recordings

What is this gatherer? I can only find a reference to an online card database.

> Why does this happen?

A blend of anonymity, low self-soothing ability, human instinct to talk trash during competition, people tying identity to performance, skew towards younger people playing, etc.

> How and to what degree does it manifest?

How? Mostly through voice and chat systems in-game. Also through quitting the game, or blatantly "throwing" a match.

To what degree? From "You suck" to racial slurs to harm yourself. It's ubiquitous across competitive games -- you'll probably experience it every session.

> How do you avoid it?

The best way is to find a consistent group of folks to play with. Stay away from "random queue". Certain games you can turn off chat features, submit reports, etc. You can also just ignore it and accept it as part of the thing.

I'd like to answer on the handling part. Handling it really depends on the game / community itself. I play Rainbow 6 Siege online, it's 10 people per match, in two teams. Most toxicity is easily avoided, because I only allow chat and voice from teammates (default setting), and if someone is toxic, it's very easy to block their chat, or voice. Killing teammates only succeeds once, then the TK-er's friendly fire will actually hurt the player itself, not the teammate, and this, if repeated, even propagates from match to match. This status is reflected with a red marker for everyone to see in a match. There's also a ticker on the top right where they sometimes show the names of a bunch of cheaters, griefers, or other toxic elements, after banning their accounts.

I wouldn't even restrict the toxicity conversation to gaming, or to online communities even. Whenever people interact, there can be toxicity. The main factor is usually the interaction setup itself. If that is handled well, the effects of toxic actors is manageably minimal. If the system lets them proliferate, they will. Gaming the system's toxicity management behavior is also a sport in itself. Communities can be even set up to explicitly allow the behavior, acknowledging the existence of this pursuit and making it plain to see that it will happen.

If you want to avoid toxic behavior in your game, don’t allow multiplayer.

Some people will always be shitty, some people will want to play your game, and some number of people will meet both those criteria. The only way to fix it is after the fact, but there’s no way to avoid it.

As to the “how and to what degree” depends on the game and the type of person it attracts. The second something is competitive, toxicity is inevitable because many people take losing personally.

Even playing bridge (card game) with random people online can be pretty grim, though playing online games organised by some national authority (eg the English Bridge Union) is a lot better.

The adventure mode is basically the Shandalar. It was added only a couple years ago by a single developer[0]. But it had excellent support since, especially in 2023. And right now it's very feature-rich with a lot of dungeons, bosses, artifacts, simple quest system, etc. New stuff comes out every month.

[0] - https://www.slightlymagic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=304...

> Now we come to the other program that we rules engineers spend our time working on, along with the GRE, which is the Game Rules Parser (GRP). This program (written in Python) takes raw English rules text of Magic cards and converts them into one or more CLIPS rules. It's what allows 80% or so of newly written Magic cards to just work in MTG Arena automatically.

Wow, didn't even think about this being a possibility! But I guess if they have a very strict dictionary and grammar rules for card effects this kind of thing can work !

That's interesting, thank you. It seems what's old is new again: I had a lot of contact with CLIPS early in my career but I found that most of the programming tasks weren't heavy rules based as much as CRUD and reporting apps. Given that Forge is in Java, they may enjoy Drools <https://github.com/apache/incubator-kie-drools#readme> (which used to be a JBoss project but I guess has been donated to the Apache Foundation)

Thanks, I found it in the 'Content Downloaders' menu!

It estimates the download time to 6 hours, and it's not because of the size but most likely their server works slowly. And in the meanwhile it does not let you play, well tomorrow then :)

I was floated the idea of doing an AI competition for Sabberstone, the open source rules engine for Hearthstone. Even though Hearthstone is hugely limited in game complexity compared to MtG, building an interface for a program to take actions in Sabberstone and evaluate boardstates is not trivial.