> I had begun the interview with what I figured was an obvious, softball icebreaker: “Yes,” Garfield responded when asked if he was related to President James Garfield (1831-1881), “he was my great-great-grandfather.”
Wow!
> I think make-believe is a very important component of games; the art really drives that.
The art and flavor text are a big part of the game, IMO. At least its original draw, anyways.
> Cheatyface {U}{U}{U}
> Creature — Efreet (2/2)
> If Cheatyface is in your hand, you may sneak Cheatyface onto the battlefield. If an opponent catches you right away, that player may exile Cheatyface.
> Flying
There's a lot of variance in the games, variety in the cards, and weird interactions to work out.
You can buy preconstructed commander decks for $35 (maybe a little more), and modify them with a bunch of obscure cards that cost no more than a few dollars a piece. Check out EDHREC for card ideas.
I've personally found that EDH/Commander is a good solution to the money problem. Yea, you're going to wind up dropping a few hundred for a deck (if you're staring from scratch), but the style of the format means you're not constantly chasing the "new hotness" of standard and don't need to worry about dropping $600+ just for your lands like modern. And I mean, legacy/vintage are just a way for rich people to show off.
The average cost of the top 10 decks at any moment is over $200, as meta shifts and sets rotate, you're buying ~5 decks per year minimum.
If you want to practice, you have to buy digital copies of those decks too (either buying singles in mtgo or a ton of boosters on arena)
If you want to play at the competitive level, you have to travel to multiple cities for open/gp events since there is a lot of randomness based on draw and matchups.
Another reason Hearthstone was so frustrating. All the legendary cards were locked behind astronomical paywalls.
Edit: It's been a while since I played, but does look like for IP reasons you'll need to actually download the cards separately from the actual program. I'm not sure where to do this, but I'd imagine someone on this subreddit or on their dedicated Cockatrice server can help you https://www.reddit.com/r/Cockatrice/
If you want to play in the computer, there are several free and open source implementations. I don't have any great recommendation, but I'll just point out that I sometimes play around with XMage (http://xmage.de/) when I feel like whacking around the AI a bit. Too bad it is so unstable and crashes a lot :(
Put the 'proxy' cards in a sleeve with a regular card behind it.
Takes time and effort, but if you play one night a week or so it ends up more fun because you never know what someone is going to bring.
There is also Apprentice, kind of like MtG online but with barebones interface, that allows you to play against other people.
Interface is amazingly complicated though, since it has to model all of MtG.
Unlike chess, it’s stochastic and unlike backgammon, it has hidden information and bluffing. But it’s more than that - the cards change the rules of the game itself.
On top of those layers, the fact that each player builds their own deck makes the game asymmetric and ultimately the meta-game of building the deck to beat the Keynsian beauty contest of optimal deck selection becomes the most important part.
It is this meta game that makes me think it will be a long long time before we have a machine learning model that can play the full game (and the meta-game) consistently better than an expert human player. At least while new cards are being added to the game.
The game is turing complete. It can have infinite loops and crazy, ridiculous complexity and is gloriously fun to play. I’d love to hear about any AI projects that have taken a serious stab at playing a complete game.
In the original rules of the game, players had to ante up a random card from their deck every game. There were other cards that added to this ante during the game itself, much like doubling in backgammon. The point was to make the person who went out and spent a lot of money on the deck likely to risk more "monetarily" than the player who only spent a few dollars.
I played this way for many years and I still think it's the best way to play the game, with the trading of cards to get back the ante card a key mechanism to improve one's deck.
If a video game let players spend thousands of dollars on high power abilities to completely dominate the lower paid tier players, they'd be ridiculed in many circles.
There are certainly ways to play around this, but it's definitely a thing.
At most tournaments, all the players have essentially equal access to any cards they want to play with. Some formats are more expensive than others to enter of course, but that's about the same as any other sport - I don't race thoroughbred horses or drive Formula One motorcars either.
In terms of non-tournament (or tournament practice) there is nothing stopping people from taking a sharpie and writing "Black Lotus" on a one-cent card and playing as if it's the most expensive card in the game. People do this all the time.
That’s definitely changed for the worse, as well as making individual cards more powerful.
I used to make fun of YuGiOh for being full of ‘this card wins you the game’ cards, but magic has very much transformed into exactly the same thing.
The beauty of magic is that people with even a modicum of spending money can find a competitive game.
Yes, if you currently want to be relevant you probably need Oko and friends, but if you want to play cheap, you can.
And if you want to play commander for cheap, check out The Commander's Quarters on YouTube, all deck techs are 25 or 50.
the cost to enjoy it is minimal if you’re not playing competitively and even if you are paying attention to the meta matters more than investing thousands of dollars in the game
Magic was incredibly innovative but I think just having this list of characteristics was not so revolutionary in the early 90's. A number of wargames and RPGs that predate Magic have most of them and a few have all of them.
Is ML anything more than pattern recognition? If I could tally nearly every game state vs game state -> win %, then run a simple if [state], then {} program, then what do I miss out on vs an ML approach? Is the magic just in how we feed good data sets to an ML algorithm so it can efficiently mimic the above much quicker?
If your problem's domain is not too big then you are basically right, but in practice things are more complicated, larger, noisier, etc. I am conflating many things here of course.
For a 14 year old me this was a pretty big deal. Thank you Richard for doing that!
My favorite memory was when me and a friend tried a novel strategy in Warcraft 2 -- the "Peon Rush". Haven't heard of the strategy? That's because it's awful. We ganged up on another player, sending waves of peons as fast as we could spawn them. Our target crushed us both with, IIRC, a pair of ogres. One died.
For some counterexamples to your point, look at any of the art by Seb McKinnon.
His stuff looks fantastic, and does look a lot like the more "tarot" inspired art of early magic. Thanks for telling us about him! Link for the curious. http://www.sebmckinnon.com/illustration/2019/5/29/2019/5/29/...
Arena now takes up a LOT of my spare time. I'm happy with the microtransaction system. $5 can take you pretty far when it comes to building a competitive deck if you are willing to play drafts. I've spent around $40 total across three accounts. The $5 one-time purchase is quite generous.
BO1 constructed allows you to deviate from the meta and/or counter it. The matchmaking is good, and you can tell a lot of effort has gone into cosmetic and sound effects.
I've played lots of Hearthstone and Shadowverse since both came out. I haven't touched Hearthstone in years, even though I spent close to a thousand dollars on it. I'm done with HS for good. I'll still play Shadowverse for new sets since you can always make a competitive deck for free if you create a new account and spend a few hours grinding.
I hope Wizards doesn't get greedy with Arena as it (and MTG) continue to grow in popularity. When Hearthstone got big, I expected Magic to die out completely, but it's nice to see that didn't happen.
Arena has been so fantastic for me. I spend a fraction of what I used to, have all that space back in my apartment and play way more than ever. There are some things that I miss about playing face to face with people, but also there's no way I'd ever play some of my combo decks (any Mirror March...) in paper.
Magic serves many different audiences -- they even purposely design cards for certain players knowing others will hate them. I guess the flavor text hits different people too.
Just a fun, stupid and memorable flavor text.
But there is more:
- They made an Unhinged card out of it (Ach! Hans, Run!)
- It is referenced in an other card with a similar ability (Revenant). "Not again." -Hans
- Saffi Eriksdotter is a creature from the "time spiral" block. Many cards of this block are "parallel universe" version of older cards. And indeed, here, Saffi Eriksdotter manages to run away.
I both played and read Invasion through Fifth Dawn, and while the quotes never appeared verbatim, some of them could be pinned down to specific events. One of my favorite easter eggs was learning that the Blind Seer from Invasion [0] was actually Urza in disguise... which fits that flavor text perfectly.
[0] https://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/details.aspx?name=Bl...
It's funny but just today I was playing a match in M:tG Arena and I noticed that I used a card's rarity to make a decision. The card was Worthy Knight, a 2/2 creature and I was trying to decide whether to attack into it with my own creature, a Pelt Collector (at the time also a 2/2, with a +1/+1 counter). Normally, in that situation, I wouldn't attack with Pelt Collector - I'd wait for it to grow a bit and then attack so it wouldn't just trade.
However, I wasn't sure what Worthy Knight was doing in the opponent's deck, but I noticed it was a rare (I didn't know the card, it's from the new set, Sword of Eldraine).
Now, normally that would make no difference, but there is no trading in M:tG Arena, as there is in the physical game, so rare cards are harder to come by in Arena than they are in the physical game. Given that Arena booster packs only have eight cards, when physical booster packs have 15 cards, a full set of four of any rare represents a more significant investment (of money, or time) on the part of its owner.
Based on this I figured that, if the opponent was running Worthy Knight (and likely a set of four given I'd seen it in the first turn), then it must be somehow important to their strategy. So I attacked with Pelt Collector and we traded (i.e. the two creatures killed each other in combat).
Edit: I mean, Pelt Collector is like the creature kill magnet. It seems players know it's a powerful card and do their best to get rid of it as early as possible.
Edit 2: Oh, I remember now. They just played another one next turn. They probably had it in hand from the start. I should have waited with the Collector.
That's Garfield of course and it's his game, but I think it's more accurate to describe the game as an abstract machine and the text on the cards (the "ability text") as its inputs that change the machine's state. Seen another way, the ability text language is the scripting language of the game's rules engine.
The language itself is fascinating. Formally, it's a Controlled Natural Language, but I doubt there is any other CNL that has been in constant use by so many people, while undergoing so many changes to its syntax and vocabulary.
Consider for instance the ability text of the card, Stasis, discussed in the article:
Players do not get an untap step.
Pay {U} during upkeep or Stasis
is destroyed.
That was what was printed on the card in its original, Limited Edition Alpha printing. The same text is now listed as follows on The Gatherer, Wizards' of the Coast M:tG online card database: Players skip their untap steps.
At the beginning of your upkeep
sacrifice Stasis unless you pay
{U}.
Note how the original card uses "destroyed" while the new text uses "sacrificed" to describe what happens if "you" (the player "controling" Stasis) does not pay {U} (one blue mana) during your upkeep step. In short, "destroy" and "sacrifice" now have different meanings. In particular, while both abilities ultimately move a permanent from its controller's Battlefield to its owner's Graveyard zone, "sacrificing" a permanent doesn't "destroy" it, so effects that replace destruction (like regeneration) cannot prevent a permanent from being moved to its owner's graveyard. Neither can "Indestructible", an ability that precludes destruction, prevent sacrifice.So the ability text language started very loose and informal, a language aimed to help players understand how a card is meant to be played, but over time it has morphed into something else entirely, a precise formal language that leaves no room for ambiguity, given of course a good knowledge of the rules.
-5/-5 for you + you must suffle all of your library into your graveyard
Replied to me pretty quick, asked for my address and sent me a signed artist proofs of all the cards he had designed which was really cool because they have the card on the front but the backs were blank, just white. It made my month, any time we went to play at a store I'd get them out and set them out and if anyone asked "oh these are my artist proof good luck charms" just for an excuse to show them off.
Sadly all of my MtG cards went up in flames at a friend's apartment 3 or 4 years ago when he lost everything (including one of his two dogs) in a New Year's day fire.
I just looked him up again, he's still doing the period stuff, and dropped him a line thanking him, brought a smile to my face and I'd probably not thought about that in the better part of decade, good times.
Mtg at this point just feels dated and I think there’s better ccgs around. Net runner is also great and imo, deeper than mtg. The asymmetrical nature of it also makes things very interesting and deep.
To each there own of course, but I think I'll avoid this particular time/money sink.
There are also draft formats where you pay to play against others from the pool of cards opened from a set of packs. The choosing of the cards is a deep meta game of its own. These are pretty affordable in general.
And you can play online which is cheaper still.
the barrier to entry is super low. i can teach you how to play in the time it takes to drink 2 coffees. it’s trivial. to actually see beyond immediate things? well... it’s gonna take a while
That was back in 4th edition days I think (I know it was during release of The Dark expansion, I bought a box of boosters for that... was a bit disappointed). It seems the rules have changed a bit since then and the game itself is quite a bit more complicated. Lots of counters and tokens and such that weren't so much of a thing back then.
Taught me how strategy and tactic work together.
How you make weaknesses my strengths.
But most importantly, it taught me not to play the games of others, but to play my own game.
D&D is still my favorite game, but man is magic up there for me.
This should cover the (very) basics well: http://www.teachmtg.com/basics
If you want a video, something like this should cover the bare-bones basics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZyXU1L3JXk
Once you have a sense of the basics, the best way to learn is to play and look up rulings whenever you get stuck.
Basic official rules are here: https://magic.wizards.com/en/magic-gameplay
Comprehensive rules for the current season are here: https://media.wizards.com/2019/downloads/MagicCompRules%2020...
Whenever there is a ruling specific to a card and its non-trivial interactions, you can look the card up in Gatherer, and there will be a rulings section that will tell you the relevant info. For example, if you were using the card 'Felidar Guardian' and didn't know what would happen in a particular case, you'd look up its Gatherer page: https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...
Be warned, mtg is addictive and expensive.
the good news is that you don’t need to learn all the rules. you learn the basic rules and after that you learn the rules surrounding abilities/effects/etc as they come up.
here:
https://magic.wizards.com/en/game-info/gameplay/rules-and-fo...
i even still buy the occasional booster pack.