I've never shared it with the magic community because I think wizards of the coast would just send me a cease and desist, so three years of work is just sitting idle.
I'm still not sure how I feel about it.
I was assuming I would go in and buy a couple of starter decks from the most recent numbered "edition" to start teaching him, but it appears that they don't do this anymore, and everything I saw was focused around the "Commander" format, which has even more mechanics and rules. The game was already complex enough that I was worried about teaching it to someone new (Plus, the commander mechanic didn't appeal to me, personally, anyway).
Is there no longer the concept of a "simple base set" with just the basic mechanics? Or is everything just theme-heavy sets now?
They had a Jumpstart product, where you could buy two half-decks and mix them together. But it looks like the last printing of that was 2022.
If you don't mind spending the time, you could just craft a starter deck on paper or find a list online, and then order the individual cards from a website. As long as you avoid the must-have cards for competitive players, it'll be cheap.
The basic rules around commander aren't particularly additionally taxing beyond that. (This is your special card that you can play every time. When it dies it goes back to its special spot and it gets more expensive each time you cast it). What I like about the commander format (in the few pre-constructed decks I've bought over the last few years) - they can really lean into a theme/strategy more - and the commander really guides you in how to play this deck.
Start with those arena kits - they are cheap and handle the rules. But if your son sees a commander deck that resonates with him (in theme or mechanics) -- I'd recommend giving it a shot.
Alternatively, Star Wars Unlimited just released their first set. The starter set has two balanced decks (Vader vs Luke) with some staple cards that can be used in a bunch of different decks with boosters. Gameplay is Magic-esque, but smoothed out (no land issues since any card can be turned into a resource, no instants/stack shenanigans, and actions pass back and forth so constant engagement).
There's a free to play version at https://www.forcetable.net/swu using the starter decks.
Here is a small blogpost by WotC: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/revitalizing...
The game is complex, but a good intellectual challenge for a bright 6yo reader.
> I built the best site out there for playing magic the gathering online.
No you didn't! You built the best site out there for playing trading card games. It just so happens that it's very easy to point to your own local card/rule sets, share them with peers, and play together online. And if the cards/rules being used by the clients happen to be MTG cards/rules, oh well! That's out of your hands.
Seriously, if you want to release this you only need to make it a) generic out of the box, and b) completely customizable at the client level. Of course this would never support true competitive play since you can never trust the client, but it would still be super fun for playing against people you trust. And as a bonus you could support user-created cards and rules.
If they really built the best site for playing MTG, even over paid versions, then there's no real way to hide the fact that it's magic-specific.
Note: You can see all the rules here: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Comprehensive_Rules
Obviously the name can be trademarked, and text (e.g. the names / descriptions of things, the specific expression of the rules) and images (e.g. card art) can be copyrighted.
There is a long history of clones of games with the exact same mechanics, but with everything renamed and the artwork changed.
Occasionally, there are attempts to patent mechanics.
So it wouldn't necessarily be a problem if GP was to rename the game, change all the card artwork, make sure no instructions from the original game are used in the new game, and rename all the cards and concepts in an isomorphic way (i.e. a 1:1 mapping between MtG and whatever the new game is called). That way, it could be a completely new game which happens to have the same mechanics as MtG, but isn't a derivative of it legally.
It would be possible to speculate what WoTC would do in that case, but hard to know for sure. Most likely, they'd probably just ignore it if it isn't using their trademark, artwork, descriptions and so on. They could send a blusterous C&D letter to try their luck if they were particularly worried. If the GP got such a letter and ignored it, or replied explaining that their game does not reuse any copyrightable elements, they'd probably just back down. If they really decided to take it to court, they could try to hope it goes more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spry_Fox%2C_LLC_v._Lolapps%2C_.... than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_East_USA,_Inc._v._Epyx,_I.... (although they'd probably have a harder road given Spry Fox was largely based on the visual look-and-feel, which would be a longer bow to draw when saying a computer game infringes on a card game).
Obviously, none of this is legal advice, and the circumstances could differ depending on facts like where it is hosted / where GP lives, and the exact details of the game engine or how similar artwork was.
You never know what opportunities this adventure might bring, but certainly more than just keeping it on your hard drive. Go for it mate.
Heroku restarts their servers once every 24 hours with only thirty seconds' warning. Since the games are in-memory, this of course kicks everyone out of whatever games they may be in the middle of.
I guess the solution is to have the games be on Redis instead of in-memory? I'm a bit more front-end oriented so I was bewildered to learn this was how it worked in the first place and I'm not 100% confident in my solution.
The owners of the intellectual property wrote to me and just asked that I stop using the domain name I was using (which was the name of a character) and that every cell contains a reference to them ("Tintin is copyrighted to blah blah blah"). I obliged and haven't heard of them ever since.
Could you adapt the thing to suit another card game?
