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I bet WOTC would find this very useful!

by anxman 3y ago

tayo42 3y ago
It would be interesting if it could make balanced cards. I wonder what kind of crazy op decks these generated cards allows for
- saghm 3y ago
  Humans aren't exactly great at this either; cards needing to be banned has only gotten more frequent over time, although it looks like this year has been the first one in a while not to require a lot[1] [1]: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Banned_and_restricted_cards/Timeline https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Banned_and_restricted_cards/Time...
  - eddtests 3y ago
    You’d expect that to happen as potential interactions increase, I assume. I’ve always wanted to learn how to use a modelling tool like TLA+ or something to find breaking issues in games - like first turn wins (that isn’t just Exodia in Yugioh)
    - wbl 3y ago
      Read up on the Power Nine sometime. They mostly look innocent but would lead to first turn win decks.
    - thom 3y ago
      Many of the recent bannings haven’t been accidental combos though, they’ve just been power creep. Wizards is in a tough spot these days because Commander players and people playing cube want a constant stream of new cards that have to be usable in an eternal format. One good result of this power creep, if anything, has been that Wizards is increasingly willing to _unban_ cards which are no longer overpowered.
  - tstrimple 3y ago
    I'd argue that humans are actually pretty fucking good at this. After all, it's humans who are exploiting the weaknesses WOTC build into the game via new card releases. Balance testing is a numbers game though. If you test your software you can be reasonably confident if you release it to 10 people, it'll perform pretty much as expected. If that software is installed by millions of people, you're going to start experiencing every edge case that can only occur in extremely rare circumstances. Or another example, the software released to ten customers can be insecure with little repercussions. But insecure software released to millions is going to be zero-day'd in no time. The MTG community absolutely has hackers that are just waiting for the latest vulnerability to be released. The latest set released by WOTC this week has an infinite mana loop that you can get on turn four. I don't think this stuff will ever stop, and I honestly hope it doesn't. Bans / restrictions can mitigate the damage to certain formats, and it really stirs up the creativity of folks in the meantime.
    - saghm 3y ago
      This seems like a question of linguistic semantics, but I'd argue that groups of humans are only good at this at the scale where its not so much a skill of the individual humans but a property of the larger system itself. Millions of humans individually trying to figure out how to exploit some new cards aren't going to be anywhere close to as good as millions of people playing games against each other to try things out, and at that point, it's not obvious to me that humans even scale as well compared to what might be possible with a computer program.
      - tstrimple 3y ago
        While this is true to some extent, there are absolutely known "hackers" within the community that are particularly good at finding these sorts of interactions. The millions will shake out the rest though for sure.
        saghm 3y ago
        Yeah, there obviously are some people who are outliers in this regard, but I don't think that's an argument that humans in general are good at this. There are people who can perform complex arithmetic in their head or even eat airplanes one piece at a time[1], but overall I'd still classify humans as "not great" at those tasks. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito
  - dtx1 3y ago
    There has been a paper on using genetic algorithms for deckbuilding in magic[0] I'm working on at least partially reproducing and improving upon the paper but the reality is that MTG as a game is really hard to implement (and a shitload of work) so i'm building my own MTG inspired game to try and balance it using genetic deck building. [0] https://ntnuopen.ntnu.no/ntnu-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2462429/16274_FULLTEXT.pdf?sequence=1 https://ntnuopen.ntnu.no/ntnu-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2...
    - standardly 3y ago
      Interesting! Is there a way I can keep up with this? edit: I mistakenly thought you authored the paper, but if you do make progress on your game definitely update us
      - dtx1 3y ago
        I certainly will! But it's a long road with many unanswered questions: Can a MCTS with enough compute time beat a human consistently enough? Can MCTS reliably exploit super efficient combos? How can I optimize MCTS Strategies for stronger and stronger players? Can you use Machine learning to optimize further? How do you encode a TCG for a neural net? How do I deal with a potentially infinite play field (MTG can generate token cards). Can genetic deck building find the best decks? If not, are there other options? ... My ultimate goal here is to create a better Magic. Fixing all the Gameplay issues from having grown over decades, creating a much more streamlined ruleset, a much broader stable meta, etc. etc. But yeah, right now i'm in the "thinking a lot about this" phase.
wly_cdgr 3y ago
I am extremely confident WoTC is aware of this and is working on and/or using similar
- WA 3y ago
  Considering the amount of cards they tend to produce these days, makes you wonder if they aren't already using some kind of AI to generate a baseline of cards.
- standardly 3y ago
  I can see them using it in a purely creative context, like generating a bunch of cards and then looking for novel and interesting cards you wouldn't have otherwise though of. But designing cards is fun for a human to do and not terribly hard, so I don't think we'll see entire sets generated by AI, or even an entire card generated by AI that a human doesn't go back and balance numbers on or fine tune a mechanic.

I bet WOTC would find this very useful!

by anxman 3y ago

I bet WOTC would find this very useful!

It would be interesting if it could make balanced cards. I wonder what kind of crazy op decks these generated cards allows for

saghm 3y ago
Humans aren't exactly great at this either; cards needing to be banned has only gotten more frequent over time, although it looks like this year has been the first one in a while not to require a lot[1] [1]: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Banned_and_restricted_cards/Timeline https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Banned_and_restricted_cards/Time...
- eddtests 3y ago
  You’d expect that to happen as potential interactions increase, I assume. I’ve always wanted to learn how to use a modelling tool like TLA+ or something to find breaking issues in games - like first turn wins (that isn’t just Exodia in Yugioh)
  - wbl 3y ago
    Read up on the Power Nine sometime. They mostly look innocent but would lead to first turn win decks.
  - thom 3y ago
    Many of the recent bannings haven’t been accidental combos though, they’ve just been power creep. Wizards is in a tough spot these days because Commander players and people playing cube want a constant stream of new cards that have to be usable in an eternal format. One good result of this power creep, if anything, has been that Wizards is increasingly willing to _unban_ cards which are no longer overpowered.
- tstrimple 3y ago
  I'd argue that humans are actually pretty fucking good at this. After all, it's humans who are exploiting the weaknesses WOTC build into the game via new card releases. Balance testing is a numbers game though. If you test your software you can be reasonably confident if you release it to 10 people, it'll perform pretty much as expected. If that software is installed by millions of people, you're going to start experiencing every edge case that can only occur in extremely rare circumstances. Or another example, the software released to ten customers can be insecure with little repercussions. But insecure software released to millions is going to be zero-day'd in no time. The MTG community absolutely has hackers that are just waiting for the latest vulnerability to be released. The latest set released by WOTC this week has an infinite mana loop that you can get on turn four. I don't think this stuff will ever stop, and I honestly hope it doesn't. Bans / restrictions can mitigate the damage to certain formats, and it really stirs up the creativity of folks in the meantime.
  - saghm 3y ago
    This seems like a question of linguistic semantics, but I'd argue that groups of humans are only good at this at the scale where its not so much a skill of the individual humans but a property of the larger system itself. Millions of humans individually trying to figure out how to exploit some new cards aren't going to be anywhere close to as good as millions of people playing games against each other to try things out, and at that point, it's not obvious to me that humans even scale as well compared to what might be possible with a computer program.
    - tstrimple 3y ago
      While this is true to some extent, there are absolutely known "hackers" within the community that are particularly good at finding these sorts of interactions. The millions will shake out the rest though for sure.
      - saghm 3y ago
        Yeah, there obviously are some people who are outliers in this regard, but I don't think that's an argument that humans in general are good at this. There are people who can perform complex arithmetic in their head or even eat airplanes one piece at a time[1], but overall I'd still classify humans as "not great" at those tasks. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito
- dtx1 3y ago
  There has been a paper on using genetic algorithms for deckbuilding in magic[0] I'm working on at least partially reproducing and improving upon the paper but the reality is that MTG as a game is really hard to implement (and a shitload of work) so i'm building my own MTG inspired game to try and balance it using genetic deck building. [0] https://ntnuopen.ntnu.no/ntnu-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2462429/16274_FULLTEXT.pdf?sequence=1 https://ntnuopen.ntnu.no/ntnu-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2...
  - standardly 3y ago
    Interesting! Is there a way I can keep up with this? edit: I mistakenly thought you authored the paper, but if you do make progress on your game definitely update us
    - dtx1 3y ago
      I certainly will! But it's a long road with many unanswered questions: Can a MCTS with enough compute time beat a human consistently enough? Can MCTS reliably exploit super efficient combos? How can I optimize MCTS Strategies for stronger and stronger players? Can you use Machine learning to optimize further? How do you encode a TCG for a neural net? How do I deal with a potentially infinite play field (MTG can generate token cards). Can genetic deck building find the best decks? If not, are there other options? ... My ultimate goal here is to create a better Magic. Fixing all the Gameplay issues from having grown over decades, creating a much more streamlined ruleset, a much broader stable meta, etc. etc. But yeah, right now i'm in the "thinking a lot about this" phase.

wly_cdgr 3y ago

I am extremely confident WoTC is aware of this and is working on and/or using similar

WA 3y ago
Considering the amount of cards they tend to produce these days, makes you wonder if they aren't already using some kind of AI to generate a baseline of cards.
standardly 3y ago
I can see them using it in a purely creative context, like generating a bunch of cards and then looking for novel and interesting cards you wouldn't have otherwise though of. But designing cards is fun for a human to do and not terribly hard, so I don't think we'll see entire sets generated by AI, or even an entire card generated by AI that a human doesn't go back and balance numbers on or fine tune a mechanic.