5 ms·

That's my favourite way to play magic. Real cardboard magic is very expensive hobby. Digital magic (like Mtg Arena) is usually toxic, too competitive and meta-d

That's my favourite way to play magic. Real cardboard magic is very expensive hobby. Digital magic (like Mtg Arena) is usually toxic, too competitive and meta-driven for my liking. So, instead, I enjoy playing against AI. And AI here is actually decent. It can't do combo or play slow control decks well, but with aggro archetypes it's an actual challenge. If you want to try it - start with Adventure - it is a mode where you get a starter deck and go into the open world to explore and challenge other planeswalkers. You earn cards and gold that can be spent on more cards. It's fun because you don't get stuck playing the same best cards over and over. All cards from a long magic history are available and have equal chances to show up in rewards. It takes a skill to build a deck from pile of random variable quality cards. But, oh boy, does it feel good when you get good at it.

542458 3y ago
I mostly play commander, and find the AI to be pretty dumb to be honest. That’s not saying it’s not fun! But I find that even with the AI using simple deck archetypes I usually have to put three of them on an enemy team before they hit moderately-skilled-human-player levels of challenge. The AI is pretty bad at threat assessment, so removal, counters and board wipes get used pretty randomly sometimes.
- archargelod 3y ago
  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.
prepend 3y ago
Has anyone recreated Shandalar in this engine?
- archargelod 3y ago
  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=30489 https://www.slightlymagic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=304...
  - falsaberN1 3y ago
    Not quite, there was another developer that quietly made a lot of work in the time he was around, after Grimm just vanished shortly after those posts, and basically left the entire thing in an usable state for later. Unfortunately he left after a series of personal tragedies that rendered him unable to function for a while. That guy never gets any credit which is rather sad. I really don't know how he still has a will to live after all that has happened to him.
ncallaway 3y ago
Are there any… archives of past MtG games or tournaments? Is there a standard format for recording a draft and a game of magic? Curious if there’s any existing data to start training AIs on, or if these are more of the classic build an AI approach
- freeone3000 3y ago
  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
- everforward 3y ago
  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).
echelon 3y ago
> toxic I hear this about a lot of gaming communities. Smash, Xbox, any FPS. Why does this happen? How and to what degree does it manifest? How do you avoid it?
- moate 3y ago
  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.
  - akerl_ 3y ago
    Imagine if we took this approach outside of gaming. “If you want to avoid toxic behavior at your workplace, don’t get a job”. We should be building systems and environments that can sustain interpersonal interaction while combatting toxicity.
    - moate 3y ago
      The better allegory (and actual advice that might be useful): If you want to avoid a toxic workplace, work by yourself. Now, that said I’m being specifically pedantic: these are steps to AVOID toxic environments. To COMBAT toxicity is a whole other problem with way too many variables. I went for the solvable problem.
- loveiswork 3y ago
  > 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.
JoshTriplett 3y ago
> Digital magic (like Mtg Arena) is usually toxic, too competitive and meta-driven for my liking. I found that Gatherer had a much more friendly environment. If you take a land-destruction or a counter/permission deck into a game there, folks will just resign when they realize what kind of deck you're playing, and word will get around to not play with you unless you change decks. It's more the kind of environment where you can play a fun, decent, creative deck, and have a good time with other folks doing the same.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  What is this gatherer? I can only find a reference to an online card database.
  - JoshTriplett 3y ago
    Sorry, got the name wrong. GCCG.
piyh 3y ago
Playing face to face with friends is the best part of magic. I've proxied 30+ edh decks on my laser printer. I still money on real cards, but increasing my kitchen table meta diversity with proxies was a great move. Building infinite budget Slivers, having perfect mana bases, and exploring jank to cedh power levels are what I've wanted from this game all my life.
- PNewling 3y ago
  Woah, did you have to hand cut all of those decks or how did you do that?
  - starkparker 3y ago
    Can't speak to OP but a Cricut or budget equivalent cardstock cutter is a M:tG hacker's best friend. That and an unlimited supply of Modge Podge. A guillotine or rotary cutter and corner punch are probably faster but nothing's more satisfying than a whole deck of precision cut cards.
  - piyh 3y ago
    I did it by hand with a scissors. I was losing my sanity every night for months trying to keep my newborn from crying. Printing tons of decks, cutting and sleeving was the kind of thoughtless work that fit in that time period.
- water-data-dude 3y ago
  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!
grensley 3y ago
How is Arena toxic? There's basically no opportunity for the players to converse besides bland preset options which rarely even gets used outside of a greeting at the start of the game.
- archargelod 3y ago
  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).
Buttons840 3y ago
My approach to an AI for MTG would be to not even pretend to play by the same rules, just make a series of challenges the player can face with their deck, Slay the Spire style. Like, one challenge the Computer adds 2 "Zombies" each turn and attacks, next challenge the Computer plays a random arc-bound card and each card on the table has a 50% chance to attack, etc, etc. Players can build their decks and then see how far they can get through the challenges.

542458 3y ago

I mostly play commander, and find the AI to be pretty dumb to be honest. That’s not saying it’s not fun! But I find that even with the AI using simple deck archetypes I usually have to put three of them on an enemy team before they hit moderately-skilled-human-player levels of challenge. The AI is pretty bad at threat assessment, so removal, counters and board wipes get used pretty randomly sometimes.

archargelod 3y ago
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.

prepend 3y ago

Has anyone recreated Shandalar in this engine?

archargelod 3y ago
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=30489 https://www.slightlymagic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=304...
- falsaberN1 3y ago
  Not quite, there was another developer that quietly made a lot of work in the time he was around, after Grimm just vanished shortly after those posts, and basically left the entire thing in an usable state for later. Unfortunately he left after a series of personal tragedies that rendered him unable to function for a while. That guy never gets any credit which is rather sad. I really don't know how he still has a will to live after all that has happened to him.

ncallaway 3y ago

Are there any… archives of past MtG games or tournaments? Is there a standard format for recording a draft and a game of magic? Curious if there’s any existing data to start training AIs on, or if these are more of the classic build an AI approach

freeone3000 3y ago
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
everforward 3y ago
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).

echelon 3y ago

> toxic I hear this about a lot of gaming communities. Smash, Xbox, any FPS. Why does this happen? How and to what degree does it manifest? How do you avoid it?

moate 3y ago
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.
- akerl_ 3y ago
  Imagine if we took this approach outside of gaming. “If you want to avoid toxic behavior at your workplace, don’t get a job”. We should be building systems and environments that can sustain interpersonal interaction while combatting toxicity.
  - moate 3y ago
    The better allegory (and actual advice that might be useful): If you want to avoid a toxic workplace, work by yourself. Now, that said I’m being specifically pedantic: these are steps to AVOID toxic environments. To COMBAT toxicity is a whole other problem with way too many variables. I went for the solvable problem.
loveiswork 3y ago
> 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.

JoshTriplett 3y ago

> Digital magic (like Mtg Arena) is usually toxic, too competitive and meta-driven for my liking. I found that Gatherer had a much more friendly environment. If you take a land-destruction or a counter/permission deck into a game there, folks will just resign when they realize what kind of deck you're playing, and word will get around to not play with you unless you change decks. It's more the kind of environment where you can play a fun, decent, creative deck, and have a good time with other folks doing the same.

Aeolun 3y ago
What is this gatherer? I can only find a reference to an online card database.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  Sorry, got the name wrong. GCCG.

piyh 3y ago

Playing face to face with friends is the best part of magic. I've proxied 30+ edh decks on my laser printer. I still money on real cards, but increasing my kitchen table meta diversity with proxies was a great move. Building infinite budget Slivers, having perfect mana bases, and exploring jank to cedh power levels are what I've wanted from this game all my life.

PNewling 3y ago
Woah, did you have to hand cut all of those decks or how did you do that?
- starkparker 3y ago
  Can't speak to OP but a Cricut or budget equivalent cardstock cutter is a M:tG hacker's best friend. That and an unlimited supply of Modge Podge. A guillotine or rotary cutter and corner punch are probably faster but nothing's more satisfying than a whole deck of precision cut cards.
- piyh 3y ago
  I did it by hand with a scissors. I was losing my sanity every night for months trying to keep my newborn from crying. Printing tons of decks, cutting and sleeving was the kind of thoughtless work that fit in that time period.
water-data-dude 3y ago
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!

grensley 3y ago

How is Arena toxic? There's basically no opportunity for the players to converse besides bland preset options which rarely even gets used outside of a greeting at the start of the game.

archargelod 3y ago
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).

Buttons840 3y ago

My approach to an AI for MTG would be to not even pretend to play by the same rules, just make a series of challenges the player can face with their deck, Slay the Spire style. Like, one challenge the Computer adds 2 "Zombies" each turn and attacks, next challenge the Computer plays a random arc-bound card and each card on the table has a 50% chance to attack, etc, etc. Players can build their decks and then see how far they can get through the challenges.