Better to go for it then completely shelve it would think. You could also r skin it in some fashion, like make it more generic and have users provide their own decks (which happen to be MTG) etc

Off topic, but I recently looked in to playing MtG again because my son expressed interest. But, I was a bit taken aback by how different the environment is. I last played when they still had numbered "base sets", e.g., "9th Edition", and then rotating "blocks" of three smaller-but-more-advanced sets.

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?

I recently got into it with my son. I bought an arena starter kit from Amazon and it came with two 60-card decks, which seemed to work pretty well in play against each other. I bought another one long – same result. No focus on the commander format at all. I would suggest that route.

They still do core sets (every Summer, IIRC) that fulfill those basic edition sets. Lately, they've been set in external intellectual properties. Last year's was Lord of the Rings. Might sound bad, but the D&D set rekindled magic in my game group.

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.

They don't do core sets any more.

You are right that they currently don't create core sets any more. I wouldn't be surprised if they change their mind /again/ in the future.

See also: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Core_set

You could also consider games which have the mechanics of MtG without being collectible, such as Epic. It still has plenty of depth.

I’ve been playing with my son, but using my shoebox full of old cards, many with an “IV” logo so must have been around 4e that I was playing back in the day.

The game is complex, but a good intellectual challenge for a bright 6yo reader.

Probably VI; 4th edition didn't have a set symbol.

Right.

Also, FWIW, 5th edition also didn't have a set symbol, but the "Visions" set was released at around the same time and had a "V" symbol... (I only realized how confusing it was after 27 years lol...

Alpha beta unlimited revised Arabian nights 4th edition ice age mirage etc etc. I'm sure that's all wrong but I used to know it by heart. I keep my cards in old motherboard boxes !

Isn't there a free starter deck you can get from game stores?

Magic has changed drastically the last few years. I tried to get back into it and the best set I found was Jump Start 2022.

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.

Fun fact, Commander was a fan-made format that WotC eventually adopted and made official. It existed (even under that name despite what people online say now) in the mid/late 2000s when I learned of it during college.

Indeed, things have changed about a year ago.

Here is a small blogpost by WotC: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/revitalizing...

Play premodern. In addition to having the best gameplay, the card pool is closed so you don't have to worry about acquiring new cards.

https://premodernmagic.com

As someone mentioned - the "Arena Starter Kits" worked for us as an intro to the game.

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.

Go out with a bang. Release it, enjoy your 15 minutes in the spotlight, and when the lawyers come a-knocking, shut it down. Or make it open source and let the community take the wheel and the responsibility.

You never know what opportunities this adventure might bring, but certainly more than just keeping it on your hard drive. Go for it mate.

I may indeed do this. There is an outstanding issue I have to address that I've never quite worked up the motivation to deal with:

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 quickest win would to move off of Heroku. Either rent your own server that you can control (to a reasonable degree), or find an alternative that doesn't suffer that issue.

Redis would work but I'd be afraid of race conditions. There probably wouldn't be any, but it's something to be aware of.

If you wanted to test the waters with at least the relative public, I'd consider doing step 1 of renting a server, but then hiding it behind a Tor hidden service. Inconvenient to connect to? Yeah. (Probably) safe from the Hasbro demons? Also yeah.

Linode is super cheap. I pay 6 or 7 bucks a month for a bottom tier VM.

I guess I just haven't done anything outside of a PaaS before and I'm a bit worried about unknown unknowns. I'm sure I'm probably up to the task but managing my own server is just new ground for me. I'll have to research how to ensure that the server is always up or recovers from an unexpected failure and restarts immediately.

Fly.io would probably work for your use case. Doesn't have the restart limit of Heroku and still has a solid enough free tier to run your app!

I'd be happy to help if you need anything! Whether hosting or just backend related questions!

Also depending on how hard coded your architecture is, maybe you can separate out the Magic specific data from the app itself? So the MTG specific data could just be loaded as a datapack?

You can also split the difference and run Dokku[0] on a vps and basically host your own instance of “Heroku”. It can even use the same build packs and procfiles.

Feel free to message me and I’d be happy to help with server stuff.

[0] https://dokku.com/

Render (render.com; I'm the founder) doesn't restart your server every 24 hours like Heroku; it does restart it automatically if it crashes.

Architect a redundant cluster and let a peer server take over as master?

Is using a host that doesn't do this not a possibility?

Data persistence is a solved problem. “Server that never fails or reboots” is not.

It seems they all do, though. Digital ocean was the same.

Any decent VPS provider (including DigitalOcean, unless they’ve changed anything) definitely doesn’t do this.

Maybe you're right, I may be mistaken. Perhaps I should migrate to DO.

Actually, I should qualify this.

If you use a PaaS (platform as a service, e.g. Heroku, DO App Platform, AWS EB), they might assume your app to be stateless and do things like restart it at will.

If you use a VPS (virtual private server, e.g. DO Droplet, AWS EC2), this certainly shouldn’t happen, but of course it requires some Linux skills to maintain your VPS.

So it’s basically a trade-off between engineering your app to fit a PaaS or hand-managing your VMs (though the latter is usually the cheaper option).

Yeah, indeed. I can try using a Droplet but I'm just new to managing a VM by hand. I've always used a PaaS for my projects so ensuring uptime and whatever other responsibilities there may be is new for me.

If that’s the case I’d suggest you probably have a bug in your code somewhere that depends on a timer that resets at midnight. So when it spans midnight everything resets, but this isn’t the server resetting.

I would second the recommendation to move off Heroku. They're essentially the smallest scale version of vendor lock-in out there nowadays, especially considering they're no longer free.

An open-sourced codedump will survive best if people (which effectively means "average technically-minded MTG player" in this case) can run it wherever they're most comfortable - which will almost certainly be something that smells like a VPS. Mayyybe a container.

On restart warning, take server state (sign/encrypt if you want to) and dump it to each players' clients.

If both players are still connected once the server comes up and client reconnects, both players can send state to server and if both players' global states match then the game resumes, if not then error out. If only one player reconnects cause the other couldn't wait & closed tab, then you gotta error out anyways.

Then you don't need Redis or any other additional dep at least.

At least make them send you the C&D! And you can get some attention for your hard work in the weeks/months before they do. Who knows what it will lead to?

I started building a Magic based data science tool for 6 months before coming to the same inevitable conclusion. It sits in a Github private repo rotting away.

Have you tried contacting them to see if they are interested in using it to their advantage as well?

They already paid millions to develop and sell another 2 versions of this. No way they want OPs,

At best they will bully anyone who made anything to hand it over to them (for free "or else"), and then scavenge on it in case they see anything they like for future 'features'.

Just brainstorming, but would it be possible to pull out the MTG-specific portions and make it just an online card game framework where people can make their own cards and rules? If people choose to use it to copy MTG that's on them (see Tabletop Simulator, for example) but they might also use it to create their own new games.

The challenge is that the level of complexity with rules interactions in MtG is absolutely enormous, especially if you want to allow the freeform format, which allows all sets and cards.

Note: You can see all the rules here: https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Comprehensive_Rules

Oh I didn't implement a rules engine, that would be impractical. It's a freeform platform that gives you all the tools needed to use every mechanic in the game, but it's up to you to actually follow the rules. No different from playing in person with real cards. It's sort of like a drag and drop sandbox with a lot of extra features around the edges.

If you do not implement the actual rules, then it can probably be made to support many other kind of card games too.

However, I would be interested to have a FOSS rule engine of Magic: the Gathering, preferably written in C, and licensed by AGPL3 or some compatible license. But, unfortunately there is no official FOSS implementation; if there was (at least of the rule engine; not necessarily the UI) (especially if literate programming is used for the rule engine), I think that it would be better since the rules can be made more precise.

I would want to ensure that the rule engine has no pictures at all (you can easily download pictures separately if you want them, anyways; so the rule engine doesn't need them and shouldn't have them).

Obviously not legal advice for anyone, but the general consensus seems to be that in many countries (including the United States where WotC are based) game mechanics are not copyrightable. This interpretation has been stated publicly by the US Copyright Office: https://web.archive.org/web/20161122174519/http://www.copyri...

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.

There's probably someone out there with a great card game that is just lacking a site...

Could you adapt the thing to suit another card game?

OK listen up dude.

> 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.

By being generic and customizable it will have the potential to become a great new game in its own right. Let the community begin with something they already know and love (MtG) and watch them coming up with cool new stuff.

The problem as I see it is loading the card data and imagery. I use scryfall for this, and it's heavily integrated into the site in several ways. I don't see how I can get around that. My site is coded specifically to work with their API. I can't really make it so you can "swap it out" for a different game's API.

Cockatrice also loads card images and card text likely from the same source

If it doesn't handle the card rules automatically for you, then it's way worse than MTG Arena or MTGO. I've played with free MTG software (cockatrice) and it's not close to the same thing, even though it has all the art and buttons for doing all the effects manually (I use this shortcut to draw 3 cards, this shortcut to put 2 back, this shortcut to exile someone's graveyard, etc).

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.

I'm not competing with Arena. Arena has a rules engine and great graphics. But Arena has a tonnnn of limitations and does not let you simply "build any deck you want and play with any number of friends in any format you choose." For what Arena is meant to do, Arena is better. That was never my goal.

I'm competing with Untap.in and Cockatrice, and what I built is just a much, much nicer version of those things. If you give me your email, I'll send you a link to it and you can try it out yourself if you'd like.

There are several projects that implement the MTG engine and are in active use. Forge and Xmage are the main ones. You could ask their developers how they avoid getting C&D'ed. It's definitely doable and your work doesn't have to be in vain.

Do what every other VC firm does, do it and don’t care. When the C&D comes, comply. Let users cause an uproar for you.

Please release it anonymously. I beg you

Also, how come Wizards don't go after Cockatrice, but would go after your site?

They did go after Cockatrice. The original developer had to step away. It's unclear what the current situation is with whoever stepped up to take it over.

Maybe adapt it to your own game? Just look how Balatro blew up!

Cockatrice has been around for a while without getting a C&D. They separate the game client from the card images to get around it. Could do similar.

I made a website about Tintin (the Belgian comic) where you can search any cell from any album by its text content. There's also a game where you have to find which album a cell comes from.

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.

Great blistering barnacles! That's quite a story. Would you mind posting the link to your site here? I'm very curious to see it.

Sure, it's https://www.ectoplasme.com/

(It's in French, should have mentioned that)

That's really impressive! I don't know enough French yet to really be able to use it, but the 'quiz without words' should still be relevant :)

Maybe consider posting your site as a 'Show HN' at some point?

Superbe site, je l'aime beaucoup. Quel boulot.

Kind of reminds me of how my brother built a website for playing scrabble online, but because of the obvious trademark/copyright issues, he made it a private site behind an invite-only login. I don’t know if it’s still running, but because he was working on and off writing for TV at the time and doing tech support for a lot of Hollywood types, a lot of the users were Hollywood folks including a number of names of people that you’d recognize.