"Narrative hook" is more often than not a sign of a weak writer. The story could also have started with: "Before they learned that their father was a drug dealer, the following happened:"
The Arena card engine is based on CLIPS [1] and not modern LLM-based tools. Magic cards are written in a very constrained language (usually called "card templating") that lends itself very well to machine-parseability.
There was an era about 10-15 years long where that was true but modern cards often fall back on very loose language that they tighten up with rulings prior or sometimes after release. See the language behind the "Prepared" key word in the newest set for a striking example.
I don't think Prepared is ambiguous at all. It has its meaning defined in the CR (722) and every card that uses it has either a clear trigger condition or the "enters prepared" replacement effect. It's just a new designation and there are plenty of those already, including ones that are 10+ years old (Renowned, Monstrous, Level Up).
Well there was a huge discussion on what it means amongst judges. On plain reading it does not do what it states it does. Start just with the phrase "its spell" - those words are entirely undefined until getting into the rulings, and don't mean what they mean in other contexts. It makes no mention of the prior rules that it sort of hacks into this either.
I have no idea what rule 722 has to do with prepared.
Ah, I have I guess an old version of the CR downloaded from when I was a judge and TO where rule section 722 is "Controlling Another Player," weird reorganization there.
Are you active in judge forums or social media at all? Huge threads on prepared with these arguments (I didn't come up with the idea as I now longer play or judge).
Regardless of whether you think this one example is confusing, WOTC came out a few years back and said they were sacrificing clarity for more natural language as a development goal and it's clearly noticeable in the cards.
Sorry, throwing out a text because its reminder text is a cop-out, that's the only way 99%+ of players are going to interact with the rules. The rule makes sense when demonstrated but from a logical step-by-step when following what it says on the actual cards it does not actually function in a way that conforms to the way it is supposed to work.
I'm specifically talking about the use case of "can we use natural-language tools to parse oracle text and produce functioning game objects in Arena". For that use case, it's completely sensible to look at the actual rules text and not reminder text.
Looking back further, there was confusion during preview season when people were looking at "fake/leaked" mockups that had incorrect text on them, but this also isn't a problem for the issue of "WotC themselves writing systems that can parse card text".
I think that level of ambiguity would be fairly easy to tighten up using the CLIPS system that was previously discussed. It isn't bug-proof and has needed manual tune-ups before but it's much more "hardened" than what we think of as AI now with LLM-powered tools.
Jacob Geller did a really interesting video essay [1] about the parallels that can be drawn between modern school architecture and maps from shooter games - on top of whatever other context or functionality they provide, they are fundamentally spaces that are designed around the question "what happens if violence occurs here?"
MTG Arena, the new digital client for the Magic the Gathering trading-card game, uses CLIPS to implement the actual game-rules based on the English text of the cards. Magic cards are written using a very standardized language (look at custom-card communities and discussions around "templating"), but the fact that they've had such success with this approach is incredibly impressive to me.
It also leads to some really funny bugs that arise from grammar ambiguities - things like a card that says "[...] then put them into your hand" and the game losing track of what "them" refers to and putting _all_ the cards into your hand.
Holy moly. I had my suspicions Magic would be a good candidate for something like CLIPS when it comes to software implementation. Do you have a source for that info? What an amazing bug.
The source for them using CLIPS is a conversation I had with Arena team lead Ian Adams in a Magic-community Discord.
The source for the bug is a video WotC did that I can't find right now that featured the Arena team talking about developing Kaldheim - the bug came from the card Alrund, God of the Cosmos.
> So first, a quick summary of how the rules engine works. When a game of Magic is in progress on MTG Arena, the program that is tracking the state of the game and enforcing all the rules-correct card interactions is called the Game Rules Engine (GRE). It's one of the two main programs that we work on. It's written in a combination of C++ and a language called CLIPS, which is a variant of LISP.
> They say it's the 'me' generation. It's not. The arrogance is taught, or it was cultivated. It's self-conscious. That's what it is. It's conscious of self. Social media - it's just the market's answer to a generation that demanded to perform, so the market said, here - perform. Perform everything to each other, all the time, for no reason. It's prison - it's horrific. It's performer and audience melded together. What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member. I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it.
I've used 8020 to custom-fab my Perfect Monitor Stand: it holds either three widescreen or two ultra-wide displays, has two attachment points to the desk, and has the minimum possible depth to keep the monitors as far as possible towards the back of the desk. It wasn't cheap, but it's solved basically all of my monitor layout issues.
I'm always amused at how little cross-promotion Marshall does - he has decently large followings in two completely different contexts and most of them are completely unaware of each other.
Especially since this YouTube channel might be bringing him more money than anything else now. I only knew about this since LSV brought it up during an LR episode on Marshall's background
What I only realized today is that his watch restoration channel has more subscribers than the official Magic: The Gathering YouTube channel now. That's insane.
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