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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

While I agree in the general, it's pretty clear that magic the gathering draws considerable inspiration from human literature and culture, and was exceptionally well planned and very carefully evolved over decades so if even if these arrangements aren't intentional, they certainly aren't accidental.

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Emphasis on was, they are slowly killing legacy. Elks for life is the new paradigm.

As someone who used to play magic, can you explain what "Elks for life" means?

I had not heard that phrase, but I imagine it refers to the recently printed Oko, Thief of Crowns. A card that dominated every format until it was banned in all but Legacy, Vintage, and EDH. It is (almost) universally agreed to be the most busted Plainswalker in Magic. And it is unique in that when you first read the card you think ‘meh, no big deal’... then you play against it and lose every time.

https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...

Yeah my stacked turbo depths deck got absolutely roasted. I'm salty.

> was exceptionally well planned and very carefully evolved over decades

Have you seen the number of banned cards?

Or the fact that it's accidentally Turing complete?

This is a card game, nothing more nothing less.

I was more referring to the cultural content (names, flavor text, art) than the game mechanics. Besides which, Turing completeness, accidental or not, is a silly metric that doesn't say anything about a game.

>Turing completeness, accidental or not, is a silly metric that doesn't say anything about a game.

You can literally crash the game so you never know if you've won or lost.

If you're referring to the Turing completeness, the algorithm and cards that were found require both players to be acting in concert to achieve the Turing machine; either player could stop at any time. I don't see the fact that players can choose to act strangely in a game to be a reflection of the game itself.

If you're talking about things like combining effects together that happen to cause an unbreakable infinite loop, then I'd argue that you're wrong; there's a rule that defines unbreakable infinite loops as a tie, so you know whether you won or lost (i.e. you did neither; it's not an xor, although it is a nand).

Your first statement is no longer true with the newest approach: it only requires a tournament-legal deck and the player piloting it to set up (and it could do so turn 1, though it's very unlikely to do so), and once set up it continues with only mandatory actions (neither player has any choices to make in the game, though either player could in principle concede).

But such things are not something which comes up in general play in practice: to set up such a machine you have to ignore several opportunities to just win the game. I've yet to even see an infinite loop which causes a tie.

> https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/20325/will-in...

See https://mtg.gamepedia.com/Ending_the_game:

> 104.4b If a game that’s not using the limited range of influence option (including a two-player game) somehow enters a “loop” of mandatory actions, repeating a sequence of events with no way to stop, the game is a draw. Loops that contain an optional action don’t result in a draw.

One (very contrived) example is the "three Oblivion Ring[0]" loop. Start with no non-land permanents on the battlefield, then cast an Oblivion Ring. There are no valid targets for the "ETB" (enters the battlefield) trigger, so nothing happens. Then cast a second Oblivion Ring; the only valid target is the first Oblivion Ring, so it's exiled until the second one leaves the battlefield. Finally, cast a third Oblivion Ring; the only valid target is the first Oblivion Ring, which is then exiled, causing the first one to come back. The only valid target for the first one is the third one, so that one is exiled and the second one comes back. The only valid target for the second one is the first one, so that one is exiled and the third comes back. This goes on infinitely, assuming no player has any cards that can respond to the ETB triggers by either countering it, removing the Oblivion Ring currently on the battlefield in some way, or putting another valid target for an Oblivion Ring on the battlefield. This isn't likely to ever happen in a game, but with the current rules, it's technically possible.

[0]: https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multive...

That rule is exactly where the the construction used becomes interesting: it's built in such a way so that if the turing machine halts, the player who set it up wins the game. If it doesn't, by the rule above, it's a draw. So it's fundamentally impossible to tell the result of an arbitrary setup (and in practice you could set it up such that it halts iff some unknown conjecture is true).

Regarding the oblivion ring loop, there's an example of it being used on MTGO, which doesn't end well (basically seems to crash the server and/or client): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGXG5rNe_tI

And here's the paper on the latest turing machine construction in mtg: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09828

> Regarding the oblivion ring loop, there's an example of it being used on MTGO, which doesn't end well (basically seems to crash the server and/or client): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGXG5rNe_tI

Oh wow, I should have realized that somebody would try it out online just to see what happens! I'm not surprised it ends up with some sort of clash; given that it's Turing complete, the game engine obviously can't detect whether a current state will end up halting or not...

> And here's the paper on the latest turing machine construction in mtg: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09828

Awesome, thanks! I'll definitely check that out

It's surprising to me that you assert that a system which is simultaneously complex-enough to support Turing-complete calculation, and simple enough to be a "pick-up-and-play card game", is not carefully evolved.

Fair shout on the number of banned cards, though - R&D and playtesting could definitely do better, there!

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