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Comment by xarope | Hacker News Reader

As a former MtG player I think the difficulty lies not in creating cards, but in ensuring there's a level of balance between existing cards and new sets.

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The AI can be trained on all current MtG cards to be able to generate cards with comparable power levels intuitively. Also to generate art and lore that fits the power distribution.... Maybe it can create synergies between generated sets and combos or counters to generate more diverse and fair fights....

I'm not sure Wizards of the coast should be excited or terrified with the possibilities

Wizards of the coast owns the patent on collectable cards, so they should be excited, since there's no way to break into the market without them suing you. They can fire all of their artists and save on costs, but still produce good working cards with AI.

That patent expired several years ago.

Apparently it was granted it 1997 so should have expired in 2017:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectible_card_game#Wizards_...

That is where AI-based play automation to test the cards should come in place.

AI players, however strong, sometimes leave glaring (to humans, at least when told) loopholes exploitable by humans.

See for instance amateur Go player armed with loophole consistently beat top Go playing software which otherwise easily crushes world champions.[1]

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/175e5314-a7f7-4741-a786-273219f43...

This sort of stuff has been a thing for balancing AAA games for a very long time (it was in production over a decade ago), and is kept surprisingly secret by those doing it.

One of the shocks of the games industry is in many respects it doesn’t learn from the wider world but in others it is quietly so far ahead that you can throw certain ML papers at former game devs to be met by confused faces as to why what is claimed is considered surprising.

That sounds interesting, can you give some examples? Is this limited to classical RL Q-learning type stuff for turn based games, or full AlphaStar-level agents for RTS games?

would love to have AI be able to play MtG sensibly, key word being sensibly!

Some would say that Microprose's "Magic: The Gathering 1997" aka "Shandalar" or "Manalink", from Sid Meyer, could already play decently well.

God that game was good.

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