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"Magic: The Gathering" is officially the world's most complex game
Magic: The Gathering is a card game in which wizards cast spells, summon creatures, and exploit magic objects to defeat their opponents. In the game, two or more players each assemble a deck of 60 cards with varying powers. They choose these decks from a pool of some 20,000 cards created as the game evolved. Though similar to role-playing fantasy games such as Dungeons and Dragons, it has significantly more cards and more complex rules than other card games.
And that raises an interesting question: among real-world games (those that people actually play, as opposed to the hypothetical ones game theorists usually consider), where does Magic fall in complexity?
Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Alex Churchill, an independent researcher and board game designer in Cambridge, UK; Stella Biderman at the Georgia Institute of Technology; and Austin Herrick at the University of Pennsylvania.
His team has measured the computational complexity of the game for the first time by encoding it in a way that can be played by a computer or Turing machine. "This construction establishes that Magic: The Gathering is the most computationally complex real-world game known in the literature," they say.
Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete (arXiv:1904.09828)
Related: How Magic the Gathering Began, and Where it Goes Next
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 09 2019, @07:05PM (13 children)
MtG is just crazy expensive. Expect to pay well over $1000 to amass a reasonably competitive collection of cards. And then, expect to pay hundreds more every few months as the game makers churn the collection, removing older cards from play and adding new ones. They certainly were pioneers of "pay to win" gaming, long before online computer games appeared in that space. MtG does have its fun aspects and I played it for quite a few years before I got tired of the crap.
One of the weirdest parts is the relationship of players to piracy. I regularly used proxy cards, as they were called. Fire up the scanner and the ink jet printer, make a few copies of rare and powerful cards to tuck into the protective plastic sleeves, with a cheap common card to provide the back, and have fun. Or just write the text of the rare card on a slip of paper. But serious MtG players totally freak out over that. Tense up like you're trying to commit a heinous crime, even if it's just a casual game. I never tried using proxies at any official tournament, but I can imagine that definitely being against the rules. They seem to feel that allowing proxies devalues their collection. I suppose it does. What they don't seem to care about is that such techniques would also work for them, let them use rare and valuable cards without paying exorbitant prices. It's like they're rich, and want the "pay to win" aspect.
In any case, whenever seriously large amounts of money are dragged in to any game, it can warp it out of all recognition. The game becomes very secondary to money.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Taibhsear on Thursday May 09 2019, @07:38PM
To be fair, no one is forcing you to play tournaments for money. Most casual groups don't care about proxies unless it's your entire deck or something you'd literally never have as a new player (Black Lotus, etc.) Plus you never play with the really expensive cards, even in sleeves. You stick those bad boys in a hard case, stick em on a shelf, and print proxies of them to play with. If you want to play on the cheap with real cards look into Pauper format. There's tons of super powerful cards that are common ($0.10-0.50 each).
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday May 09 2019, @08:54PM (5 children)
The reactions to proxies are partly because each player that is serious about the game considers his cards to be an investment. I've known players that offloaded their vintage deck (the most expensive format to play competitively) to help make a down payment on a house. Every "serious" player that invests a lot of time and money into the game wants to believe someday he could walk away if so inclined by just selling his cards to recoup some of those costs.
I own no high valued old cards for partly this reason. The Chinese fakes have gotten very, very good. I expect someday it won't be possible to distinguish them at all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @09:16PM (1 child)
Ha ha sounds like this but for gown-ups
https://games.slashdot.org/story/19/05/08/1329236/fortnite-is-free-but-kids-are-getting-bullied-into-spending-money [slashdot.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 09 2019, @09:24PM
Now that's a business model. 👌
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mth on Thursday May 09 2019, @10:25PM
Card value depends on how popular a game is. MtG has remained popular for many years, but that's not a guarantee for all games. The people who said they were investing in cards in Valve's Artefact have lost money on those.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @10:52PM
I was at a friends house for a party. The complete and utter effing wanker uni buddy of my mate saw that there were magic the gathering cards in a cupboard. I didn't know how to play. So, this effing wanker, the kind of person who spends their uni years drinking and crippling other people's chances at finishing uni, pulls a box out of the cupboard and opens it on the floor.
The owner of the cards walked in as the effing wanker was shuffling the cards. He was upset. He explained that if we wanted to play he had a couple of boxes of common cards. That the box Mr wanker had opened was a brand new still in original packaging box set he was keeping.
I knew at the time this was a fluckup. The guy did not hold this against me. So far as I know.
Now I wonder how much that pristine box of magic cards is worth.
(Score: 1, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Friday May 10 2019, @12:49AM
Complicated, and time consuming way of letting folks know, you are rich. Or, at one time used to be rich -- before you bought the very special Magic Cards.
It's not for me. Not for me because, I have an app and it's so much better. The Fine Art App called, I Am Rich. Very special, very expensive app, crafted in Germany. And I bought it in the early days of iPhone. Something that only 7 other people were allowed to buy. Because Apple saw that one would be a total Game changer and they took it off the market. Turning it into even more of a collector's item -- a limited edition. Only 8 copies were made. And 2 of those, the buyers returned. Something that, I'm sure, they're feeling very foolish about now. Because it's like they were in one of the most exclusive "clubs" in the history of the World. And canceled their membership.
I Am Rich is very easy to use. I touch the little square on my Home Screen. And out comes the beautiful jewel. The Red Ruby that looks so magnificent on my iPhone XS. I show that one off, very proudly, when I want someone to know that I'm rich. And right away, they know. They know and I can do that without a card table. Without a deck of cards. Without explaining a bunch of rules. It gets the message across so quickly and we can get back to what we were meeting about. Whether it's a nice dinner (KFC), a "friendly" game of Golf, a date with one of the World's top Supermodels, or a strong & smart Nuclear Deal. Terrific!!!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 09 2019, @09:13PM (2 children)
I know there are too many dimensions to make a simple "card value" - but... that would be my approach to how to play a "fair" card game: both players get to have up to X points worth of cards in their deck.
Having to buy random packs until you get lucky is just as crappy as baseball cards ever were, moreso: no gum.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Thursday May 09 2019, @10:33PM
Most people go to the MtG 2ndary markets and buy what they want. In most cases that'll be cheaper.
You might as well make your points "dollars". And then both players get to spend X dollars :)
Although lots of people looking for more fair fights do sealed deck / draft. And in non-tournament environments there's a zillion ways to rebalance..
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday May 10 2019, @04:14PM
There is a format that does exactly that - Canadian Highlander. [gamepedia.com] But it's not very popular (overshadowed by Commander)...I think I've run into one guy in person who actually had a deck put together for it.
You may be able to scare up some people online if you wanted to play a game. But you'd probably have to use one of the third-party clients like XMage because I doubt MTGO has built-in support for the point system.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @02:25AM
People can't resist artificial scarcity. This is basically Beanie Babies for nerds, and it is built on the same economic house of (literal) cards. Pick the right time to jump off and sell, and you'll do just fine, but just don't be the person that ends up holding the bag.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday May 10 2019, @04:10PM
With the way WOTC manages things, they tend to reprint $40+ cards that are in high demand very sparingly, so the price never comes down much (or if it does, it's only slightly, for at most a year). Combined with Chinese fakes steadily getting better, I would half like to see us reach the point where the counterfeits can pass as real just to drive the ridiculous price points down.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday May 12 2019, @01:37AM
Thus it's alternative name, "Magic: The Fleecing".