How does MTG Arena manage all the rules and complexities of Magic? Alex Werner uses the card Living Breakthrough to explain how the systems work.

This week, Senior Software Development Engineer Alex Werner digs into MTG Arena’s Game Rules Engine, how it manages Magic rules, and what it takes to bring even a card—in this case, Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty’s Living Breakthrough—from tabletop to the digital world.

  • EvuEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    As a programmer, this was really interesting to read (while still being fairly accessible to non-technical folks, I think).

    I was especially interested in this line, which I had suspected but hadn’t been certain of: the Game Rules Parser “allows 80% or so of newly written Magic cards to just work in MTG Arena automatically,” but the programmers have to do some finagling for the other 20%.