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.
It’s always fun to see end nuts and bolts to how these complex interactions work. I had never given an extra thought to Inventive Iteration but it took all this work just to get it working right
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%.
