(A)I, Robot

What’s good, Spirit Squad!

Today we’re going to address a question asked by one of Magic: the Gathering’s most prolific players, Sam Black. Sam is fairly well-known in the pro player circuit for being a fan of in-depth analysis, so this question makes a lot of sense coming from them:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has a bit of a mixed reputation. Because of the sheer number of things you can do with AI, a lot of folks who have experience with it know that it can either replace human work (boo) or make life easier for us by eliminating the need to compute things ourselves (yay).

We know that. What’s this got to do with Magic?

For better or for worse, AI has been used in some context by Magic: the Gathering players, and is here to stay. As fun as it can be to make fun of AI artwork though, that’s nowhere near the only application of AI as it pertains to the world of Magic. Here’s a few of the different ways we’ve been able to make use of AI:

• Artwork, of course. This is easily my least favorite use of AI in any game, let alone one where the artwork is as prolific and important as it is in Magic. We even had a suspected use of AI artwork in the box art for Magic: the Gathering Foundations, with a picture of Tinybones, Bauble Burglar.
• Custom cards have been created by players for decades. As a community, we’ve been making use of websites to create fan-made cards and sharing them on community forums like Reddit and Facebook. Fellow Mana Base content creator Nikachu even rates custom cards on his YouTube channel!
• Deck building has been attempted on platforms like Chat GPT, where players can ask the program to execute a prompt like “build me a Spirits deck for Pioneer” or “build me a deck that can win any tournament lol”. AI isn’t exactly great at this, but this’ll probably change after a few years of innovation and people just loading raw data into AI servers.
• We’ve had trading bots on Magic: the Gathering Online for decades now. These are much more scripted robots than true AI, but they’ve made the process of obtaining cards *much* easier for players than it would be without them. I’d go so far as to say Magic: the Gathering Online wouldn’t look anything like it does today without trade bots.
• Overlays like Untapped.gg help players directly during their games by showing information like the cards remaining in your deck and the cards your opponent has played in a game so far. Other games like Hearthstone have had these features for years. The AI part comes in when you’re drafting a deck. Normally cards are rated on a scale of 1-5 to show what the most powerful options are, but this is a very no-context scale and doesn’t consider what you’ve already drafted or what you may have noticed the players around you picking. The adaptive technology that AI can help enable actually looks at the existing pool of cards and puts your “best picks” in context with everything around you, helping create a truly good deck instead of a “collection of good cards” that may or may not have any cohesion or synergy with each other.

(I asked Chat GPT to make a Spirits deck for Pioneer, and it shows me a Bant list with Collected Company. This list isn’t flat-out terrible, but I would also never bring this deck to a tournament.)

Sounds like AI is already kinda everywhere.

To some extent, it is. But this doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be expanded on, or that it can’t be truly useful to the gaming community as a whole. If I were inclined to learn programming, here’re a few additional ways I’d make use of AI in my Magic: the Gathering experience:

• When building decks, I’d have an AI to help analyze the metagame of whichever format you’re building the deck for as you’re building it. For example, if you’re playing an Azorius Control deck in Standard (prior to the most recent bans), then you know you want some number of sweeper cards to get rid of opposing permanents. This is true of just about every Azorius Control deck, no matter the format or time period. What AI can do for you is determine which of these effects you want to use. Day of Judgment costs 4 mana and destroys creatures, but doesn’t deal well with either the “Deathrattle” of Heartfire Hero or permanently solve token-generating cards like Cori-Steel Cutter/Urabrask’s Forge. An AI could suggest you play cards like Temporary Lockdown or Final Fantasy’s Ultima, both of which solve the exact problems Standard presents better than Day of Judgment.
• Tools like the Untapped overlay mentioned before let you see what cards are no longer in your deck and the probability of drawing a certain card each turn, but this can absolutely be expanded on. An AI could, for example, take a look at the cards in your hand and the mana you have available, and make relevant gameplay suggestions based on your scenario. For example, if you have both a Go For the Throat and an Abrade in hand, an AI could tell you to kill an opposing Screaming Nemesis with the Go For the Throat. If you’re old enough to remember Clippy from old versions of Microsoft Office, I’m imagining that guy but with a blurb about how Go For the Throat doesn’t trigger the Nemesis’s ability and that you should save the Abrade for something like an Urabrask’s Forge.
• My favorite idea that includes AI is… let’s call it “Looking for Game” (I don’t have kids, so don’t dwell too much on my nonexistent naming skills lol). Let’s say you’re new to an area and there’s like 6 game stores within half-an-hour’s drive of where you’re moving to. Great, right? But how do you pick which one to go to? An app like this could collect information from willing gamers in various places to curate an answer. It could parse social media accounts to help pair you with people who you’re likely to get along with, it could collect some information from places like Steam or Magic: the Gathering Arena to pair you with people who like the same types of games, or even go so far as to pair you with folks who enjoy the same formats within Magic. If you, a Commander player, play Brawl 90% of the time you’re on Arena, the app wouldn’t suggest shop full of players like me who plays Commander/Brawl less than once a year.

In any event, I don’t think AI going away as far as the world at large is concerned, and it would be a mistake for the gaming community to not at least look into the ways it can be used to better our experience.

I’m hoping that someone a lot smarter than myself can come up with a few ways to make this happen in a positive (read: NOT THE ART) way or two, and until then I’ll see y’all on the next one!