
Magic: The Gathering Is Turing Complete (v5) - icelancer
http://www.toothycat.net/~hologram/Turing/HowItWorks.html
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dzenos
I'm not a Magic player personally, but I learnt about it through the project I
did on this game. Learnt how complex it is and really good for doing different
analysis. We created a Deck Builder Toolkit, which should help inexperienced
players to build their card deck in order to improve card synergies and
overall success ratio. Fortunately my team mate was experienced player while
we were building this. If anyone interested, you can check project info here:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/hojm1rfqgkz5dn4/Poster.pdf?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/hojm1rfqgkz5dn4/Poster.pdf?dl=0)
And Git repo here: [https://github.com/dzeno/deck-builder-
toolkit](https://github.com/dzeno/deck-builder-toolkit)

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36erhefg
The procedure mentions that you need 43 Rotlung Reanimators. A magic deck can
only have at most 4 copies of the same card. :-) How are the copies created?
Shouldn't be too hard to create infinite copies of a card, but I didn't see
this mentioned anywhere.

~~~
DiabloD3
Its funny how the rules were at most 4 copies, yet I had a red/white deck that
had different versions of essentially the same spell (1 red + n colorless
damage to target player or creature), and used it frequently against people
who didn't understand how to properly defend against it. Had something like 12
cards in that deck that just did that.

~~~
steveklabnik
Originally, the 4 copy maximum didn't exist. However, there were two early
decks that broke the game:

    
    
      20x Black Lotus 
      20x Channel 
      20x Fireball 
    

Gatherer links:
[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver...](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=382866)
[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver...](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=382882)
[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver...](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=393831)

As long as you get 2x Lotus, 1x other two in your opening 7 cards, first turn
kill. Play two lotus, sacrifice one for green, one for red. Play channel with
green. Give up 19 life. Do 22 damage with Fireball.

Black Lotus is worth five figures these days, so building that deck would be
very expensive. Replacing them with Mountains and Forests gives you a deck for
less than ten dollars that can routinely kill on the fourthish turn every
time, though.

The second one is even sillier: (see edits and citations below, I slightly
mis-remembered this one, but the concept is the same)

    
    
      60x Shahrazad
    

[http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver...](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=980)

This was Richard Garfield's favorite card. But due to the way the rules work,
a subgame within a subgame within a subgame within.... means that you win, due
to the way that rounding works.

~~~
herbig
Even better is:

    
    
      31 Ancestral Recall
      25 Black Lotus
      3 Timetwister
      1 Braingeyser
    

You don't need 2x of any one thing to get started, you only need 1 Lotus and 1
Timetwister or Ancestral Recall.

If anything gets countered, you are very, very likely to be able to keep going
and win the same turn.

Timetwister lets you recycle, so you can generate infinite mana.

Braingeyser kills the opponent, and doubles as card draw itself, in the
unlikely event that you stall out.

You also don't lose to a turn 1 Lightning Bolt, like you do with Channel.

A mulligan to two still has a fairly high likelihood of winning on the first
turn.

~~~
steveklabnik
Ah nice!

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debacle
I'm generally all for esoteric programming stuff, but trying to understand
this really hurt my head.

Kudos to these guys to figuring this out.

~~~
robhu
Yes. AlexTFish (HN name) / Hologram (elsewhere) is brilliant.

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archagon
Time for somebody to play Magic inside Magic!

