Other Programs
When I started working on Wagic a year ago, I thought there was absolutely no program that did what I wanted to do : a MTG game with rules enforcement.
After digging a little bit, I discovered that there are actually quite a lot of attempts at doing that.
MTG Forge Has quite a lot of cards (around 700 I think), is an open source Java application. Its author is working hard, so the application has in dynamism what it lacks in professional-looking-ism. When I tried it several months ago, I didn’t enjoy it because I thought the AI was crappy. I think differently now that I have to code my own :p . The creator’s blog is very interesting, updated regularly, and the main reason I started my own blog for this project !
Deckbot is not open source, but has quite a lot of cards from recent editions. It is text based, but uses a form of Minimax algorithm for the AI. Haven’t tried it yet but I read the AI is pretty damn good !
Incantus is the new hot Magic project these days. All is written in Python, and the GUI is brilliant, even better than the official “MTG Online” sold by Wizards of the Coast. I have difficulties to understand the “open source or not” status of this game… Adding cards seems to be easy as pie, it manages lots of complex rules, but it doesn’t have any AI (network play).
There are lots of other games, the site slightlymagic.net tries to give a complete list of them.
So why would we need yet another Magic game ? Well, none of these could run on the PSP, due to the size of the screen and the memory they use. So a new one is definitely needed for portable devices owners !
Note: There is also a PSP port of Magic WorkStation, but I found the installation process to be complex, especially since the game didn’t do much at that time (2 players hotseat, no rule enforcement…). MWS without network support is not that interesting…so I didn’t try that hard to install it.