Comment by reverendsteveii
2 months ago
> I don’t see the ethical problem with counterfeiting a card for personal use.
Neither does most of the community. We call it proxying. Of course it's not allowed in sanctioned play because the purpose of sanctioned play is to sell cards, but I've never been around a table in someone's basement who cared that the sol ring I just played is actually a mountain with "sol ring" scribbled on it in sharpie as long as there was no way of telling it from the other cards in the deck, it would be legal for a real sol ring to be in that deck and I played it according to the rules governing sol ring. There are different formats to magic and the one with the most extensive, and therefore expensive, list of permissible cards has competitive decks that run into the tens of thousands of dollars invested (https://www.mtggoldfish.com/metagame/vintage#paper). If you had to buy all of that every time you felt like playtesting a new deck people simply wouldn't do it.
I never played anywhere that allowed fakes but most players were ok with you taking a otherwise worthless card (hello Lapras my old friend) and marking the face to count as something else in Pokemon or otherwise.
Actual fakes were problematic as you can tell the back of the card apart generally.
Card sleeves are now generally required, at least in Magic the Gathering, because of double sided cards.
I have a (casual, goofy) deck with some proxies and I earnestly cannot tell the difference when they're sleeved.
What we used to do when I was a kid (before online stores were common to use, and had ~4 hours to the closest store selling magic cards so only got a new pack once a fortnight) was to use plastic sleeves for the whole deck. Then you can't really ser from the back if it's a printout or a real card.
Yeah I can't really imagine not using sleeves, any cards left unsleeved got worn out incredibly quickly.
you're going to sleeve it anyways, unsleeved card backs are too easy to mark. I've never played against or with an unsleeved deck in a magic tournament, even a draft.
I'm actually working on an open source digital card game with this in mind.
My favorite digital card games feel half way like scams in that if you really need a rare card for a deck, you can easily spend 50 or 60$ on packs and come up short. It's impossible to just pay 10$ and get the single card I need.
I don't think I'll be able to match the production values of MTG( the cards don't even have art, which is a both a stylistic choice and my own limitations), but I want something self hostable anyone can play.
You may be interested in the excellent rules engine and frontend to MtG. All FOSS and with real cards and art. I can't imagine the "official" games ever being as good.
https://github.com/Card-Forge/forge
this is significant news for me. I don't have the money for cardboard crack or its digital equivalent, and I used to play a lot with apprentice but apprentice didn't actually have a rules engine it just logged every state change and who initiated it and then counted on the players to play correctly. A functioning rules engine and real card art for free might be enough to get me back into the hobby, or at least back to reading articles and goldfishing myself
edit: oh my god it's got an adventure/overworld mode like the old microprose mtg game from back in the 90s. My heart doth soar, thank you so much for pointing this out!
Outstanding!
I played with the Android build for a bit. Still not ideal since it's ultimately uses someone else's IP, but it's very cool.
I hope to get my own prototype up by this summer. The logic is all server side ( to prevent cheating), so you could even roll your own client.
I'm getting ahead of myself, but I imagine a bunch of related projects. Want to play from a Rust cli app, go ahead!
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I know that MtG scene in my city plays basically 100% on nicely done proxies ;)
Nobody has an issue with it. The courtesy is that it'd be nice for you to work towards a real deck if you play with it much, but it's not a hard rule or anything.