Comment by portly
8 days ago
With the direction MtG is currently heading, I kind of want to break out and just play some in-Universe sets that are community made on an FOSS client. How nice would it be to just play the game in its original spirit.
8 days ago
With the direction MtG is currently heading, I kind of want to break out and just play some in-Universe sets that are community made on an FOSS client. How nice would it be to just play the game in its original spirit.
You might be interested in Premodern: https://premodernmagic.com/. You can play it on regular old MTGO.
FOSS Magic clients are in a legal gray area at best. My mental model is that Wizards de facto tolerate clients like XMage and Forge because their UX is awful, but if you made something that's actually as user-friendly as MTGO/Arena, they'd sue you and you would lose.
GCCG has been around for a while and the clients at times had to download card images and metadata from the public Wizards site
My understanding of the argument for "why these clients are legal" is basically that they're just implementing the rules engine, rules aren't copyrightable, card text is rules, and they aren't directly distributing the unambiguously-copyrightable stuff like the art or the trademarks like the mana symbols. It's possible that would win in court, but so far my understanding is that everybody who's actually been faced with the decision of "WoTC sent me a cease-and-desist, should I fight it based on that legal theory or just comply?" has spoken to lawyers and decided to comply. WoTC has just gotten less aggressive with their cease-and-desists over the past decade or so.
3 replies →
Sounds like you want Cockatrice: https://cockatrice.github.io/
The rules aren't embedded into the client; it's "just" a virtual tabletop where you enforce the rules the same way you would playing with a friend in person. Cards have to be imported but it's fairly automatic (basically just clicking a few buttons after startup), so you could either only import the sets you want or just not use the ones you don't want (which is also how it tends to work when playing informally in person; it's not like you usually have a judge to enforce that you or your friends are playing by whatever rules you agree to).
I still play 4th edition against some friends. We have had the decks well over a couple of decades after we bought them! That and Catan.
Best to do this stuff in person I find.