With some contrieved meaning of the cards, which has nothing to do with the "meaning of the card" in Magic the game, like "State B, Colour 16: Stay in state B, colour this space 18, move one step right." it recreates a complicated and arcane turing machine.
'Reanimator 17B actually says "Whenever a Rat (R0) dies, make a Sliver (S1M).'
The linked page is not using the rules of Magic the gathering or the texts on the cards, but uses it's own rules what cards mean.
The game rules of magic the gathering are not turing complete, because the linked post is not talking about Magic the Gathering game.
What's interesting is actual MTG gameplay uses a HUGE amount of shortcuts on every play, because saying every single thing you and the opponent have to do during each step and phase would be incredibly time consuming.
If you play Commander or multiplayer, then its usually a heck of a lot less formal. Ive also played some local tournament games where the players were good-natured and we all just had fun.
Then I've played some tournaments locally and at Gencon that were methodical and clockwork style "Please indicate what you did, step by ste-COUNTER". Or you get the priority police up and running, where you have to explicitly pass priority. I hate those games with a passion - it just drains the fun out via rules-lawyering.
I've not played in a few years, primarily because the game was feeling much more like 'loot crates' that I've railed against prior. And with $3.50/pack, I didn't feel like I was getting enjoyment. You either buy buy buy, or get left in the dust and destroyed in games because you didnt buy buy buy.
What's the advantage over simply specifying the moment you wanted to react out of the last batch of actions (like a normal person)? If the opponent skips too many steps and gives up some critical information as a result -- his problem.
And that next game, they'll say "ditch that deck or you aren't playing".
These days, I play explicit decks that have a neat theme and good win conditions (I have 2 decks left). They dont use infinite combos (they win, but are unfun), and I play to have a good time. If I lose, it was because I had some good threats and a blast of a game.
Thanks, didn't know "colour this space 18" was a concept in MTG now, I haven't played for 2 decades I assume (stopped before Legends, no clue what came afterwards).
Transmission, storage with magnetic interactions of electrical actions, small size of components, speed of transmission -- aren't these properties that make for more practical Turing machines?
Parked cars are going to take ages to do anything useful with, no.
(IANAComputerScientist)
No one disputes that a modern computer implementing a Turing machine is going to calculate faster than manually manipulating MTG cards.
However, better here means 'more expressive'. Turing completeness is concerned with whether or not a computational system is 'universal' or not. In other words, whether that computational system can compute everything that another computational system could. If two systems can both be shown to simulate a Turing machine, then that means that those systems could compute the same exact set of things (given enough time).
So with regards to expressiveness (or the things a system could theoretically compute), since a modern computer can implement a Turing machine and a MTG game can implement a Turing machine, they are both the same, and thus neither is 'better'. In other words, the addition of electricity doesn't effect what a system could theoretically compute.
It is precisely this ability to map seemingly arbitrary and meaningless physical manifestations of turning machines to the abstract that provides the concept so much power. By being able to provably map the implementation to the concept you're able to get all the "benefits" of the concept without having to individually prove them in your implementation where it might be really difficult or just time consuming to prove everything individually.
This, coincidentally, is the same reason mathematics is so obsessed with isomorphisms, homeomorphisms, homomorphisms etc. They are all different ways of saying "this thing stays the same, even when it changes" which many times means that things proven in a place where it's easy to prove are maintained in places where it's very difficult or even impossible to prove (absent the isomorphism).