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Comment by TZubiri | Hacker News Reader

Looking forward to this metric being Goodhart lawed.

Like how the strawberry example was overtrained for, or how the pelican on a bike started being used in official release posts.

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Magic is complicated. I looked at doing something like this but the open-ended nature where one specific card will completely change the rules or require a series of followup events or modifications to the rules engine at hand is just tremendous.

or, that certain cards when play together make an infinite loop, and so cannot be played/insta-die

You misspelled insta-win. Infinite turn combos are the best.

only if there's a player choice in the loop. If there's a mandatory infinite loop the game ends in a draw.

There is also this Matt Parker video about MTG, in which he explores a specific three-card combination that produces an ungodly amount of creature tokens.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3dE-NJ1UDQ

I was wondering how complicated it could really be, and it turns out that some people showed in 2019 that it's Turing-complete -- meaning that any conceivable computation can be simulated by a MTG game, indeed a game in which every move by every player is forced: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09828

IOW, it's as complicated as possible.

Someone made a video based on the paper, if you want to see the cards being used and a little more explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdmODVYPDLA

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