FOSS MTG inspired digital card game.

I love card games, but for digital card games the business model is beyond predatory. If you need a specific card your option is to basically buy a pack. Let’s say this is about 3$ give or take. But if it’s a specific rare card, you can open a dozen of so packs and still not get the specific card you want.

This can go on indefinitely, and apologists will claim you can just work around this, by building a different deck. But the business model clearly wants you to drop 50 to 100$ just to get a single card.

All for this to repeat every 3 months when they introduce new mechanics to nerf the old cards or just rotate out the dream deck you spent 100$+ to build.

I’m under no impression I’ll directly compete, but it’s a fun FOSS game you can spin up with friends. Or even since it’s all MIT, you can fork and sell.

It also gives me an excuse to use Python, looks like Django on the backend and Godot for the game client. Although the actual logic runs in Django so you can always roll a different game client.

Eventually I’d like different devs to roll their own game clients in whatever framework they want.

Want to play from the CLI, sure

I started building a MtG competitor inspired by Altered and Netrunner. As weird as it sounds, I started with some bash scripts to see how the meta would play out to make sure the card values/strategies were balanced.

I would love to compare game development notes if you're interested in discussing this sometime.

Many years ago Decipher (who made the Star Trek and Star Wars TCGs) rolled out a web platform for playing their games. It was the business model but with none of the advantages of the physical property. You would spend money on their platform to buy their digital cards, to play only there, and when you left the cards just disappeared into the void.

Have you heard about Mindbug[0]? It's a recent MTG-inspired (co-created by one of the authors of MTG) card game. Plays quick and is full of interesting and consequential decisions.

[0]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/345584/mindbug-first-con...

I'm sold. How do I play?