Magic cards used to have no ability restrictions. As long as you could fit the ability in a text box, it became a part of the game. Even the silliest of ideas became reality with un-set cards. Of course, rules and power issues were bound to occur, and some cards had to get an errata (I’m looking at you Time Vault).
These times are no more. With an increasing number of cards appearing on MTG’s premier digital experience, MTG Arena, developers need cards that work simply within all those zeroes and ones of computer code.
Some players may point out that Magic: the Gathering Online has nearly 100% of the cards in the game, but as MTGO players know, there’s a fair amount of busted code and cards sometimes don’t work the way they are supposed to. Hundreds of bugged cards crash or break the MTGO client. Simply kicking a card like Jace, Mirror Mage causes the game to restart.
Unlike MTGO, MTG Arena was designed and coded in Unity for a seamless gameplay experience with the kind of relatively error-free framework gamers have come to expect from competitors like Hearthstone.
In a video released today, MTG Arena developers went into detail on how the Modern Horizons 3 design team worked with game developers to refine, change, and potentially axe or avoid cards that wouldn’t work digitally.
Ultimately, this means that more people get to play with the cards, since they are on Arena. But it also means, paper card design is altered forever. Not only do cards have to go through the rules and mechanics of the game for feasibility, but also through programmers of digital code. Watch the MTG Arena & play design team explain below.
As explained in the video, some card designs “will never ever work in a hundred million years” and designers have to do something else.
This means some wild or new mechanics can’t happen in a set with a digital twin, such as Standard or MH3. Mike Turian, product architect at WOTC, says that 99% of the time, it isn’t a problem, and MTG Arena developers are able to figure out a way to seamlessly integrate card abilities into the digital game.
Thanks to their combined efforts, MH3 will be completely playable with the draft format on MTG Arena, a feat they were unable to accomplish with MH2.
Modern Horizons 3 will be released globally on MTG Arena on June 11.
READ MORE: Modern Horizons 3 Debut Video Showcases New Ripple Foils
