Back in the summer of 2010, I began to work on an open source Magic the Gathering simulator project called CardForge. I am a Magic addict, I’ve been playing it since middle school back in 2002. My first set that I bought was Judgement. Anyways, I thought why not develop something I have a passion in? So I looked up the project, which was hosted on Google Code at the time, joined the forums, and became an active contributer, with the committer name xitongzou.

CardForge is entirely Java-based and uses Maven for building and dependency management. The simulator currently cannot simulate multiplayer nor 100% optimal AI actions due to the interactions of MTG’s 10000+ cards, but it has a deck editor and a decent single player practice mode.

I implemented about 60 of my favorite cards, including Bloodfire Colossus and Molten Hydra.

Since the project is open source, I can divulge some of the implementation of the cards. The Card.java file is very big, and contains all the different abilities of each creature.

-Tong Zou