Arthur Baboin

Why compile Magic: The Gathering?

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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Magic: The Gathering has tens of thousands of unique cards, each carrying rules text written in a semi-formal natural language (“Oracle text”). A first taste of the data we are working with:

Parsing Oracle text into a typed AST

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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The front end turns raw Oracle text into a typed abstract syntax tree:

flowchart LR A[Oracle text] --> B[Lexer] B --> C[Tokens] C --> D[Parser] D --> E[Typed AST]

Each stage gets its own treatment: how the lexer handles reminder text and mana symbols, and how the grammar copes with the long tail of one-off templating while still producing a well-typed tree.

A symbolic, LLM-facing DSL

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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The typed AST round-trips to a compact symbolic DSL — the surface an LLM generates against, then back to an AST that is guaranteed to parse:

Modeling effect cost

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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Once a card is a typed tree, we can score it. Model a card’s cost as the sum of its effects’ costs, each weighted by how often it triggers: