Why compile Magic: The Gathering?

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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:

card = {
    "name": "Lightning Bolt",
    "oracle_text": "Lightning Bolt deals 3 damage to any target.",
}

To generate new cards with a language model and have them actually parse and resolve, free-form text isn’t enough — you need a grammar and a typed representation to constrain the output. That is what mtg-compiler builds: a typed AST, a symbolic DSL, and a cost model. Why each piece is needed is the subject of this series.