Maybe it's just @RoboRosewater who likes creatures. I only trimmed the most incomprehensible cards, and ended up with 111 creatures vs. 50 among everything else.
EDIT: OK, I'm coming around to the idea of having nonsense keywords and whatnot in there. @MaximumC, would you mind sharing your work in progress? I'll need to print these tonight or tomorrow if I'm to have them ready for the weekend.
Sure, that sounds awesome, thank you! If you don't have a good place to host it, I'm "sabrecat" at Gmail.
I go back and forth on the editing thing. I agree about the charm, but on the other hand, I'd like a playable game. I don't want cards that will bring the game to a screeching halt or which no one will draft because they don't actually do anything by present rules. But I guess that can be accomplished at the card selection level, leaving minor oddments in place on individual cards.
I'm taking another stab at a Robo-Cube for a local games convention coming up this weekend. I've copied everything rules-legal from @RoboRosewater into MSE and will probably start sifting this thread next. Once I've got a fun and varied set, I'll trim it down until I have some semblance of a mana curve.
Stuff that'll be on my mind as I pick things:
I'm only using cards in human-readable format. Time's too tight for me to parse raw dumps.
I'm not editing costs or effects from what the RNNs produced. Color pie? Balance? Bah.
I do correct minor grammar errors and trim superfluous text. Cards that are just word soup whose "intent" can't be guessed at, though, I skip.
One trend I'm noticing, though, is that there is a huge overabundance of creatures vs. other types of cards in the RoboRosewater set, and to a certain extent those have floated to the top here too. So! What are your favorite RNN-generated non-critters? Point me at them and I'll do my durndest to get them onto a game table!
Yeah, I got distracted from the project after I missed a self-imposed deadline for it, eheh. I think that putting together a cube of viable cards from this thread, @RoboRosewater, and miscellaneous card dumps is probably the best fit for the state of the art at the moment!
Though if you get set up to run the scripts yourself, there are several options for translating the raw output into human-readable formats, including a style that can be pasted into the forum here.
Mind's Eater 1
Artifact - Equipment (Common)
Equip 1
Living Weapon (When this Equipment enters the battlefield, put a 0/0 black Germ creature token onto the battlefield, then attach this to it.)
Equipped creature gets +3/+3 and has "At the beginning of your upkeep, sacrifice this creature unless you pay its mana cost."
#That's actually a really clever design. But the drawback isn't really one, because the Germ doesn't have a mana cost associated with it.
The drawback comes into play once you equip the artifact onto something other than the Germ it came with. You still get a 3/3 black critter for 1, though, which is a bit much!
1) Pass 49 zero inputs?
2) Whatever it needs those 50 for, tell it to skip all but the first?
Hack fixes like that will often address the issue in the short term, but make the code messy and prone to break in unexpected ways as soon as something changes to render the hack irrelevant. Better to address why it's requiring that 49x extra work than to paper over the behavior.
Unrelated, but I found a card that actually used Y in addition to X, but sadly it only explained what X would be. It's also using it in an illegal manner (a non-creature giving itself +x/+y). And also a card where it just lost track of what it was doing.
Snip the +X/+Y sentence and that's quite an interesting card! I love that the Quest card picked up "from a height" via, presumably, Chaos Orb.
Since some of the the cards are either missing information or their costs/power is so wildly unbalanced, I'm starting to consider at what point do I draw a line between "I need to edit these for the sake of the cube draft" and whether or not that ruins some of the charm?
That was one reason I've shifted over from "filling out a set skeleton" to "building a Greatest Hits cube". I didn't like how much hand editing was required to make the former work--especially given that the current methods available for "priming" gum up the RNN's thought process so much.
I will make small edits to a card that's nearly there, such as removing a spurious clause added to the end of an otherwise rules-legal sentence, defining an undefined token type, or replacing "Echo" with "Kicker" in a card that has an "if it was kicked" clause. But I haven't figured out where I fall on adjusting mana costs.
I'm finding that making a cube out of robocards is far more fun than filling out a set skeleton. There's no need for priming or filling "slots", so you're free to build in "greatest hits" fashion from whatever cards you want to work with. You still need to pay attention to things like balance across colors, mana curve, and ensuring equal access to removal, but it relieves a great deal of the trudge involved in searching for cards with very specific properties. Also, the cube mindset allows for continual tinkering as new cards--and new card-producing methodologies--come out!
I know I for one would love to play in a limited environment with fun stuff like this:
Pollenbright Wind (rare) GW
Instant
Each player returns all creature cards from his or her graveyard to the battlefield.
Patrol Fire (common) 1W
Instant
Put two 1/1 white human construct archer wizard all blue creature tokens with flying onto the battlefield.
Flashback 1W
A cube seems like a very good idea, actually. The network can churn out cool and interesting cards by the boatload, and designing for a cube would play to its strengths. So even if the draft doesn't end up happening, you can still put the ink and paper to use to produce something entertaining.
A few things about it are easier, even: at least with a traditional "singleton" style cube, I don't need to pay overmuch attention to rarity, and needn't print off any more cards than are going to see use.
(Replying to the same post twice, my bad--I got distracted by the shiny RNN cards and didn't respond to this bit when I could've!)
EDIT: Just for fun and because I haven't done it in awhile, I fired up the generator and seeded it with abilities from the upcoming set (I phrased everything as an ability word so I could feed the reminder text).
I take it this is with an existing brain, not something produced by the new methodology you're working on?
EDIT: OK, I'm coming around to the idea of having nonsense keywords and whatnot in there. @MaximumC, would you mind sharing your work in progress? I'll need to print these tonight or tomorrow if I'm to have them ready for the weekend.
I go back and forth on the editing thing. I agree about the charm, but on the other hand, I'd like a playable game. I don't want cards that will bring the game to a screeching halt or which no one will draft because they don't actually do anything by present rules. But I guess that can be accomplished at the card selection level, leaving minor oddments in place on individual cards.
I'm taking another stab at a Robo-Cube for a local games convention coming up this weekend. I've copied everything rules-legal from @RoboRosewater into MSE and will probably start sifting this thread next. Once I've got a fun and varied set, I'll trim it down until I have some semblance of a mana curve.
Stuff that'll be on my mind as I pick things:
- I'm only using cards in human-readable format. Time's too tight for me to parse raw dumps.
- I'm not editing costs or effects from what the RNNs produced. Color pie? Balance? Bah.
- I do correct minor grammar errors and trim superfluous text. Cards that are just word soup whose "intent" can't be guessed at, though, I skip.
One trend I'm noticing, though, is that there is a huge overabundance of creatures vs. other types of cards in the RoboRosewater set, and to a certain extent those have floated to the top here too. So! What are your favorite RNN-generated non-critters? Point me at them and I'll do my durndest to get them onto a game table!I will make small edits to a card that's nearly there, such as removing a spurious clause added to the end of an otherwise rules-legal sentence, defining an undefined token type, or replacing "Echo" with "Kicker" in a card that has an "if it was kicked" clause. But I haven't figured out where I fall on adjusting mana costs.
I know I for one would love to play in a limited environment with fun stuff like this:
Pollenbright Wind (rare)
GW
Instant
Each player returns all creature cards from his or her graveyard to the battlefield.
Patrol Fire (common)
1W
Instant
Put two 1/1 white human construct archer wizard all blue creature tokens with flying onto the battlefield.
Flashback 1W
(Replying to the same post twice, my bad--I got distracted by the shiny RNN cards and didn't respond to this bit when I could've!)