Overriding Core Rules 2

Cards likes Mana Flare and Doran, the Siege Tower are hard to implement because they change the core rules of Magic. The basic way, which is perfectly fine, is to have various parts of the program look to see which cards are in play. This has the drawback that all of the card code for Doran is not in one place and cannot be easily used by different cards. (Although it doesn’t seem like Wizards will be printing variations on Doran.)

Let me get sidetracked for a minute and then I’ll return to the main topic. I think it is a good idea if all of the rules are encoded in one large class which is named something like RulesEngine. Various phases and actions in Magic are intertwined which makes even getting the card’s color complicated sometimes, Painter’s Servant says something like “All cards in play are white”. Since RulesEngine is handling all aspects of Magic, even the small ones, RulesEngine can just easily check to see if Painter’s Servant is in play and return the appropriate color.

Now back Doran, if RulesEngine has a method like changeRules(String), Doran can simply use changeRules(RulesEngine.ASSIGN_TOUGHNESS). The RulesEngine class could have a bunch of constants that could be passed to changeRules(). Doran doesn’t care how its ability is implemented in RulesEngine, it just knows that it will be handled. Likewise Mana Flare could call changeRules(RulesEngine.DOUBLE_MANA).

There is an old computer joke that says anything can be programmed with enough layers of indirection (methods calling other methods), which is often true. If RulesEngine handles all of the data and actions that happen in a game, implementing “hard” cards like Doran and Mana Flare should be simple.

The reason that MTG Forge currently cannot handle protection is because there isn’t a “global” canTarget() method which is used to check to see if that spell can target that permanent. And when I say “global”, I just mean that it is used everywhere that a target is assigned.

Separating WHAT from the HOW is very important. In HTML the "b" attribute tells the browser to put that text in bold. The b attribute doesn't tell the browser HOW to do it.

p.s.
Painter’s Friend isn’t a great example but I couldn’t think of a better one. I know I’ve read cards that say something like “All cards are white” but I probably have the wrong wording. Just for reference here is Doran and Painter’s Servant.