CardFactory - How to create 2,700 different objects?

The CardFactory class is responsible for only one thing, to create all new Card objects. Every Magic card is represented internally as a Card object. The difficultly is that Forge implements 2,700 cards, so that means that CardFactory has to return 2,700 different objects.

So the question becomes how do you actually create a method that can return (output) 2,700 different things? First, I try to refer to the gang of four "Design Patterns" book as often as possible. It mentions the prototype pattern but is seems very vague as to the actual implementation. From page 121, "The hardest part of the Prototype pattern is implementing the Clone operation correctly." So basically you have four very smart people saying that copying an object is hard, yeah.

My very "dumb" solution was to stick all of the objects together in one huge method. The reason why I did this instead of reading them from XML or a text file is because each object was fundamentally different (they were anonymous classes). I couldn't just read the information from a file because each Card object is fundamentally different, Shock is different than Elvish Piper.

I enjoyed having all of the card code in CardFactory because I could quickly cut-and-paste, which is a horrible practice but it helped things zip along. Now things don't "zip" because the Forge architecture isn't very flexible since everything was designed only for basic, simple Magic cards. (Even basic, simple cards are hard to program.)

The one CardFactory method was around 18,000 lines long, which is insane I know but each card had separate brackets and didn't share any variables. I submitted it to the Guinness Book of World Records as the "world's longest method" but they didn't think it was very important. (They were right but I still wanted my plaque, ha.) Currently CardFactory has been divided up into about 5 different classes, which helps the "long method problem" but it doesn't solve it.

Alternatively, I could have created 2,700 different files to hold each card.

I really want to create cards like this.

Card card = new Card("Wrath of God");
 
SpellAbility spell = new Spell(card)
spell.addResolve("Destroy all creatures");

card.addSpellAbility(spell);

Hopefully the AI won't need specific instructions on how to handle each card. Right now the computer will play Wrath of God if it has less than 7 life or if it would destroy 2 more of its opponents creatures versus its own creatures. This is just a rough guess when the AI should play Wrath of God and it doesn't work for all situations. This is also a good explanation of why the AI seems so stupid sometimes. (At least AI isn't stupid 100% of the time, ha.)

This is current (ugly) way.

if(cardName.equals("Wrath of God") || cardName.equals("Damnation"))
{
SpellAbility spell = new Spell(card)
 {
 public void resolve()
  {
   CardList all = new CardList();
   all.addAll(AllZone.Human_Play.getCards());
   all.addAll(AllZone.Computer_Play.getCards());

   for(int i = 0; i < all.size(); i++)
   {
    Card c = all.get(i);
    if(c.isCreature())
     AllZone.GameAction.destroyNoRegeneration(c);
   }
}//resolve()

//should the AI play this spell or ability?
public boolean canPlayAI()
{
CardList human    = new CardList(AllZone.Human_Play.getCards());
CardList computer = new CardList(AllZone.Computer_Play.getCards());

human    = human.getType("Creature");
computer = computer.getType("Creature");

//the computer will at least 
//destroy 2 more human creatures
return computer.size() < human.size()-1  || 
(AllZone.Computer_Life.getLife() < 7 && 
!human.isEmpty());

}//canPlayAI()

};//SpellAbility

card.addSpellAbility(spell);

p.s. I don't usually have shoutouts because they are stupid. But here it is anyways, shoutouts to pheadbaq.