Join us at Babycastles for a unique Magic The Gathering experience: a booster draft using cards designed and illustrated by neural networks. The cards are designed by one robot and illustrated by another. The only thing the humans do is play the game.

Since June 2015, the Twitter account RoboRosewater (https://twitter.com/RoboRosewater) has been tweeting out new magic cards designed by a neural network that has been trained on the 30,000+ existing cards in the game. To go with these cards, I made my own neural to train on the art of MTG and eventually create new images in that style. The striking images created by this bot can be seen here:

http://andymakesgames.tumblr.com/tagged/machine-learning

By combining the output of the two bots (and printing out a lot of our own cards), we'll be creating a new set of cards designed entirely by machine. And we'll be using these cards to hold a booster draft, a classic style of magic tournament where players create decks on the fly from booster packs.

More info on booster drafts here:

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/lo/basics-booster-draft-2014-11-03

The Weird MTG series attempts to give us peeks at overlooked or underutilized parts of this sprawling game. With more and more of our tasks being taken over by automation, the game design that can be done in this space is ripe for exploration.

We will only be using generated cards that are playable as written. Even with that, the cards generated by RoboRosewater are far from balanced, so these games will get weird. We'll have a judge on hand specifically to help with any unusual scenarios that come up.

We're requesting $5 from each player to cover the cost of printing and sleeving the cards. As with all Weird MTG events, the atmosphere is more focused on fun than completion, but we will have a few fun prizes. For folks that have never played Magic before, I recommend getting in a practice game or two before the event.