Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete
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Abstract (arXiv)
textitMagic: The Gathering is a popular and famously complicated trading card game about magical combat. In this paper we show that optimal play in real-world textitMagic is at least as hard as the Halting Problem, solving a problem that has been open for a decade. To do this, we present a methodology for embedding an arbitrary Turing machine into a game of textitMagic such that the first player is guaranteed to win the game if and only if the Turing machine halts. Our result applies to how real textitMagic is played, can be achieved using standard-size tournament-legal decks, and does not rely on stochasticity or hidden information. Our result is also highly unusual in that all moves of both players are forced in the construction. This shows that even recognising who will win a game in which neither player has a non-trivial decision to make for the rest of the game is undecidable. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for a unified computational theory of games and remarks about the playability of such a board in a tournament setting.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2019.
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Citing papers per year: 2021: 1; 2022: 1; 2023: 1; 2024: 1; 2025: 0; 2026: 1.
5 papers.
- 2023Games for Artificial Intelligence Research: A Review and Perspectivescited by 14
- 2026Causal Reinforcement Learning for Complex Card Games: A Magic The Gathering Benchmarkcited by 1
- 2021Turing Completeness and Sid Meier's Civilizationcited by 0
- 2022What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?cited by 0
- 2024A Taxonomy of Collectible Card Games from a Game-Playing AI Perspectivecited by 0
- 2026Causal Reinforcement Learning for Complex Card Games: A Magic The Gathering Benchmark7 May 2026
- 2024A Taxonomy of Collectible Card Games from a Game-Playing AI Perspective8 Oct 2024
- 2023Games for Artificial Intelligence Research: A Review and Perspectives26 Apr 2023
- 2022What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?8 Aug 2022
- 2021Turing Completeness and Sid Meier's Civilization29 Apr 2021