Spells

I fear that my blog evolves into a redundant commit log of my project, but I really try to write interesting and original.

First, let me say I'm steadily making progress. Now there's a mana pool and you can play mana abilities. Lands do untap and mana is removed properly. I have Llanowar Elves, my first nonland card, which you can play. It's put on the stack and then resolves. You don't pay costs for it yet...

And that's exactly my topic: What does it take to play a spell? There are several reasons why I started with lands, but the most important is that playing a land is a relatively simple thing: "To play a land, a player puts that land onto the battlefield from the zone it was in".

Playing a land is a single line in a Subpoint of the Subpoint 114.2a of "Special Actions" in the comprehensive rules. "Casting Spells" is Section 601, and 601.2 describes the steps necessary to do so, a to h, each one much longer than 114.2a.

The best known steps for playing spells are choosing targets and paying costs. Targets are a somewhat advanced, and I will rest a little before implementing them, but costs are a really essential part. The hard part is not costs per se, but paying them. Just for paying a mana cost, the player must choose how to pay for hybrid or variable symbols and then choose which mana to use.

Now that I know that playing spells works in general, I can try to fill in the details. When I have costs, and can therefore play simple spells rules-compliant, I might take a break to do some cards, improve the GUI, or implement combat... And swoosh! A game isn't that far away any more!

PS: There's one cost working already: The tap cost ;)