Mystical Tutor: A Magic: The Gathering Design Assistant via Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Learning

Abstract

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) has seen heavy focus on the generation of levels for video games, aesthetic content, and on rule creation, but has seen little use in other domains. Recently, the ready availability of Long Short Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM RNNs) has seen a rise in text based procedural generation, including card designs for Collectible Card Games (CCGs) like Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering. In this work we present a mixed-initiative design tool, Mystical Tutor, that allows a user to type in a partial specification for a card and receive a full card design. This is achieved by using sequence-to-sequence learning as a denoising sequence autoencoder, allowing Mystical Tutor to learn how to translate from partial specifications to full.