CallumFerg
Joined 5 years ago
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Mar 19
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Comment · 4 months ago
Comment · 4 months ago
The scoring is just based on a simple prompt which is given the game state at the start and end of the turn and the log of tool calls and the final turn summary. The prompt asks it to evaluate the quality of the simulation from 0 to 10, and to give pass or fail for if it is legal.
It is far from ideal, but from my testing, even underpowered small LLMs that could not complete a single legal turn were reasonably good at judging if a simulation was legal. The final judging was all done by gpt-5.5 (medium) which might have given the OpenAI models an advantage, but from all the simulations I looked at, it seemed pretty fair.
This benchmark ended up be more of a test of how well an LLM can call tools without contradicting itself or backtracking. Most of the failures were not because of breaking magic rules, but because it could not sequence the tool calls correctly.
For example: https://app.mtgautodeck.com/public/benchmarks/6349dda2-4069-...
and: https://app.mtgautodeck.com/public/benchmarks/dcc18bd8-339d-...
The failure mode seems to be that some models are overly trained to start tool calls, even when the model itself knows that it should not be calling the tool. Both of those examples were not errors because the judge prompt said they were illegal. In both of those examples the model stopped the simulation itself knowing that it made a tool error.
The Opus 4.8 examples are especially weird because it will consistently make the same tool call error 2 or 3 times in a row, and it will put things like "placeholder" or "noop" for the tool call reason.
Comment · 4 months ago
Admittedly, the mulligan phase system prompt is the weakest part of the project. I had to add heuristics to stop the LLMs from mulliganing down to just a few cards looking for a perfect hand. The scoring for the benchmark is mostly based on if the LLM could complete legal turns, not good turns.
https://github.com/CallumFerguson/mtg-auto-deck/blob/a877c08...
Comment · 4 months ago
No, I was not aware of that project when I made this.
I'll have to look into that project, but I also have an RTX 5090 and did a lot of testing with Qwen3.6 27B and Gemma 4 31B. I was not able to get it to play legal turns consistently. I had to keep expanding the system prompt and adding rules for edge cases. By the end, the prompt was over 10k tokens, and while it mostly make legal turns, it did not make good turns. And all the heuristics in the prompt degraded the performance and increased the cost for frontier models.
Comment · 4 months ago
I actually considered using card forge when I started this. I mostly didn't end up using it because of how much more work it would have been.
But also with a rules engine, you have to manually go though every step, and pass priority after every action.
I think it makes more sense to let an LLM play magic like a person would. On early turns it is acceptable to say "I play a land and pass" without going through every phase. And you can say "I tap all my land and play this card" without having to use a tool call and agent turn for every land tap.
Also card forge would not let you goldfish a deck. You must have opponents.
With maximum thinking and web search to look up magic rules, I didn't ever see it make a mistake. It is probably better at following the rules than the average magic player (but not better at making the most strategic moves).
The benchmark was mostly to find out what is the cheapest model with the lowest reasoning effort would provide a good experience for the app. The answer turned out to be that, for now, there is no cost effective way to run this app.
To provide a good experience, the simulations either need to be near instant, or you need to be able to run dozens or hundreds of simulations in parallel and do statistical analysis.