I taught LLMs to play Magic: The Gathering against each other
I've been teaching LLMs to play Magic: The Gathering recently, via MCP tools hooked up to the open-source XMage codebase. It's still pretty buggy and I think there's significant room for existing models to get better at it via tooling improvements, but it pretty much works today. The ratings for expensive frontier models are artificially low right now because I've been focusing on cheaper models until I work out the bugs, so they don't have a lot of games in the system.
I taught LLMs to play Magic: The Gathering against each other launched on February 17, 2026 with 117 votes, #286 of 16,627 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
In plain words
This project enables large language models to play Magic: The Gathering against each other through MCP tools integrated with the open-source XMage codebase. Designed for developers interested in LLM game-playing capabilities, it currently works but remains buggy, with room for improvement through tooling enhancements. The system tracks model performance ratings, though frontier model ratings are incomplete due to focus on testing cheaper models first.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
mage-bench is a benchmark where LLMs play Magic: The Gathering against eachfrom mage-bench.com
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