In the mid 90'ties a liked playing "Portal". Portal was the first starter-kit that Wizards of the Cost TM released in order to get even more people to play Magic The Gathering (or just MTG). Since even at that time MTG had beomce (at least on a passers by view) a complicated game, they thought "let's make it nice an simple" and release Portal.
Nowadays, about 15 years later, there are not many people around (at my place) that play these games with me - so I started looking if anyone thought of implementing a nice Computer-Portal (or "Trading Card Game").
There are actually quite some similar games, which I know of (if anyone knows more - please give me some hints):
The old Micropose games, always had difficulties with them...
Etherlord and Etherlord II
on the IPhone Orions
Wagic the Homebrew a game for the PSP (and a "debugging" windows Port) (look at http://wololo.net/wagic/), which I quit like, but:
sometimes the AI is a bit stupid (at least I thinks so - some suicides...)
very unusual to play under windows, since it feels more an emulated PSP (small window, no Mouse...)
crashed on me a few times
nonetheless I like it (as you see in some options I implemented)
Forge, also in Java (look at http://mtgrares.blogspot.com/), which quit confused me in the beginning. But some ideas I borrowed. :-)
Apprentice hm, not my thing - looks bad, feels bad, probably a personal thing, no AI anyway, only possibly some stray other human being over the internet.
Magic Workstation Not a game really, though online matches between two (human) players are possible.
This is where I started of. Actually in the beginning I wanted to play Wagic on my PSP. Downloaded it, found "grafics" installed it - and was quite intrigued by it. It supports an already (and growing) huge number of cards (Magic The Gathering). I was happy that even the old Portal could be found. I configured it thus, that only the Portal set was available, build (by hand) some computer decks and played a few games. Thats where I discovered crashes, AI problems etc. AND it was fiddlestick to edit the card information and create decks. Thats was the first shot that I thoght about my own project. Even now you can import Sets from Wagic, export Sets and can also create Decks and export them a Wagic format - if you want.
For a good comprehensive list of Magic software take a look at: (undefinied external link))
http:/ /forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=56796