alt Hacker NewsWith the direction MtG is currently heading, I kind of want to break out and just play some in-Universe sets that are community made on an FOSS client. How nice would it be to just play the game in its original spirit.
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You might be interested in Premodern: https://premodernmagic.com/. You can play it on regular old MTGO.
FOSS Magic clients are in a legal gray area at best. My mental model is that Wizards de facto tolerate clients like XMage and Forge because their UX is awful, but if you made something that's actually as user-friendly as MTGO/Arena, they'd sue you and you would lose.
I still play 4th edition against some friends. We have had the decks well over a couple of decades after we bought them! That and Catan.
Best to do this stuff in person I find.
Sounds like you want Cockatrice: https://cockatrice.github.io/
The rules aren't embedded into the client; it's "just" a virtual tabletop where you enforce the rules the same way you would playing with a friend in person. Cards have to be imported but it's fairly automatic (basically just clicking a few buttons after startup), so you could either only import the sets you want or just not use the ones you don't want (which is also how it tends to work when playing informally in person; it's not like you usually have a judge to enforce that you or your friends are playing by whatever rules you agree to).