In this short and sweet guide for Windows, you will have MTG Forge up and running in a few minutes. MTG Forge is an MTG rules engine that allows you to play most MTG formats against an AI. It supports more than 99% of all of Magic’s cards.
Forge is open source and completely free to use. If you consider the complexity and scale of modelling every MTG mechanic and interaction between these mechanics, it is very impressive that it’s being kept alive by a small community.
Table of Contents
1. Installing JAVA
Forge requires JAVA to run, you can find it here: https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/downloads/. Click on Windows, then download and run the installer.
2. Installing Forge
- After you installed the latest JAVA version, you can download Forge here.
- Check the date next to the files to find the latest release, at the time of this writing that was 1.6.53.
- Click on the latest version and download the tar.bz2 file from this folder.
- Right click the tar.bz2 file and extract it into a folder of your liking. If you don’t have this option, download and install 7zip first: https://www.7-zip.org/.
- Once you extracted the files, open up Forge.exe from the folder.
3. Downloading card images (OPTIONAL)
You could start up your first game right now, but you won’t have any card art. If you want to play with just card text for now you can skip this step.
To download the card art images click on “Game Settings” > “Content Downloaders” in the left menu. I recommend using the “Low Quality” option. This process can take up to a couple of hours, so just leave Forge running until it’s finished.
4. Importing your deck
To import a Commander deck (or any other format) do the following:
- Click on the “Deck Editor” tab in the top left corner and click on the “Commander” tab.
- In the Current Deck tab, click on “Import”.
- Paste your deck into the “Card List” window, you can export it from your deck building website. Make sure that all the card names in the Decklist window show up in green.
- Click on “New Deck”. Then, fill in your deck Title and click on save.
5. Starting a game against AI
Go back to the home screen by clicking the “Home” tab in the top left.
Make sure to select “Constructed” in the menu on the left and check the “Commander” box.
By clicking “Add Player” you can add more AI opponents to the game, you can also select whatever deck you want your opponents to play with.
Press “Start” at the bottom of the screen to start up a game! The UI kind of speaks for itself, pro tip: you can press the space bar to quickly skip through steps and phases.