Can I ask why this approach to creating rules was chosen and simultaneously we don’t have a larger card pool? If the rules are generated by reading oracle rules text, why is pioneer, modern, legacy etc not available ?
I could understand the smaller card pool if rules were manually implemented as functions or equivalent, but this threw me for a loop as something that seems too complex for the limited card pool the game started with.
Well, the dream has always been for the card parser to be a massive productivity boost for backfilling MTG's card catalog. There are a few reasons why it isn't just a snap-of-the-finger though:
The Pareto Principle applies: the parser is excellent at handling normal MTG card text, but a sizeable number of MTG cards do things that really no other card does. For example, [[Void Winnower]]'s prohibition on casting even-mana value spells would play some havoc with casting X-cost spells. Perhaps we could just dump the large proportion of cards that work "for free" in engine...
... but in-engine isn't the only concern. There's also the client experience to consider. The engine's been worked on for longer and supports some interactions that the client has never needed to implement before. Plus there's our standards of presentation: we want new content we release to meet our standards of clarity to players and to work with our auxiliary systems like autotap...