Moxle gathers a little Magic for its card game spin on Wordle
Counterspell? No, count *and* spell.
If you find the daily Wordle puzzle a bit too mundane and realistic, perhaps wishing the vocabulary pool referenced popular trading card game Magic: the Gathering, that very specific wish has been granted in the form of Moxle.
Deckbuilding website Moxfield has released its own spin on Josh Wardle’s internet-dominating phenomenon, Wordle. The simple word-guessing game has become a daily ritual, welcome distraction and point of cultural contention since its entry into the online zeitgeist earlier this month. In fact, Moxle arrived alongside a glut of clones, derivations and what seemed to be one extremely bold carbon copy.
The basic structure remains the same: players get six attempts to spell a randomly selected, five-letter word of the day where correct guesses are highlighted in yellow and correct placements get filled in as purple. Would-be experts (this author, included) say to either cram commonly used vowels and consonants in early or else hope to land an extremely lucky guess. The word game's simplicity and ease of sharing to social media has likely helped its spread and constant remixing.
Moxle’s spin on the formula replaces the English dictionary with the names of Magic: the Gathering cards that can fit in five spaces. According to TheGamer, Moxfield is using card database Scryfall’s API to pull names into the pool of possibilities each day. That means resident White mana-aligned catboy Ajani wasn’t initially included, as most of his cards append descriptors such as “Inspiring Leader” and “Adversary of Tyrants”.
Moxfield has been tweaking setting and fixing bugs since release, and the company’s Twitter account keeps track of the latest updates. As of January 24th, first names and other MTG-related words were tossed into the pool of possibilities, and it seems development will continue as long as interested players keep plunking away daily.
Expect to see a lot of cards from the first few years of MTG’s lifespan when one-word names were plentiful. It would be a neat addition if Moxle linked to the solution’s card image so that players could see the often more whimsical and esoteric art, along with the weirdly worded rules text that designers have smoothed out over the decades. Today’s solution (clickers, beware) is a perfect example, given its place in the very first silver-bordered un-set.
Players will need a Moxfield account to access Moxle, but that process is free and largely painless. It’s likely only a matter of time before someone creates a board game version, though that raises the question of whether the exclamation point is a necessary part of Clank!