What the judge is

A judgebot answers Magic: The Gathering rules questions the way a judge would. It gives a short ruling. Every claim in it is backed by a quote from the Comprehensive Rules, an official Scryfall ruling or the card’s current Oracle text. The quote is checked against its source before the answer is shown, so a rule number the model invented never reaches you. Ask from Discord with /judge, from a web page, or from the command line. Use brackets like [[Full Card Name]] when a nickname could mean several things.

One bot per community

Every judgebot is its own Discord application, run by the community that uses it. One process is one spend cap, one judge role and one bot token, so the person who chose the model pays for the questions and nobody shares a budget with strangers. The design decisions page has the reasoning.

Setting one up takes a compose file, a Discord application you create in the developer portal in a few minutes, and a model API key:

1. Requirements and first run: the database, the data loads, and the web page on your own machine.
2. Create the Discord app: the portal steps, with links into Discord’s documentation for each.
3. Production deployment, when it should stay up without your laptop.

Nothing in the pipeline depends on Discord, so you can see the judge work before you have a bot token. Try it without Discord brings up the web page and the command line. Once yours is in a server, /help explains the commands. The Discord commands page has the details.

What an instance stores

For every question answered (except a Discord question asked with private: True, which is not saved), an instance stores the question text, the answer, the channel or web session it was asked in, and the ids of the rules, rulings and cards it was answered from. When someone presses a rating button, it stores their Discord user id and the score. It stores nothing else. The bot receives only its own slash commands and button presses, never channel messages. /forget deletes a user’s ratings, which is the only data tied to them.

Sample answers shows what comes back, and Evaluation how it scored on a hard question set.

AI-generated answers

Every citation is checked against its source before it is shown, and every rule number the answer’s text names must be one of those citations. That rules out invented rule numbers and misquoted text. It does not rule out a wrong conclusion drawn from correct quotes. Verify anything that matters at a tournament with a human judge. The bot declines tournament-policy questions (the Magic Tournament Rules and Infraction Procedure Guide) rather than answering them badly.