University of Iowa law professor to deal out lessons through ‘Magic: The Gathering’

Using the skills and knowledge he’s gathered over the years playing tabletop games, a University of Iowa professor will employ a popular fantasy game to add more cards to future lawyers’ decks and help them take their legal interpretation to a higher level.

Students in the Mihailis Diamantis’ new business law course will learn how to play “Magic: The Gathering” — a complex fantasy game with expansive and nuanced rules — alongside lectures and lessons on principles, interpretation and building their skills.

In the one-credit-hour, Magic: The Gathering law course, which Diamantis will teach starting next May, students will learn about interpreting complicated text, searching for rules, precedents and rulings, identifying areas of ambiguity and working with others to resolve problems.

As the card game is inherently adversarial, Diamantis said it “provides an automatic and instant check on dubious interpretations” of rules by students, and he will test their interpretations as well.

As the class studies rules and cards with certain ambiguities, students will draft briefs arguing their interpretation as well as create their own cards and maybe even new game mechanics, all of which will be voted on by the class. Their capstone project for the course will be students arguing their case for how they interpret cards to an “expert judge” — in this case a Seattle lawyer and Magic player who will Zoom in.

Cards, like cases, sometimes up for interpretation

With its more-than-300-page rule book and an archive of cards growing past 35,000, the professor said learning the intricacies of how cards interact with one another and how rules, old and new, impact them in “Magic: The Gathering” is much like “picking at the edge of a legal text or legal doctrine or rule,” as it is “never as simple as you assumed it was.”

The process of finding an ambiguity in a card and checking the rule book, the official website, what other cards have and how the same rule works with them and sometimes needing to decide as a group how it should be handled is strikingly similar to the work lawyers do, he said. It also helps that the rulebook pages look the same as Internal Revenue Code text, and that students had been asking for another interpretation course in the college of law.

Professor’s son inspires course

Diamantis had been out of the “Magic: The Gathering” scene for a while. The professor said he used to play in middle and high school, but it was his son Gibson’s growing interest in the trading card game during the COVID-19 pandemic that brought him back in and led him to Critical Hit Games in Iowa City.

When Gibson visits his dad, Diamantis said, the pair never misses a Commander Night at Critical Hit Games, where they and other Magic players gather to compete and enjoy the game. It was this time spent with other enthusiasts — and the changes to the game and cards he missed during his time away — that linked in his mind “Magic: The Gathering” with the skills and knowledge base lawyers need to develop before stepping foot in a courtroom.

“Playing the game is awesome, because it’s like painting the fence and waxing the floor — you’re building this skill set, you’re not doing it in a threatening environment, but then all of a sudden you have it and you can bring it to the game, to the match,” Diamantis said. “That’s the idea here, it’s a universal skill set that will benefit them in whatever area of law they practice, and what better way to convey that to them than having them learn it in a context where law is not immediately engaged?”

Fantasy games lead to real-world lessons

This won’t be the first time the professor has worked to gamify his lessons, having offered a week-long course in corporate law where students learned through the lens of “Dungeons & Dragons” sessions. The course, offered last summer, was a departure for Diamantis, as he said he usually teaches “typical law review format” courses where he lectures and calls on students for questions.

Business law can be an intimidating subject for students, Diamantis said, and not “immediately interesting” like criminal law is. He wanted to fill a niche and create a “business class for people who didn’t want to take a business class,” and drew inspiration from his son’s Dungeons & Dragons interest and his own knowledge from playing the Baldur’s Gate videogame series in landing on the tabletop game as a vehicle for lessons.

“It gives kind of an immediate entry point, so that people can understand more … personally, why we have the doctrines in business law that we do, because they are ways of resolving conflicts of interest between parties that are bound together by the business structure they’re operating,” Diamantis said.

Feedback was positive for the course, he said, and he’s got a waitlist for the next iteration of the course scheduled in August that is twice as long as available seats. Diamantis also had students stop him in the hallway in the fall to tell him his course gave them a solid foundation for the lecture courses they were taking after the summer.

While there wasn’t a direct lead-in from Dungeons & Dragons to “Magic: The Gathering” in terms of in-class use, Diamantis said if there’s one thing he knows better than D&D, it’s MTG.

Reactions from his colleagues have varied based on how much experience they’ve had with complicated board games or similar activities, Diamantis said.

“If all you know is checkers, it’s like, what the heck is the relevance between checkers and the law,” Diamantis said. “But if you’re someone who is has experience (with) complex strategic board game culture, then then you see, and you know … that this could be a really powerful way to give students a skill set without again making it boring, because, interpreting tax law, if you don’t care about tax law, is boring.”