Go is easy to get a computer to play, but computers can't play at all well because the tactics are beyond current hardware capabilities. I think Magic would probably fall into the same category - the calculations would be insane. That said, while Magic is tactically complex, there's not terribly much strategy in actually playing a game - most strategy comes during deck selection and construction.
Right, my point largely was that writing parsers for the english language to get the meaning behind, and interpret it into something that a machine "understands" is something that AI researchers are very interested in because its beyond difficult, and the first person who writes said program will enjoy their 5 minutes of fame in popular news (and be hailed as a king in the Computer Science industry for the rest of eternity). The other part of my post was about how difficult a task it would be to get a machine to do certain tasks well. In which case, even if we had bots to play against right now, it wouldn't do us any good because they'd be considered incompetent. For instance, the Microprose Magic game, even if you could pre-program in decks for the computer to play, thus taking care of deck construction, and it cheated to see its opponents deck, hand, and its own deck, and the code was optimized in such a way so it could play at a reasonable pace, I doubt its capability to perform at a level that would make people consider play-testing against it in preperation for tournaments.
