A couple of years ago, I had a student who wanted to do a kind of MtG assistant for his master's thesis. It would have a database with the functionality of each card stored in a symbolic format, and it would use that for applications like giving you advice during play, with the possibility of implementing other applications in the future (once you have the functionality of cards encoded in a format easy to process by machines, you can do many interesting things).
I told him that it could be a great project and I would be happy to supervise it, but the first thing he needed to do was to ensure there would be no legal problems. So I told him to write to the WotC legal department. He wrote a nice email saying if it would be OK to do this, taking into account that it was not for profit, he would recognize all copyrights, not use illustrations (just raw data about the cards), etc.
I told him that it could be a great project and I would be happy to supervise it, but the first thing he needed to do was to ensure there would be no legal problems. So I told him to write to the WotC legal department. He wrote a nice email saying if it would be OK to do this, taking into account that it was not for profit, he would recognize all copyrights, not use illustrations (just raw data about the cards), etc.
They (politely, but clearly) said no.