The cat sacrifice rotation seems to have been streamlined a bit, although bringing back a cat had me occasionally confirm that I wanted to sacrifice a food token.
All that is missing now is for food tokens to be automatically sacrificed if the tokens are your only food source.
External link →I may be wrong, but I think they're asking you to confirm which Food token to sac because in theory, you could trasform that artifact into a creature to attack (with [[Animated Faerie]] for example), so you should sac the summoning sickness one first.
Then again it could just default to the tokens that came into play this turn...
Before we asked you "Do you want to sacrifice a food" before having you select a food. Now we just have you click a food or decline, saving a click. You still have to click your food if it's the only food you have (unless it's autotap eating it). #wotc_staff
Could you make it autoselect the least-special food amongst all your foods, so you just have to click "Confirm" or hit the spacebar, unless you're doing something special?
No, because "least special" is a pretty undefined concept :P. There may come a day when we use some heuristics to propose fast-and-loose recommended selections for various prompts, but our current philosophy is that it's bad player experience for SOME prompts to do stuff like that and others not to. #wotc_staff
"least special" would be the ones that are the default food or somehow worse after effects.
It's already auto-selecting for mana abilities (without confirmation, except when the "auto-tap solution has changed" message pops up, which usually happens even when it hasn't changed), for Proliferate (which is exactly the interface I'd like for "sac a food"), for many (but not all) selections where you only have 1 option, and I'm pretty sure there's one other ability that already does a "select the most likely option and prompt for confirm" (besides Proliferate), but I can't think of what it is right off hand.
Even the determination of "is default food" is nontrivial, let alone "somehow worse". With a cursory look, I can count 21 different fields on a card that could somewhat-reasonably differ from Food to Food, and that's not even counting stuff like "can't block" (wouldn't you be upset if this system autoselected your normal [[Gingerbrute]] and not the one that's [[Trapped in a Tower]]?)
As for the other scenarios, those are places that we have indeed put in the work to do heuristics for selection (some of which will disagree with a strategic situation!). For Proliferate, we have a simple "good/bad" list for counters, and the rule is "if it's mine, preselect it if it has any good counters on it" and "if it's my opponent's, preselect it if it has a bad counter on it and no good counters on it."
I don't disagree with you that we could improve some play experiences by increasing the number of places where we propose automatic selections. I do think it'll be a worse experience, though, if there are similar situations where SOMETIMES we propose those and other times we don't, and as a player your muscle memory gets trained one way and is betrayed by the system elsewhere. #wotc_staff
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