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Hello reddit! [[The Chain Veil]] was the most interesting Pioneer Masters card I worked on implementing for MTG Arena, so I'm happy to preview it for you.
Both of the abilities involved some new-to-Arena mechanics. The triggered ability involved me teaching our "activate" verb handling about how to behave in a condition phrase - here, to look throughout the history of ability activations for this turn for a loyalty ability's activation whose source was, at the time of activation, a planeswalker. Lots of testing around this for "what about other abilities on planeswalkers?" "What about permanents that weren't planeswalkers but had loyalty abilities, but are planeswalkers now that it's the end step?" And many more in that ilk.
The activated ability is certainly the more fun one. But it's interestingly very different from similar extra-activation abilities like [[Oath of Teferi]] and [[Urza, Planeswalker]]. In particular, each activation of The Chain Veil gives a specific-to-that-activation permission to reuse a planeswalker. In fact, if you use that permission as your first activation of a planeswalker this turn, you've also "used up" one of the normal activations (as those rules just care about how many times you've activated a loyalty ability on that permanent this turn, regardless of whether there was a special permission involved). Of course, I also had to change the normal pruning rule that stops you from activating loyalty abilities too much to make an exception for actions that have a special permission like that of The Chain Veil.
There was also an interesting gramatical challenge for this ability, as "For each planeswalker you control" sounds like it should be iterating over the planeswalkers you currently control, but rather this is a single permission that applies to "the rules of the game" rather than to the individual planeswalkers - basically every time you get priority, this permission looks at the current planeswalkers you control and compares them to the permanents you've already "used up" this permission for. Lots of type-changing testing around this ability, too! While I was working on this, I also cleaned up our "n times this turn" syntax to be open to arbitrary number words.
I hope this card is a lot of fun to play with. Superfriends unite! #wotc_staff