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This bug is easily reproducible:
- Play a nonhuman creature and give it a menace counter (in this case [[Fertilid]] and [[Blood Curdle]])
- Mutate [[Cavern Whisperer]] onto it, so it gains the menace ability a second time.
- Cast [[Heartless Act]] and remove the menace counter. The creature will now be able to blocked by a single creature.
Note that I've only tested this when the opponent casts Heartless Act during the attackers step, just in case that's the only time this happens. It's also somewhat likely that this logic applies to other keywords as well. I did check with the MTG Judge Chat and they agreed this is a bug, not a rule I'm misunderstanding.
edit: This bug was formally reported here if you want to vote it up to hopefully get this fixed soon.
To clarify, you have to Mutate a menace creature on top? Having menace naturally doesn't seem to result in this bug, I'll try again with mutating. #wotc_staff
EDIT: Yes, mutating seems to do the trick. Let's figure out what's going wrong.
EDIT 2: Alright, got it! Here's what's going on. Whenever we detect that you've gained a new ability, we usually kick off that new ability's continuous effects. However, multiple different places in the code can attempt to start those continuous effects (creating attachment relationships and redestining zone transfers are some somewhat esoteric examples), and we don't want to double-dip starting those continuous effects, so we see if there are any already from this ability.
Menace makes a BlockedByMinCountQualification, which is a continuous effect. When you add menace (say, Menace2, the one from Cavern Whisperer) to something that already has it (say, Menace1, from the Menace counter) we were erroneously thinking we'd be double dipping because we already have a BlockedByMinCountQualification from Menace for this card - we should instead be looking to see if we have any BlockedByMinCountQualifications from THIS Menace (Menace2) on this card. That way, when we get rid of Menace1 by removing the Menace counter, we clean up its qualification but we still have one from Menace2.
Wow, complicated to describe. A one line fix though. #wotc_staff
WotC coding
creature.menaceCounter--; if (creature.menaceCounter == 0) creature.menace = false;
Check out my postmortem of the bug here to see what actually happened! #wotc_staff
Natual Menace is always first, issue is/was with second and later not properly adding it's effect. So since non-conditional non-counter instance of Menace (or any other ability) cannot be removed from creature without also removing all other instances, it's not possible to reproduce this bug on creature with natural full-time Menace.
Precisely! #wotc_staff
So does this affect other abilities as well now that ability counters are in the game? Flying comes to mind.
I believe Menace is the only one of the "Ikoria nine" keywords to be backed by a qualification. Admittedly Flying probably should be for consistency's sake, but it isn't. #wotc_staff
Hey Ben, there’s also another higher profile bug were mutating creatures on top of nissa lands do not keep their stats.
That is rules-correct. The power/toughness setting effect Nissa confers happens on a later layer than the modifications Mutate does. #wotc_staff