Saw this happen in the Streamer event, it only draws you cards for actual lands sacrificed, not for any DFCs. So if I sacrifice a mountain and a flip land, I'd only draw 1 card. But according to my interpretation of the rules, it shouldn't matter and you should draw 2. Am I right?
External link →On it. Good ol' anaphora resolver misunderstood the card, it's checking "is the card you sacrificed a land in its new zone" rather than the last-known-information. Ideally we can hotfix this. #wotc_staff
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No, In Oketra's Name didn't understand what "Other creatures" was supposed to refer to, as 99%+ of the time "other [blah]" in MTG means other than a particular object rather than a category of objects. We substituted that phrase with "Non-zombie creatures" - ancient history! #wotc_staff
Wait - anaphora resolver? Are you saying the rules engine is actually parsing the natural language on the card?
If so, I believe that's incredibly innovative.
We do indeed parse the natural language! It's what generates the cards' code. I keep meaning to do an AMA or something about it but never find the time. #wotc_staff
Forget an AMA, that is publication-worthy! Have you guys presented this work in the general NLP/ML community?
Well, it's not machine learning, and Natural Language Processing-wise, we're not doing much interesting - it's a very stodgy "here is the dictionary, here are the syntactic productions" affair. The most interesting part, in my opinion, is the marriage between semantics and game rules. What information does the word "creature" impart? How do we go from a syntactic pattern that looks like an intervening-if trigger to the behavior that stewards those rules? And it evolves with every set. #wotc_staff
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