Original Post — Direct link

The way the reshufling of creatures in the battlefield needs to be revised. It's not the first time I've made a mistake targeting because the battlefield changed as I was targeting, and honestly it's bad design.

I understand the need to order the battlefield for combat, and returning to the common order afterwards, but changing the battlefield during combat is confusing and it happens to fast for someone to react accordingly.

In this particular game of Draft, I had a [[Hobblefiend]] on the field, a [[Goblin Arsonist]] and a [[Chandra's Pyreling]], I was attacking with the 3 creatures, against a [[Wishcoin Crab]] and a [[Vodalian Arcanist]]. Hobblefiend gets blocked by the Crab, the Arsonist is blocked by his other creature. So I Sacrifice the Pyreling and the Arsonist to Hobblefiend to make it a 4/3, and with the arsonist damage that was enough to kill the crab. Except that as the Arsonist triggers the battlefield changed and I did one damage to the Vodalian Arcanist, making all the sacrifices and the attack completely pointless.

I know, I could have taken 3 seconds and then I would have noticed the change, but honestly there is no reason to change the battlefield during combat, and if I know a creature is in a specific place, of course I'm going to target that specific place.

So please, PLEASE devs, make it that the battlefield changes when declaring attackers, when declaring blockers, and when combat ends, but not during!

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over 4 years ago - /u/wotc_kale - Direct link

Originally posted by BeercornPonghole

All I can say is, I'm not a huge fan of the "hopping around" myself while assigning blockers, but I do understand that it's trying to solve a very difficult problem (cleaning up the blocking direction lines on huge, complicated board states). I think when the latency is high - like my backwoods internet - I have to be more patient than I want to be to make sure I don't click on things that are mid-hop.

That said, I'm more of the "outside of gameplay" designer, so I'll point Ian towards this thread so he can see your feedback. Thanks for writing this up and starting the conversation!

-Kale #wotcstaff