Magic The Gathering: Arena Dev Tracker

I can't really, as it's outside my area of the code. I'm focused pretty much entirely on the "playing a game of MTG" side of things. I do know that getting that system working again is a priority for us. #wotc_staff

When we made the Gutter Grime change, our test for Toralf's Hammer failed. That led to us actually carving out an exception to the "delete the ability constraint" for "unattach" costs, which led to that test passing again. We really should have taken that as a warning sign that other similar cards may have issues, certainly. But the upshot is Toralf's Hammer never ended up buggy in release. #wotc_staff

That is absolutely intentional. You should also be able to tell which Serra Paragons have been "used up" (and may want to change which you prefer based on the state of the different Paragons). #wotc_staff

You know, I think that actually is an undesired behavior. Our rules for providing an alternative cost to an existing action, as Runeforge Champion does, do not have the logic of "is the source object meaningful" like our rules for providing novel action permissions do. I think I'll make a ticket for that, thanks for bringing it to my attention! #wotc_staff

Boons have a few things going for them:

• We (Studio X card design and us Arena devs together) first got the idea after puzzling over Y22-MID's [[Tenacious Pup]]. We wanted an embedded trigger inside a triggered ability, and for that to be the outer trigger's only effect. But something like "When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, when you cast your next spell" was dissatisfying to read. For the Pup, that's why the 1 life is tacked in there. But we didn't want trinkets like that to be the long term solution. So advantage #1 is that it's a more pleasant read.

• Boons are currently digital-only, as they sort of have a memory issue for paper. More digital design space is fruitful for us.

• As they are digital-only, we have more flexibility in adjusting the game rules around them if design needs that compared to paper mechanics.

One disadvantage is that it's pretty awkward to make downside boons, given the connotation of the w...

In practice, at least 75% of the cards' generated code do not need individual attention. The advantage of the language of MTG cards is that it's very precise. This is what allows our project to not be a fool's errand in the first place. #wotc_staff

I had first thought the issue was with anaphora resolution (having the parser correctly identify what the self-reference meant). That is, the bug would have been "the parser thought some other phrase was what that self-reference meant". It turns out it did that correctly, we just squashed the meaning out of the result! #wotc_staff

It's a bug. We're very frustrated too (we like players having easy access to the events they want). It won't go away on its own, but it will be fixed soon.

As many are aware by now, the Shadows over Innistrad: Remastered release on March 21st introduced an unfortunate bug to Magic: The Gathering Arena. This bug affected many cards that confer an ability that mentions the title of the conferring card, such as [[Citizen's Crowbar]] and [[Ninja's Kunai]].

Equipped creature gets +1/+1 and has "{oW}, {oT}, Sacrifice Citizen's Crowbar: Destroy target artifact or enchantment."

Equipped creature has "{1}, {T}, Sacrifice Ninja's Kunai: Ninja's Kunai deals 3 damage to any target."

Instead of sacrificing the conferring object, these abilities sacrificed all permanents controlled by the ability's controller. In Kunai's case, this was also followed up by each of the sacrificed objects dealing 3 damage to the target.

...ouch. What is happening? Why is it happening? How did we miss this happening? Well, do we have a story for you!

The story of how this bug ...

You already have all of the cards in these decks; there's no value in farming them again

Our ability to do this is bugged, so it wasn’t an option here, unfortunately. We’re working on a fix for that.

Yup, that’s why

Length of suspension will be based on degree of abuse, and full bans are on the table too.

Great description, thanks so much! That will really help us try to narrow down what went wrong here.

Thanks for the report!
QA's been trying to reproduce this, but can't get it to happen. Do you have any other details about what happened here so we can get closer? What exactly was happening as your opponent conceded in game 1? Where in game 2 did you get stuck? Do you think it's possible you disconnected anywhere in there?

Has anyone else had/not had this happen to them?

Yeah, that's pretty much it. Because of a bug (introduced by Gutter Grime), the sacrifice part of: Equipped creature gets +1/+1 and has “{W}, {T}, Sacrifice Citizen’s Crowbar: Destroy target artifact or enchantment.” Lost its reference to Citizen's Crowbar, and the rules engine decided it meant sacrifice All The Things.

The Arena rules backend works by basically reading the cards (natural language parsing), and we have to regularly adjust that reading process to make sure it understands new cards properly. In some cases, like this one, that can lead to older cards getting new (and improper) behaviors. We have a lot of automated and manual testing to check for this, but with ~8k cards there's always the possibility that something sneaks through.

In any case, we're working to get a fix out soon. Until then, I wouldn't recommend sacrificing Citizen's Crowbar (and your whole board).

Do you not have phones? Wait...

When you tap on the opponent's hand it opens a browser (like you were searching your library), and you pick from that.

I wouldn't say Intrepid Adversary is THAT related; all kinds of cards reference their own titles. Gutter Grime and Citizen's Crowbar are of a much rarer category of cards that self-reference in abilities they confer to other objects. Most times a self-reference simply means "the object that has this ability", but for Gutter Grime and Citizen's Crowbar, they actually mean "the object that conferred this ability". Note that such references need to work even if that object stops having that name. #wotc_staff

Sorry I didn't post here, y'all are still my favorite. #wotc_staff

Here. #wotc_staff