WotC_BenFinkel

What if:

• you suspect your opponent has a Herald of Vengeance

• you attacked them with two otherwise identical creatures, but only one dealt damage to them

• you have some reason to distinguish them, e.g. the ability to put a shield counter on one of them

We do not have a good way of communicating to players "this is the one that would be destroyed by Herald of Vengeance". In fact, we don't even "break up the stack" at all - they'll be presented to you in a pile. #wotc_staff

I mean, obviously the design started out as "destroy each permanent that dealt damage to you last turn.". But the real obstacle was UX, not implementation.

If we went with that text, players would have to be able distinguish otherwise identical permanents that dealt damage to players the previous turn - they'd have to unstack, and you'd have to be able to somehow tell which stack was which.

And this would have to happen in EVERY game of Arena, lest you get improperly informed as to whether Herald of Vengeance is in the game! #wotc_staff

I hope Alchemy Horizons: Baldur's Gate will help scratch that itch! #wotc_staff

Thank YOU for the game! A nailbiter to be sure. I think it was your [[Showdown of the Skalds]] that sealed the deal for you there - so much value! #wotc_staff

Unfortunately, yeah, it's a bug (one which will with good luck be patched this week). The script that converts the mana cost to mana value did not adequately account for the "hybrid-phyrexian" mana symbol. #wotc_staff

Who woulda thunk it? #wotc_staff

Essentially, shipping releases is a pretty complicated process that involves a lot of coordination. We keep them pretty tightly to a schedule. The December holidays were certainly a big gap there. #wotc_staff

This issue should be fixed with the Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty release, by the way. #wotc_staff

Probably the most notorious card for us to implement was [[Explore the Vastlands]], the backside of [[Wandering Archaic]]. It literally took weeks to work out the kinks on this card - and to add insult to injury, it's such a strategically worse card than its other face that it feels like it was a waste of our time. Managing the control flow of the "each player" loop was very much like pulling teeth for our semantics processing...

For QA, I'd say something like [[Thief of Sanity]] and/or [[Underworld Breach]] would be the biggest problem child. Essentially every action permission mechanic (e.g. MDFCs, Mutate, Disturb, etc) needs to be vetted through "well what happens if you get to cast your opponent's cards, and what if they're face down?". And there have been many bugs with conferring an alternative cost with non-mana payments over the years; I think we're finally through the woods with them though. #wotc_staff

Why thank you! While we still have never found a good opportunity to give an in-depth article about its workings (and it's one of those topics where's it's very hard to avoid going down endless digressions!), we did do a video with Gavin Verhey's Youtube show, Good Morning Magic, a few months ago that discusses this very topic, featuring yours truly! Here it is. Also I'm usually open to answering ad-hoc questions (at least ones that I have good answers to!). #wotc_staff

Looks like the predictive discount from Vine Gecko is acting up, possibly in combination with the Skydiver's minimum-1 kicker. That can definitely cause you to lose priority of it's your only meaningful action. I'll look into it tomorrow. #wotc_staff

This was probably introduced with AFR, it seems to be some interaction between "choosing your hybrid mana symbol" and choosing an X value. We'll investigate it soon. #wotc_staff

I'll double check with rules manager Jess Dunks on Monday, but I'm pretty sure the ability conferred by Druid Class is a characteristic-defining ability, and thus is applied in layer 7a, before Emergent Sequence is applied in 7b, meaning this is not a bug but certainly unintuitive. #wotc_staff

I assume you cast [[Emergent Sequence]]? The permanent is affected by a layered effect turning its power and toughness to 0/0 (which was created by Emergent Sequence). This means that at layer 7b, the permanent becomes a 0/0, far later than where it becomes a 2/4 in layer 1. #wotc_staff

In a way, it was giving +1/+1 for each other attacking creature - each attacking creature other than Paladin Class! #wotc_staff

Anything that talks about a "forest card" is affected by the bug (and the fix). #wotc_staff

As always, precise words matter. Expressive Iteration reads "the exiled card", Light Up the Stage reads "those cards". This means EI ends up using the machinery that linked abilities use, whereas LUtS uses recorded information from the resolving spell. It should be reasonable for our anaphora resolution to also use the recorded resolution state information for EI. #wotc_staff

Thanks for the report, we'll get on it. #wotc_staff

Lemme guess: the Auspicious Starrix I see in your opponent's graveyard had been mutated onto an Old-Growth Troll, and this Troll Warrior token came from sacrificing the Starrix-as-an-aura? MTG sure can be ridiculous sometimes. We'll look into getting the right token identifier for this bananas case... #wotc_staff

We actually do have a fix for the loop detector to identify this style of situation and cause a draw now. It should come with AFR. The bug was that we didn't identify that spell copies might be mandatory, so the loop detector thought that the copies were being proactively cast (and that therefore something like running out of time would cause this loop to end, as the autoresponder would rather pass than cast anything). #wotc_staff