Shandalar - Feature Requests

If it is Only for test purposes maybe I am fine with it,although one should take into account ante when deckbulding.In game I am totally against as it is a big part of shandalar strategy and why it is so important to have the appropriate magic to change your ante.Besides it is a small price for AI to loose a card when AI antes a lot and your best cards usually in towns under siege.

It's not a "small price for the AI" to ante a card - it's an enormous price for the AI to have cards randomly missing from their deck, any amount of them. You can't make AI decks with random cards missing, good lord. You have a card randomly missing from your deck in a tournament you get a round loss. And the ante-changing mechanic is perfectly fine enough for giving you a chance to not lose something you payed a ton for or got out of a dungeon if you lose a match. I'm not saying "remove ante", I'm saying, mark the cards but don't remove them from the deck for the match - it's interfering with so much that I'm frankly astonished we're even having a discussion about it. If a card would ante additional cards in-game, just have them marked and exiled to simulate that effect. I bloody well pay attention to ante when deckbuilding by not putting too many cards I couldn't stand to lose if I lose a match in a deck. And I hit the power before you can blink if Tarmogoyf or even a handy common I'm trying to stack a bunch of pops up. But having a random card missing from your deck in every match, for the player and the AI, that's insane.

I mean, just read Biovisionary. So I have to put 5 of them in a deck (which breaks them, and also ups the chance of getting a free one from dice in dungeons), to make sure I don't randomly have a deck with only 3 of them (which makes them completely worthless)? So the AI with Pack Hunt and Timberpack Wolf is randomly going to have a copy missing? Or an AI control deck is going to be missing one of thier 2 copies of their finisher or be forced to run more which it doesn't want? Or a green guy randomly missing Llanowar elves? I could go on for days.

I don't mind it being optional for people who would insist on having it work as ante originally worked. Or the other way around, as long as it's done. Please tell me it's not too much work so you don't have to force yourself to do it . It takes hours of compromises just trying to make AI decks the AI can consistently play remotely well, trying to make them work with stuff randomly missing from them is... insane. We can call it a testing thing if you want, but it needs no testing, I can guarantee that. Hell, if it somehow completely obsoleted the black power - I'd still never ever think of turning it back on if I could switch it off. Same if it obsoleted the white power, or all the powers, and if you would think you're doing something against your will just because this tiresome guy asked for it - you can freely make the option for the Ante not to remove the cards for the duration of the match shut down all world magics and I'd still be grateful to you for significantly improving the game.

Just to be clear: What I'm asking for is not "shut ante down". It's "make ante not remove anything from decks until the match is over".

[Korath]

This is a lot less feasible than it appears at first glance. What happens, for instance, if your ante is the only Sengir Vampire in your deck, you cast Contract from Below, and that Sengir Vampire happens to be on top of your library?

Or if it were anted during the game, what if you cast Pull from Eternity on it (or use one of the shiny new BFZ processors) to put it in your graveyard, got it back into your hand or library or battlefield from there, then anted it again?

I'm not sure what "feasible" has to do with your example. Is it coded in a problematic way? Or is it problematic because it's not for some reason clear that rules on Ante weren't updated since forever because wizard stopped supporting the mechanic entirely very early on for legal reasons and never developed it like it did other things?

It was removed from sanctioned play because it altered the number of cards in decks (before anything is played!) before it was discontinued as a mechanic because of "gambling" and everything else. It can't be kept as it was, no way. It has to be changed (and not even all that much, the initial card is the problem, everything else is completely fine). (*and before you ask yes, really - tourney matches couldn't be ante matches because it makes 0 sense to expect people to play with random cards missing, and they would be by the end of a tournament probably be missing a bunch on top of missing one every match even if they're winning. So since the matches couldn't be ante, then ante cards had to be removed at the start of the match, which people abused to play with less than 60 cards in decks, which was even worse, so they banned them entirely. The whole gambling thing came later, serious games of magic can't be played with random cards missing).

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As for what if you're using an ante card during a match - that's all fine. You can remove a random card from decks as a result of a card you played. That's part of the effect of that card. But you can't automatically be down a random card just because you set down to play.

So if you cast Contract from Below and end up removing your Sengir - same risk as if you cast Demonic Consultation or a million other cards designed to mimic Contract from Below, for all practical purposes.

As for processors and other exile fiddling - it's very simple, all such effects (you can sit down and check) require cards in exile to have an owner. Cards anted during the match are in exile and have no owner. Problem solved.

The original rules and "ante zone" were introduced as a means to keep players honest. So that you couldn't somehow work it back into the game or that cards removed from the game don't get mixed up with anted cards and then the winner claims this or that, that you anted something else, you know how kids are. It was a record keeping thing. There's no way for this to happen in computer magic, so there's 0 need to remove the initial ante-cards from the deck.

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So you can do it in any of the two ways, have a separate ante zone like in the comprehensive rules, and simply add cards removed from the game during the match to that ante zone, and the initial ante cards at match resolution. Or you can mark ante separately and make cards exiled by ante cards in a match change ownership status to "none" until end of the match.

There's two ante cards which rely on the actual ante rules - Darkpact and Jeweled Bird. Because they require things to be removed from the game at the start. Removing cards from decks before the game starts is still insane and should not be done, but those two would need to work a bit different under the hood to replicate their effect.

Have to think about it.

[Korath]

It's not feasible because the rules you're proposing aren't self-consistent. You say to mark a card as ante'd at the beginning of the game, but offer no solution when the same card gets anted again.

(Not to mention that your concept of "exiled but doesn't have an owner so nothing can interact with it" pretty much duplicates the ante zone.)

To the extent that ante was forbidden in tournaments because of deck makeup, it was because of its effect on later rounds, not the current game. Having a random card in your deck set aside at the beginning of the game is, absent tutoring, exactly equivalent to having that card happen to be the one shuffled to the bottom of your library. Tournaments could deal with that. What they couldn't deal with was the loss of cards in double elimination or (especially) round-robin formats.

Maybe this could be made to work if the ante was picked until the game ends; in the ante window, you'd see a face-down card (or three when attacking a city) for cards ante'd at game start, and face-up cards as normal for cards ante'd during the game. Even setting aside that it breaks Darkpact and Jeweled Bird and the Sleight of Hand worldmagic, I can't imagine this would be any fun to play; it's bad enough when you know that you must win this game or lose an unreplaceable dungeon treasure, but randomly finding out you just lost the Time Vault or Tolarian Academy or Necropotence that you've been building your deck around for the whole game after you already lost the duel and can't do anything about it anymore would be just horrid.

Players already have to build their decks with the consideration that they might lose a card to ante. Screwing up their play experience with a scenario like that, just to make it easier to design AI decks, doesn't seem like the right way to go.

All right, how about this then: add the option to the ini which adds the ante to the ante zone at match resolution and disables ante cards (which could add the cards itself to the ante) altogether. One option lets you play with ante cards, the other with more consistent AI (and player) decks. I know I would personally always chose more consistent AI decks over ante cards pretty much every time as it also makes plenty of added cards work properly.

Can you at least tell me where the mechanism for this is located in the src? I've got a buddy who'll do it for me, and you said you could enable it for testing purposes. What would someone who wanted to do it on their end have to do, roughly?