I've been thinking about lands and I have a few thoughts/questions.
I play almost exclusively against AI opponents. The non-MM lands are an improvement in that the AI can use them, but I'm finding a problem, particularly in two-color decks. Since the cards always list the mana in color wheel order, any dual lands in a deck are basically all going to be the first color for the AI player. For example, if a Red-White deck has 4 copies of
Plateau and 4 copies of
Sacred Foundry, that is really 8 mountains to the AI player since the AI player doesn't ever change the default mana choice on the non-MM cards. (With the MM cards, it does nothing, so it's still an improvement to work with non-MM.)
Xander, I know you are working on some improvements to lands. Will your changes make any improvements in this area?
Out of curiosity, I did try adding two mana ability blocks to a test card to see what it would do. Interestingly, both worked, but it only tapped for the lowest one in the file. The higher one became an infinite source of that color because it would never tap. Unfortunately, I don't believe we can trigger off of mana ability blocks, so I don't know of any way we could force it to tap. If we could, that would be great because essentially the card could be automatically tapped for any color of mana it included. (I doubt there is a way to do this, just mentioning on the 0.001% chance.)
So depending on Xander's answer to the question above, a couple of other thoughts . . .
1.) We could make AI friendly versions of some dual lands that reverse the order of the two mana symbols. When included in a deck, the human player wouldn't notice anything different (other than card text), but the AI player would have 4 plains and 4 mountains in the above cited example. This doesn't work for every deck and would have to be handled carefully. As you may have read, I've been making "AI friendly" versions of many of the decks in the CW. To do that with the current cards we have, I've had to adjust the default basic land counts in some decks. I hate to do this because it could throw off the balance, but as I said, I'm almost exclusively playing against AI, so it is essential. Most of the decks in the CW contain MM lands, so I have to update them any way.
2.) If there aren't any other ways to make the lands better for AI, could we add some code to the non-MM lands that (1) checks to see if the controller is AI (2) if the controller is AI, it checks the chroma count of the hand and then (3) adjusts the default mana type based on chroma count. There are some issues with this approach: (a) it doesn't account for mana needs on the battlefield in terms of activated abilities and (b) it doesn't account for similar cards on the battlefield doing the same thing (in other words, all copies of
Sacred Foundry would make themselves default to the same color). An alternative might be to base it on the amount of basic lands in play, but even that wouldn't be perfect.
I'd love to find some sort of solution. I hesitate to add two-color decks to the game now because it has been an issue. Three-color is an improvement because the color wheel situation is less of a problem (you usually end up with one dual land with each color as a default). Four-color and five-color are mostly impossible for the AI to play well because they really depend on a player's ability to switch lands' mana color to meet the needs.
Posted: 12 Jan 2017, 11:09
). I think it probably does have to do with the specific colorless mana.
, but it has an availability block which prevents it from being cast unless the player actually has two colorless mana. I hadn't considered the scenario of casting without paying the mana cost, but in order to fix it, we'd need to modify the function it uses to also return true if it's being cast for free, not only true in the case of having colorless mana. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do that.