Collectible Card Game Headquarters

Version September 2013

It was previously reported that vivid lands when autotapped expend a counter rather than tapping for base mana when paying colorless mana and was marked as fixed. I've tested for Vivid Marsh and that appears to be fixed, but the other vivid lands still have the problem.

I don't see any changes in these cards' code compared to OtIv2 except for the sound effect I added.

Vivid Marsh only seems to work right because of the order of colors chosen to pay colorless mana (colorless if it's available, else black, else blue, else green, else red, else white).

Fixing this properly isn't trivial. A really horrid hack that might work would be to make them temporarily tappable for colorless if you're paying a mana cost requiring only colorless mana. I'll give it some thought.

Korath said:
Vivid Marsh only seems to work right because of the order of colors chosen to pay colorless mana (colorless if it's available, else black, else blue, else green, else red, else white).

Is it because the engine (autotap feature always reads in this order:colorless if it's available, else black, else blue, else green, else red, else white)?

Right.

Rewrote these during the Great Counter Migration.

Much better, but still needs work. Don't know how easy this is, but is there any way to make these cards spend mana last? I ask because I had a Vivid Creek and 2 Badlands as my only mana sources, cast Arc Lightning via double-click (auto-tap) and rather than spend a R from the Badlands and colorless from the Vivid Creek it used the Vivid Creek to produce the R and the Badlands for the colorless.

Not easily. We know which function gets called to pick a mana source to autotap (try_to_pay_for_mana_by_autotapping() at 0x42F4A0), and what its parameters do (the important one is a bitfield with flags for "Don't tap basic lands", "Don't tap nonbasic lands", "Don't tap cards flagged 'Don't auto tap this card'", "Don't tap artifacts", and "Don't tap creatures" - adding more calls to that function with the latter two bits set are how the AutotapArtifacts and AutotapCreatures config.txt options work).

Exactly how it works, though, is unclear, and adding more flags to that bitfield would be difficult. We'll probably eventually want at least one more, for "Don't tap mana sources with a drawback" (using one of the unused bits in Manalink.csv, including such things as Rainbow Vale, City of Brass, Saprazzan Skerry, and Princess Lucrezia ), to improve the AI. But this is getting a bit too far into the "make the AI play the game for you" territory for human mana doubleclicking for my taste. Just turn on "Don't autotap this card" for lands like that.