Mind's Desire

[Beached As]

I've been working hard at getting Mind's Desire to work, but there's still a few problems:

1. The AI can't use it.
2. Any spell copied to Mind's Desire can be activated as an instant, thus you can cast creature or sorcery spells as instants
3. You can pay alternative costs (such as morph) but the card errata says that you're not allowed to. I also tested it with recall and it seems that X is infinite (but restricted to your hand size due to recall's coding). The errata says that X must be equal to 0.

I've committed my version of Mind's Desire, so have a look and see if you can point out any problems or give any guidance.

[Beached As]

UPDATE: (Would be nice if got some replies though)
Problem 1 is going to be ignored for the time being.
Problem 2 is solved.
Made some progress on Problem 3, it turns out that Recall is a lone exception and has been dealt with. All other "X" spells have X = 0. You can still pay alternative costs such as morph costs

[DennisBergkamp]

Tricky stuff... I really don't know, I'd have to look at the code and do some tests myself... I'll play around with this and see if I can come up with some answers

EDIT: By the way, is there a reason Mind's Desire currently has Indestructible + Shroud?

[Chris H.]

I think that you have been doing a great job.

Our work will sometimes uncover situations that are difficult to resolve. I had a problem with Animate Artifact. At first everything looked good and I discovered later that our card drawing routines for stacking cards was not written to account for some situations.

I could not come up with a 100 % rules accurate bug fix but I now have a few checks in place to prevent the ugly card drawing problem.

The original dev Rares has stated many times that he sometimes had to cut a few corners. And the AI part of the code can be really tricky at times.

We do not thank one another often enough … so thank you for your time and efforts.

[Beached As]

Mind's Desire has shroud because i could at one stage return it to my hand using Temporal Fissure while it was on the field (and having shroud fixed that). I whacked in indestructible because i though maybe cards could destroy Mind's Desire. I dont like giving Mind's Desire these properties and hopefully i'll find alternative means to disable it from being targetted, but until then i guess at least shroud should stay.

Hmm i'll look into Animate Artifact, see what i can find.
Haha thanks Chris, but i'm not the only one thats hard at work. Thank you all!

[Beached As]

Animate Artifact seems to be a specific case (because other enchant creature cards work) and it seems that it's to do with the way it copies. If your lucky enough to cascade into Animate Artifact, it will ask you to play the cost.

[Beached As]

UPDATE:

I believe i have Mind's Desire working for most cards now, with the exception of multikicker cards. Any testing to confirm this would be great.

With multikicker, i think theres a problem when its played for free thus the problem lies somewhere in GameAction.java with the PlayCardnoCost command. At the moment, i'm not ballin' enough with java to allow the player to pay the additional multikicker cost. I might look into it later though.

[DennisBergkamp]

Great stuff, Beached As!
Multikicker not working is just a minor thing... I'm sure people would really enjoy this card either way