Noob question about Riaak's Deck Builder

by **addict insane** » 16 Jun 2015, 23:04

Most of the times, when I build a deck with scarce basic lands (1,2 or none) the deck builder automatically puts a number of about 250 basic lands.

I've tried modifying the number of spells that count as lands, the minimum ammount of lands, the CMC of the cards ignored. I can't find the pattern. Sometimes it spawns 200 lands, sometimes it spawns none.

Any helps?

by **Xander9009** » 17 Jun 2015, 03:58

When I changed the "Ignore cards with CMC over" option to 0 it fixed this problem for me. You said you messed with it, but didn't say how, so I'd try setting it specifically to 0 and see if that works. If you want, say, 4 forest, then set the ignore to 0 and the forests to 4.

by **RiiakShiNal** » 17 Jun 2015, 10:49

First off this is not a problem with the Deck Builder, the Deck Builder does not automatically add any basic land. This is a problem with how the game engine handles decks (most commonly a problem with decks with 4+ colours, but can also occur with multi-colour decks that have no basic land for at least one colour). The game engine looks at the deck and attempts to determine how much basic land should be in the deck for each colour in the deck, however, the game only supports 3 colours and the developers expected there to always be at least 1 basic land for each colour, so when it encounters a situation where things don't match up to what it wants a bug in the engine causes large amounts of basic land to be added.

When making a multi-coloured deck the easiest way to avoid this is to set the Ignore cards with CMC over to 0 (which tells the engine to ignore any card that requires mana), and manually set the minimum basic lands to put in the deck (like Xander9009 said). This essentially tells the engine the percentage of land for each colour to use for the purposes of adding basic land to get up to the minimum of 60 cards in the deck.

This is a DotP bug, not a Deck Builder bug.

by **addict insane** » 18 Jun 2015, 02:29

Maybe I'm wrong, but thought I had read something about your deck builder auto-calculating lands. But yeah, it makes sense that it's a game bug.

About the ignore cmc I tried exactly that, setting it to ignore CMC to 0 and setting a minimum number of lands. I only works consistently if I set up at least two basic lands.

I guess I'll stick to less colours since my 4+ colour decks suck anyways.

by **RiiakShiNal** » 18 Jun 2015, 10:56

addict insane wrote:Maybe I'm wrong, but thought I had read something about your deck builder auto-calculating lands. But yeah, it makes sense that it's a game bug.

It attempts to auto-calculate how many basic lands the game will add (shows that number above the main deck), but the Deck Builder itself does not add any basic lands unless you manually add them to the deck.

Another piece you could be thinking about would be that the Deck Builder automatically calculates the Land Pools based on the card colours in the deck. Though the Land Pools don't actually add basic lands, they just tell the engine what specific basic land cards should be used when it needs to add lands (basically adds some variety to the basic lands you will see while playing).

addict insane wrote:About the ignore cmc I tried exactly that, setting it to ignore CMC to 0 and setting a minimum number of lands. I only works consistently if I set up at least two basic lands.

This is again due to engine bugs. DotP 2013 worked perfectly fine with all and/or none of these settings, but then again DotP 2013 had full support for 5 colour decks.

addict insane wrote:I guess I'll stick to less colours since my 4+ colour decks suck anyways.

That is what is generally recommended since the game only officially supports 3 colour and below decks. The Deck Builder allows creating 5+ colour decks, but it can't compensate for the game bugs without doing things modders don't want (and would interpret as bugs).

by **Xander9009** » 18 Jun 2015, 18:52

Since we're on the topic, maybe it would be possible to detect when this might happen and show a popup when exporting a deck likely to encounter the bug? Warn the user their lands might be messed up and suggest what may fix it? This way, the user is aware of it and of the fact it's not the Deck Builder's fault. I only mention it because this is the third or fourth time I can think of in the last few months this has come up.