Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God DOTP2014 options

by **Splinterverse** » 06 Jul 2019, 22:42

Hey. Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God is a very interesting card that I would love to be able to play in DOTP2014.

I thought I would start a thread to discuss options to make the card viable in DOTP2014.

A couple thoughts that I had . . .

1. I know there are functions to copy cards. Could we use those to copy the abilities of a planeswalker without wiping his existing abilities?
2. We could have a granted ability on Bolas that grants numbered abilities based on what planeswalkers are on the battlefield. But we'd have to add either all of the abilities to his card or some sort of manager card or function file.
3. We could add activated abilities on planeswalkers that are granted when Bolas is on the battlefield. They could be granted to Bolas or the original planeswalker, but remove Loyalty from Bolas when activated.
4. Outside of the Community Wad, I know I could make a custom version of the card that just has the abilities of the planeswalkers in my deck via granted abilities based on the presence of those planeswalkers. But that would be the last resort I guess.

Any other ideas?

by **Splinterverse** » 24 Jul 2019, 19:56

The more that I think about this, the more that I think the best option would be to just add a static ability to each planeswalker card that checks for the presence of Bolas and grants him copies of the abilities on that planeswalker. That would mean we'd have to have two copies of each ability on our planeswalker cards (one with a resource_id and one without), which would be more code to maintain, but I don't think it would be too difficult.

The biggest challenge would be implementing it on 196 other planeswalkers that exist today. The static ability would be easy to copy paste onto each card en masse. It's the copying/numbering of the existing abilities that would be time-consuming.

by **Xander9009** » 22 Oct 2019, 18:37

Don't check for Bolas. Check for permanents with a fake characteristic. This way, if this kind of card ever gets printed again (such as another Bolas with it), then it won't take any updating at all.

Making a fake characteristic isn't difficult. Just add the constant to the constants file and give the card the code to spawn the manager.

But yeah, I'd agree that's probably the best option.