cholulaablongata wrote:1.)
Gloom is totally broken. Somehow, I can't play lands of that color or even pay the 3 extra mana to pay a white spell if it's on the board. Basically, it just locks me out of white.
Frack. I'll look into it. I suspect it's something I did somewhere else rather than something I did directly to
Gloom; but
Gloom's mechanism isn't as well-understood as most of the rest of duel, since it's been broken in Manalink for a very long time.
2.) Eldrazi Spawn cannot be sacrificed for mana.
They can, but had to tap to do it (and so couldn't while summoning-sick). Fixed.
This was a problem for a long time in Manalink. I was hoping that it was mainly because of cards added there, not because of problems with the original Microprose cards. (It's definitely not
Crystal Ball's fault, and doesn't appear to be
Sylvan Library's either.)
Cards in play, on the stack, and in hand are all kept in the same unsorted array, card_instances[][]. (Cards in libraries, graveyards, and exile are kept separate, and nothing is stored about them except for a four-byte id.) Since a fair number of cards care about how many a player has in hand, and iterating over the whole array to count how many instances are valid, not in play, and not on the stack is relatively slow, a separate count (hand_count[]) is maintained for each player.
The problem was that the functions to draw a card, to discard, and various actions that could add or remove a card to or from a player's hand (bounce_permanent(), kill_card(), put_into_play(), many others) didn't change hand_count[] themselves; it was the responsibility of the individual cards that used those functions. This path was fraught with peril and bugs, usually manifesting either with
Library of Alexandria (as you observed) or a "discard your hand" effect demanding that you pick another card to discard when your hand was already empty - but it wasn't ever the fault of
Library of Alexandria or
Lion's Eye Diamond or
Wit's End or whatever; it was some
other, completely innocuous and non-obvious card that failed to adjust hand_count[] like it was supposed to.
(Annoyingly enough, the variable that displays in the title of the "Your Hand (6)" window, while it's always correct for the current game state and doesn't need to be manually maintained like hand_count[], isn't reliable during AI speculation and so can't be used.)
We eventually got rid of this error by making draw_a_card() and discard_card() and add_card_to_hand() and all the other functions of this sort maintain hand_count[] instead of making individual cards do it. I've done the same in expanding Shandalar. It's certainly possible that I overlooked a function needing a new version that maintains hand_count[], but I don't think so.
I'm really not looking forward to tracking these all down again. Hrm. Maybe I'll recalculate hand_count[] de novo during recalculate_all_cards_in_play(), which has to walk the card_instances[][] array anyway and gets run fairly frequently (almost exactly corresponding to whenever state-based actions are checked under modern rules).
4.)
Seat of the Synod, and perhaps other artifact lands, are considered spells and can be countered.
Yes, and
Dryad Arbor, known. They trigger lucky charms, too.
Here's the big one: 5.)
Armageddon totally froze up the client vs Winged Stallion late-game. It looked like that AI was 'thinking' but never resolved. Eventually I got 3 error messages and I had to close out the game. For some boneheaded reason, I didn't take a screen shot. I will try to reproduce this glitch and post it again.
I haven't touched
Armageddon, nor anything relevant that it calls. This is 99% certain the fault of some other card on the battlefield or in the AI's hand.
Also, how do I install the enemy decks overhaul? The bad guys are still playing with awful cards like
Coral Helm.
Well, there's better enemy decks in
this thread, but they still only use the original 650ish cards in the original game. Nobody's released decks using the new card pool yet.
There are instructions
here how to make the Manalink deckbuilder only display cards available in Shandalar. (Don't use the rarity.dat file attached to that, though; it's almost a month old. There's an up-to-date one included in the Ruined Tower release zip.) It only took a couple substitutions to change Merfolk Shaman's deck from "laughable" to "pretty scary when you're only starting at 10 life"; I know I'd find new AI decks to play against to be pretty motivating.
Posted: 10 May 2015, 16:15
, which I've fixed. I don't see how the executable let lands through without charging for them, too, but I've fixed that as well. And fixed 
still won't be affected by it just yet