[confirmed]Altered Ego no X

by **Korath** » 15 Dec 2017, 19:28

Describe the bug:
~~Altered Ego doesn't charge , so never enters the battlefield with counters.~~

Which card behaved improperly?
Altered Ego.

Which update are you using? (date, name)Which type? (duel, gauntlet, sealed deck)
df88666 from 2017 Dec 14.

What exactly should be the correct behavior/interaction?
{X}

, not

and charge mana afterwards, and definitely not just {2}

.

Are any other cards possibly affected by this bug?
Well, yes. Manalink's handling of most X-spells even without a nonzero generic cost is broken, even compared to the original game. When there's a generic cost besides X, things are even less reliable. (A complete list.)

The corner cases I was trying to test, and couldn't because the card's basic functionality is broken, were:

Whether it gets counters even if you choose not to clone a creature. Looks like you do, if you somehow manage to get it to acknowledge an X cost. (You shouldn't.)
Whether it gets counters if it copies Melira's Keepers. I don't know what the correct behavior would be anymore, between it being a self-replacement effect and the way enters-the-bf-as-a-copy works with the horrendously contorted layering introduced as a "minor rules change to make Essence of the Wild and similar cards in the future work intuitively".

by **Aswan jaguar** » 15 May 2019, 12:43

No charge x mana fixed also in commit 3936db6f.
Altered Ego still gets counters even if you don't copy anything as it gets the counters while cast and has them in stack.
It gets counters if it copies Melira's Keepers. Which logically seems wrong as first copies Melira's Keepers and then it should apply the counters but then it is too late to apply Melira's Keepers ruling:
6/1/2011 If a creature with a counter on it becomes a copy of Melira’s Keepers, those counters will remain.

For the x cost being paid after colored/generic mana cost is something adopted by Gargaroz and most such cards are coded like this.