Creature order switching (Mantle of Webs etc)

MisterPete

There are times when the order of your creatures changes when it should not. For example when casting Mantle of Webs it moves the creature it is cast on to the first position. This unexpected effect can be really bad since creature order can be really important and can mean that a creature lives or dies that otherwise wouldn't have.

Ithilglin

Mantle of web gives Reach, and creatures with reach and defender always moves in first position for what I know.

But it seems there is a bug related to these habilities since the last maintenance. It occurred twice for me.

Each time I had knight of the white orchid (which has defender) and breackneck rider in night form on the field.
The first time was against ajani and my neck breaker was disabled. Once the hability end, the two cards switched.
The second time, I had neckbreacker and skyraker giant on the field (which has reach). Then I played the knight.
The knight moved correctly to first position but the neckbreacker stayed second and the giant moved third.

So maybe the bug is related to neckbreacker which is already bugged for not correctly switching back to day form.

MisterPete

Oh ok, didn't realize it was expected with Mantle of Webs. I don't really find it intuitive but I guess it's not a bug in that particular case. There have been other times when I've been surprised by position changes but I can't remember what the circumstances were. I'll keep an eye open, maybe they were mostly defender/reach cases as well.

Do you think the reasoning behind that is so that they can take hits from berserker creatures first?

Ithilglin

Well, it seems to be a logical reason.

May be there are also programming reason such as, if defenders can be anywhere, each attacking creature need to test each creature of the defenders. The way it is, if the first defender's creature can't block, there is no need to check the others.

But only the team could answer that question.