List of Cards that freeze the game

Ampmp11

I submitted this one to support recently:

I played Deploy the Gatewatch which fetched: Fathom Feeder, Decimator of the Provinces, and then Emrakrul, the Promised End. Attacked. AI played nothing. Fathom Feeder's activate gems activated of which I popped one and it drew a card. The game froze after Fathom Feeder drew a card from one of the activate gems being popped and attacked into a Paranoid-Parish Blade who had delirium. Once Paranoid left the board Decimator never attacked to finish the round and the I was unable to do anything on the board.

octal9

JC:

That's great to hear about the sandbox; this makes me less gunshy about posting particularly weird bugs. Also happy to hear that those three are being looked at. I'm not surprised to hear that the Ulrich return-from-turn-creature loop seems to be embedded directly into your "rules engine."

The sandbox bit is great to hear because now I can ask freely about you testing whether's the SP freeze mechanism is/(was!) the same one that is affecting Liliana's Raise Dead, which causes freezes as well. Additionally: I haven't tested but if I were a betting man I'd check this not comprehensive list: Dutiful Return, Dukhara Scavenger (test with Thraben Gargoyle/Westvale Abbey I guess), Macabre Waltz, Possessed Skaab, Wildest Dreams, Dark Petition, Necromantic Summons, Demon of Dark Schemes, and Emeria Sheperd.

I ask for verification on these cases because we have seen other cases where card/ability behaviors do not match one another when they appear as though they should. To pull a completely random example out of thin air: Ob Nixilis' Torment, Imprisoned in the Moon, and Oath of Liliana are failing against targets that have incoming damage reduced (Prevent Damage, Undergrowth Champion). It seems that instead of using "Destroy Target" like Grip of Desolation or To the Slaughter, these three are using "Deal damage to target equal to its max toughness". I've not tested any KLD cards for similar behavior, but...

Hibernum_JC

octal9 wrote:

JC:

That's great to hear about the sandbox; this makes me less gunshy about posting particularly weird bugs. Also happy to hear that those three are being looked at. I'm not surprised to hear that the Ulrich return-from-turn-creature loop seems to be embedded directly into your "rules engine."

Yeah, the bug with Ulrich and Geier Reach Bandit is something crazy alright. It's out of scope for these forum posts, but let's say it's a tricky one.

octal9 wrote:

The sandbox bit is great to hear because now I can ask freely about you testing whether's the SP freeze mechanism is/(was!) the same one that is affecting Liliana's Raise Dead, which causes freezes as well. Additionally: I haven't tested but if I were a betting man I'd check this not comprehensive list: Dutiful Return, Dukhara Scavenger (test with Thraben Gargoyle/Westvale Abbey I guess), Macabre Waltz, Possessed Skaab, Wildest Dreams, Dark Petition, Necromantic Summons, Demon of Dark Schemes, and Emeria Sheperd.

All of these will be fixed. These all use the exact same action within the cards, and the action itself was fixed, so any effect that returns card from the dead will no longer freeze on reinforced transformed werewolves.

octal9 wrote:

I ask for verification on these cases because we have seen other cases where card/ability behaviors do not match one another when they appear as though they should. To pull a completely random example out of thin air: Ob Nixilis' Torment, Imprisoned in the Moon, and Oath of Liliana are failing against targets that have incoming damage reduced (Prevent Damage, Undergrowth Champion). It seems that instead of using "Destroy Target" like Grip of Desolation or To the Slaughter, these three are using "Deal damage to target equal to its max toughness". I've not tested any KLD cards for similar behavior, but...

The problem with "Destroy target" is that there needs to be a manual toggle to force destruction through effects. Sometimes that toggle is off, and that's what causes these cards/effects to not work through Prevent Damage and UC. Whenever they come up I try to fix them, but it can still slip through. I'll do another pass so we can squish these as well.

Hibernum_JC

Ampmp11 wrote:

I submitted this one to support recently:

I played Deploy the Gatewatch which fetched: Fathom Feeder, Decimator of the Provinces, and then Emrakrul, the Promised End. Attacked. AI played nothing. Fathom Feeder's activate gems activated of which I popped one and it drew a card. The game froze after Fathom Feeder drew a card from one of the activate gems being popped and attacked into a Paranoid-Parish Blade who had delirium. Once Paranoid left the board Decimator never attacked to finish the round and the I was unable to do anything on the board.

This is a unique sequence of actions. I can reproduce this exactly, but I doubt the problem lies with this exact sequence of events. I'll see what I can do.

octal9

Here's another freeze, if you can replicate.

I cannot provide steps on this one, outside of "have three creatures already on your battlefield, then spawn a token" - sometimes I have had it freeze, sometimes not. I took Call the Bloodline out of my old Emrakul's Corruption deck because I lost too many matches due to this freeze:

viewtopic.php?f=32&t=52375&p=577101#p577101

viewtopic.php?p=557931#p557931 <- specifically the post linked

viewtopic.php?p=581894#p581894 <- contains video, does not show bug occurring but shows the resultant freeze

viewtopic.php?f=32&t=54896&p=599458&hilit=vampire#p599458 <- also contains video

I'll try harder to replicate today and see if I can't figure out how to force it to happen. Maybe it only happens when the tokens are spawned without direct interaction from the player? That is to say, From Beyond, Activate Gems could cause the freeze - but a spell like Call the Scions or Devil's Playground wouldn't? I don't really know. It might be similar to the "Support text down the middle of the screen" & related to tapping too fast on token creation.

Morphis

octal9 wrote:

Here's another freeze, if you can replicate.

I cannot provide steps on this one, outside of "have three creatures already on your battlefield, then spawn a token" - sometimes I have had it freeze, sometimes not. I took Call the Bloodline out of my old Emrakul's Corruption deck because I lost too many matches due to this freeze:

viewtopic.php?f=32&t=52375&p=577101#p577101

viewtopic.php?p=557931#p557931 <- specifically the post linked

viewtopic.php?p=581894#p581894 <- contains video, does not show bug occurring but shows the resultant freeze

viewtopic.php?f=32&t=54896&p=599458&hilit=vampire#p599458 <- also contains video

I'll try harder to replicate today and see if I can't figure out how to force it to happen. Maybe it only happens when the tokens are spawned without direct interaction from the player? That is to say, From Beyond, Activate Gems could cause the freeze - but a spell like Call the Scions or Devil's Playground wouldn't? I don't really know. It might be similar to the "Support text down the middle of the screen" & related to tapping too fast on token creation.

From what I have seen it could be that all those bugs are related to "too many things showing at once".
I mean when you add up one or more of the following, these freezes are more likely to happen:
- fevered vision extra card draw at end of ai turn
- start of turn multiple token generation throug gem color changers/destruction(call of the bloodline Sigarda)
- start of turn extra draw through clue destruction because of gem color change/destruction(usually not natural expiration).
- start of turn extra draw through prism array cause of gem change/destruction
- tokens naturally spawning at start of turn(from beyond/thopter spy network)


It could be more an UI bug than a game mechanic bug.
While it's not that easy to reproduce, with sufficient element from the above it should happen fast enough and overall "confirm" what I suspect.