Lena Selfless Champion not acting as Leader to tokens with knight subtype given by Dub

TheDude1

A little convoluted, but the basic setup:

• I cast Spore Swarm and Foundry of the Consuls to generate saproling and thopter tokens
• I cast Lena as the third creature
• I cast Dub to grant the first creature (one of the token sets) the knight subtype

Nothing else happens...

What I thought should happen:

• Dub gives the first token set the knight subtype
• That token set gets absorbed by Lena's leader function
• After being absorbed, the second token stack moves into the first position, which then also gets the knight subtype
• That second token stack is also absorbed by Lena

I know the Leader function doesn't matter which order it's played - ie, you can play a saproling before Slimefoot or after, and it gets absorbed either way - so it seems like this is an issue with Lena not interacting with the Dub effect.  Or, alternately: Knight + Token does not mean it is a Knight Token?

Laeuftbeidir

I had a theory what might have gone wrong and was able to prove it in a quick match.

Your theory is indeed correct, but didn't take into account how the triggers.. Well, trigger.

When you cast dub and one or two tokens first, then cast  the leader, the token with the additional subtype knight gets swallowed. The other token now gets the subtype as an effect from dub, but won't trigger the leader since there was no "movement". If you now reinforce the leader or cast another token, the board state gets refreshed and the next round of tokens get swallowed.

Anyway, it's buggy, your idea should work out.

TheDude1

Thanks for checking.  I was also going to experiment with casting Mantle of Webs (or similar) to force tokens into the first position to then get Dub, but couldn't quite get the card draw to work out.

I get that this is a niche setup but I worry that the impact means you have to cast things in such a specific order that the deck build in general isn't worth the trouble.  It also would be a bit of a bummer as it seems like a straightforward use of Dub's core function.

Mburn7

I agree with @Laeuftbeidir, in that it would probably work if you cast Lena after the tokens the knight subtype.

I like the way you think, though!  That's the kind of funky combo I like to play with, I'm actually kind of mad I didn't think of it first.

Kinesia

Also... Casting reach or defender onto things does NOT force the reorder currently like it used to. It's fairly easy to get reach or defender creatures in the later slots which messed up the Bodyguard.
It used to work.

Furks

I've had another bug related to lena so I'll post it in this thread:

Lena, selfless champion SOMETIMES absorbs the new lifelink soldier tokens. 

It's not consistent and doesn't seem to happen all the times but I've had it happen when casting march of the multitudes followed by lena. Summoning more soldiers doesn't reinforce lena but creates a separate stack of tokens.

She shouldn't absorb them at all, obviously. Since they only have the soldier type and lena is a Knight leader 

Tombstone

Hmm, there definitely seems to be some odd behavior going on with this card. I'll go ahead and relay this to the team for review. 

Tombstone

Hi everyone, I've received an update from the team regarding this issue. This behavior is as designed.

Leaders absorb Token Creatures when they enter the battlefield, but if a Token Creature is given the Leader's type while the Tokens and Leader are both already on the battlefield, the Token Creatures will not be absorbed. If the Token Creature is reinforced while it has the Leader's type, it will then be absorbed.