Deathsprout does not always fetch a land support [Fix in 4.1]

Machine · 2020 17

I've seen this behavior in the past and had it again yesterday. I don't think it's related to the 4.0 update, but it's still very annoying. I can't reproduce this issue, because Deathsprout works like 99% of the time. Anyone else have an idea why or when Deathsprout might not fetch a land card?

jtwood · 2020 17

I’ve never had it fail, but I’ll keep an eye out

Shiser · 2020 18

Possibly when your hand is already full? Like if Deathsprout is being cast from somewhere besides your hand?

Stormcrow · 2020 18

I noticed this recently too. Happens sometimes even when you have space in your hand.

There was an old, old bug where "fetch" cards would sometimes fail because the game generates the player's deck 40 cards at a time, and while drawing a card would force it to generate a new 40 cards if you had run out of cards, fetching a card of a specific type would not generate a new set of 40 cards if there weren't any cards of that type left in your deck, instead the fetch would just fail. IIRC, it was a big issue back in the days when Hazoret's Undying Fury was first released; if you didn't have enough spells left in your first 40 cards for HUF to fetch, it would just fail to fetch as many cards as it was supposed to.

I hadn't seen any instances of that bug in a long time, but due to how inconsistent the Deathsprout failure-to-fetch is, I think that might be the culprit; if you don't have any lands left in the current 40-card-instance of your deck, it's failing to fetch anything. I haven't tracked lands-in-play yet, but I've noticed Deathsprout fails significantly more often in my Undergrowth deck (which self-mills a lot of cards and only has 1-2 lands in it) and almost never fails in my Primeval Titan deck which runs like 5 or 6 lands.

Machine · 2020 18

Shiser said:

Possibly when your hand is already full? Like if Deathsprout is being cast from somewhere besides your hand?

That's for sure not the case, but thanks for thinking with me. @Stormcrow's explanation is probably the best bet for now. I haven't tracked the number of lands used from my deck, but that's something I can keep an eye out for next time.