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

Machine
Machine Posts: 787 Critical Contributor
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?

Comments

  • jtwood
    jtwood Posts: 1,285 Chairperson of the Boards
    I’ve never had it fail, but I’ll keep an eye out
  • Shiser
    Shiser Posts: 45 Just Dropped In
    Possibly when your hand is already full? Like if Deathsprout is being cast from somewhere besides your hand?
  • Stormcrow
    Stormcrow Posts: 461 Mover and Shaker
    edited February 2020
    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
    Machine Posts: 787 Critical Contributor
    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.
  • BlessedOne
    BlessedOne Posts: 256 Mover and Shaker

    I can concur that I have had many instances where deathsprout did not fetch a land.

  • madwren
    madwren Posts: 2,226 Chairperson of the Boards

    What land were you trying to fetch?

  • Julie71
    Julie71 MTGPQ Mod Posts: 707 Critical Contributor

    I noticed that today also

  • Zzyzzx
    Zzyzzx Posts: 248 Tile Toppler

    I hadn't noticed this with Deathsprout, but I did notice this at least once last week running District Guide in a Vivien build with 3 Gates.

    I wasn't sure what caused it but the 40-card deck instance issue, not appending another deck to my library, seems consistent with the behavior.