Tokens shenanigans leading to tons of weird results [Investigating]

Magic: The Gathering - Puzzle Quest MtGPQ Bugs & Technical Issues
1

So I just built a token-based Teferi legacy deck that lead to quite a few funky interactions. Let me walk you through the deck first, then through the wonky situations (I have marked the relevant cards in bold):

Trostani Discordant
Divine Visitation
Thopter Spy Network
Anointed Procession
March of the Multitudes
Sram’s Expertise
Luminarch Ascension
Storm the Vault
Blue Sun Zenith
River’s Rebuke

Problem #1: Divine Visitation does not act as true replacement effect
This is a serious issue, as I built my deck around the assumption that Divine Visitation is a replacement effect. The card reads “Whenever a non-Angel token creature would enter the battlefield under your control, create a Vigilant Angel Token instead”.
Expected: Whenever a non-Angel token would be created, the creation is actually replaced with the Vigilant Angel Token.
Actual: Two things happen

  • On a full board, I am asked to remove one of my creatures to make room for the “presumably non-angel” token. This cuts the efficiency of the card in token decks tremendously.
  • Furthermore the extra token still enters the battlefield (even on an empty board - this will be relevant on a separate problem). It is then removed. This leads to extra “death” triggers on a token creature that should have never entered the battlefield in the first place. This can both be abused or work in the detriment of the player.

Problem #2: Anointed Procession + Thopter Spy Network + Divine Visitation = Madness
Thopter Spy Network generates 4 Thopter tokens at the beginning of your turn. Anointed Procession doubles those tokens. Divine Visitation replaces all those tokens with nice Vigilant Angel tokens.

Expected: At the beginning of the turn, 8 Vigilant Angel tokens are created.
Actual: Here is what happens

  • First replacement angel token is created, then reinforced due to Anointed Procession
  • First thopter is generated then reinforced, then it gets -1/-1 - hence I am left with a 1/1 thopter token. Yes, this can get me to 4 creatures on the board!
  • Second replacement angel token is created, then reinforced due to Anointed Procession.
  • Thopter gets reinforced once, gets -1/-1, then gets reinforced again due to Anointed Procession, then gets -1/-1 again. This looks like a “pseudo correct” behaviour (at least those thopters don’t get bigger and bigger with each anointed procession reinforcement)

Extra: Now I summon a Trostani on my wonky board. Guess what, I have to get rid of two of my creatures to make room for her (no surprise there).

Problem #3: Convoke does not correctly keep track of creature reinforcements.
Due to Anointed Procession, I think the extra reinforcements are not counted towards the convoke. I had on the board 2x Vigilant Angel Tokens and 2x Ascension Angel Tokens, Yet my March had been discounted to a base cost of 6 only (which should’ve instead been 4).

Problem #4: This was super wonky and actually involved my opponent imprisoning in the moon one of my creatures while I had a Divine Visitation (and an Anointed Procession too) out.

  • My creature got destroyed by the Imprisoned in the Moon
  • Because a moon token was about to enter the board under my control, a vigilant angel token was actually generated. It then got reinforced by Anointed Procession.
  • Then moon token then entered the battlefield and it was reinforced.
  • Then something “invisible” destroyed my vigilant angel token. (I presume the moon)

This deck particularly comes to show how complex all these mechanics are - convoke, replacement effects on generating tokens, triggered effects on multiplying reinforcements etc. While it’s not surprise we have so many issues, my main problem is the implementation of Divine Visitation which is super clunky - and looks more like a quick implementation that has drastic consequences on the game play itself - much more than it should.

I nicely ask the team once again to reconsider such implementations, think of a solid foundation of rules for this game, and ensure the foundation is properly implemented into the game engine itself. Then creating new cards should be MUCH easier.

//Edited Title -Brigby

2

Your experience mirrors what I just posted with narcomoeba.. a strange “kill” effect is happening to the tokens…

3

I created a ticket to this effect, glad to see it and +1 it here as well. Divine Visitation is crazy wonky. A couple other things I’ve noticed:

Path of Discovery will trigger twice, once for the vigilant angel, and once for the dead token that briefly enters the board.

Also once in a blue moon, it will create a 4th creature slot for the soon-to-be-killed token, seems to be completely random. I’ve been playing with Legion’s Landing, for example, and let’s say there’s 3 creatures on the board. I hit an activated Landing gem, and I get a vigilant angel token added to the stack. Then a 1/0 vampire appears up top in 4th slot, before promptly killing itself. THEN it asks me to choose a creature to be replaced by the second vampire token, if I choose no I get no second angel.

Lastly - at one point I had Hangarback Walker out with a stack of angels and a stack of thopters. Divine Visitation has been destroyed the turn before, yet every time Hangarback was triggered it had a similar but reversed(?) effect as described above with TSN: it would gain then immediately lose the thopter reinforcement. I gained no angel, obviously, because Visitation was no longer in play. The thopters did however explore due to Path of Discovery before losing their new reinforcement, leading to a 2x stack of thopters at 14 P/T by the end of game. I checked the battle log and there were no other triggers aside from Hangarback and PoD.

TLDR; Divine Visitation is a confirmed mess.

4

I don’t have Divine Visitation yet (sadly) but I’ve heard that the token replacement effect causes death triggers to go off.

That means it goes infinite with Murder Investigation (since each soldier summoned then “dies” to become an angel, triggering the murder investigation again.

It also counts as “lost” creatures for objectives.

@Tombstone this card is seriously buggy. Please let the team know that whatever testing they did on it was not nearly enough (since these are all extremely obvious problems that should have been spotted on the first test)

5

I can confirm - murder investigation + divine visitation is an infinite loop - mine only stopped because I had path of discovery and it eventually popped all the gems on the board

6

Edited—thought it wasn’t triggering for Elenda, but it did on further play.

7

Huh, interesting. I wonder why it works for some and not others?

8

Turns out I was wrong. I don’t know why, but it worked this time–Elenda reinforced. I wonder if it was because she was in play before the supports, instead of after. Oh well. Anyway. Corrected original post.

9

Hi Everyone. Thanks for reporting these bugs! I’ll be sure to pass them along to the team.

In addition, as opposed to reporting multiple different bugs in one thread, if you could please create a new thread for each individual bug, that would help us greatly in keeping track of and updating each individual issue. Thank you!