Magic "Miracle" mechanic ? Revealing the first card drawn in a turn

[jadencamelot]

The new keyword mechanic for Avacyn Restored, called Miracle, has just been spoiled. The set is due for prerelease in about two weeks, but the exact mechanic presents some issues playing it in Lackey.

The exact mechanic is:
Miracle {cost} (You may cast this card for its miracle cost when you draw it if it's the first card you drew this turn.)

Eg. Thunderous Wrath.

In a real-life game, you would have to separate the drawn card from your hand physically, and reveal the card before you put in your hand. Once it makes contact with the rest of your hand, the card is considered drawn and you won't be able to reveal it for miracle.

Now in Lackey, it does have the ability to recognise when a player plays a card from the bottom of their hand. However, drawing a card places it on the top of their hand, and this is not recognised by Lackey. Also, cards can be freely rearranged in each players hand without notification.

Normally, the way to do this (eg. Delver of Secrets) would be to reveal the top card of that players deck to that player only, and if appropriate reveal the card to all players. But with this mechanic, unlike having a Delver trigger, this would have to be done for every draw of the entire game. In addition, both players would always have to do it, or they would be giving free information to their opponent about whether or not such cards are present.

This is a serious problem, as it is currently an extremely cumbersome action for players to perform routinely.

Note that if you allow Lackey to recognise the top card of a players hand, not only does that give free information to the opponent about which cards were drawn this turn (which can be highly relevant ? competitive Magic is somewhat reminiscent of Poker in regard to bluffing), but players can currently rearrange cards in their hand freely and without notification to the opponent.

This will affect Magic games for at least the mechanic's life in Standard (two years; Standard is overwhelmingly the most popular format on Lackey), and could continue to be problematic if any of the cards are powerful enough to make it into eternal formats like Legacy.

So what, if anything, can be done to fix this problem?

[masterage]

I too would like to see a less cumbersome reveal mechanic, but for entirely different reasons.

[Trevor]

Regarding miracle, that can take advantage of some of the many functions I am going to enable. I wrote a number a while ago and disabled them so as not to overwhelm people with all the possibilities. I'm enabling several of them in the next release, including /lastcarddrawn (or/lcd) which announces the last card drawn. Someone requested it because they suspected a player was "accidentally" drawing an extra card and then putting a different card back on their deck.

I too would like to see a less cumbersome reveal mechanic, but for entirely different reasons.

If you have a better idea than the way things are now, mock something up and let me know.

[masterage]

I was just thinking of a zonefunction, since playing with the top card of your deck revealed is a reasonably common mechanic. Maybe attach it to an "onDraw"?

onDraw, Reveal 1 of top of deck to All players.

Heck, maybe you got it in that "large list" of unreleased lackey mechanics.

[Trevor]

I was just thinking of a zonefunction, since playing with the top card of your deck revealed is a reasonably common mechanic.

I think the simplest solution is to just drag the top card of your deck to the table. Instead of drawing a new card, take it into hand, and put the new card from the top onto the table.  I'm not sure if there would be a better, more intuitive, less bulky way of doing it than that.

[Picks-at-Flies]

I personally think /lastcarddrawn is a very effective way of handling this without interfering with game play in any way. We probably just need to poke Bort to ask him to add it to the next version of the Magic plugin. Nice one Trevor.