Given how complex Magic is as a game, it’s frankly miraculous that we have digital versions of it available. This goes double for MTG Online (MTGO), which was originally released way back in 2002. Simulating the endless bowl of spaghetti that constitutes the game’s rules is no mean feat, however, so a few bugs and technical issues have been an inevitability over the years. One such bug, involving MTG ramp classic Wall of Roots, has been plaguing Modern for over eight years now. Thanks to Magic’s esteemed engineers, that bug has finally been squashed as of yesterday.
The MTG Wall Of Roots Bug
For those who don’t play or follow MTGO, I’ll recap what the Wall of Roots bug entailed. This bug arose when Oath of the Gatewatch was released in January 2016. This set was known for introducing true colorless mana to Magic, which demanded a reworking of MTGO’s mana system. An unintended consequence of this was that Wall of Roots no longer functioned as intended.
When trying to undo actions involving the mana generated by Wall of Roots, or attempting to cast an illegal spell with the mana, the game would enter a soft lock state. This would force the Wall of Roots player to concede the game in order to get out of the lock. The bug also caused frequent soft locks when players tried to use the final mana from Wall of Roots and tap it for Convoke as well.
This sounds like an incredibly niche interaction, but you’d be surprised. Both Wall of Roots and Chord of Calling are staples in Yawgmoth decks in Modern, so it comes up a fair bit. The interaction is perfectly usable in paper, so having the deck play differently in digital is obviously not ideal. There have been recorded instances of this bug costing players games in serious events, so it’s no small thing.
To address this issue, the team at Daybreak changed how Wall of Roots’ ability worked. Rather than being a mana ability, which are separate from normal abilities and can’t be responded to, they switched it to a normal instant-speed ability. While this helped a bit, it opened up a number of other issues, since the opponent could now respond to Wall of Roots with spells or abilities of their own.
Relief At Last
For many reasons, the Wall of Roots bug was bad for MTG. Decks playing differently between paper and digital is always a major problem. This was the main reason Nexus of Fate caught a ban on MTG Arena back in 2019, after all. For a while, players had just come to accept the situation, since Daybreak didn’t seem to have the resources to fix it.
“We are aware of this issue. We tried to address it via a mana refactor several years ago. Fixing this and similar issues (original Selvala, Kozilek’s Translator, etc) requires more work hours than we can spare. Therefore, we have made the decision to have those abilities work at instant speed instead of mana speed. Please play accordingly.”
MTGO_TonyM, October 2022
Today all of that changed, however. As announced in an MTGO blog post about Foundations coming to the platform, a fix for the bug has now been discovered. According to the blog, the MTGO team recently “got an entire discretionary week to work on whatever they desired.” For Cardset Developer Josh Melnick, that meant tackling MTGO’s “great green whale.”
“The key to understanding why Wall of Roots was so difficult to solve for so long is that the set of symptoms that were visible to players (not being able to activate + convoke, having to remember to activate before starting to cast spells, etc.) is distinct from the set of problems that were prohibitively difficult to solve for us – namely, avoiding soft-lock.”
Josh Melnick
Melnick, for obvious reasons, didn’t get too deep into the nitty-gritty of the bug in the post. He did provide a solid overview of the issue, however, and the steps he took to finally fix it. According to the blog post, Melnick “had a goal of fixing this interaction prior to even working on the MTGO team.” As a self-professed “longtime Cube grinder and Yawgmoth enthusiast,” that makes a lot of sense.
When does this monumental change go live? Next Tuesday, November 12th, according to the blog post. This will arrive in the pre-Foundations patch for MTGO, so you can enjoy some optimum Yawgmoth gameplay while you wait for the new set to release.
While it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, MTGO is a crucial platform beloved by many players. It’s also a vital tool for the wider tournament scene. Getting a fix like this, which puts a high-tier deck in its rightful place, is brilliant stuff for that reason.
