I wonder if this new Meld thing might be a byproduct from, or test of, a Contraptions / Assembly mechanic

Imagine if you had artifacts down that a Rigger could transform and improve together.

(but that relies on three different cards being available)

We'll have to see what the combination looks like, but I bet it's this theory

@murgatroid99 oh my gosh. That would explain how Graf Rats can have the wording it has:

> At the beginning of combat on your turn, if you both own and control Graf Rats and a creature named midnight Scavengers, exile them, then meld them into Chittering Host.

That doesn't sound compatible with turning them into, say, a creature + an enchantment each.

And they both say they're 5/6 on the reverse side.

So if they have half of Chittering Host each, and meld into one giant card, that'd make a lot of sense right now.

I bet this means that there will be a Bruna + Gisela Meld card

@murgatroid99 Oh yeah. Saw that art. That seems likely. >_>;

Hi everyone. I've got a question that isn't really suitable for the site itself as it's rather subjective, but I was wondering - does anyone know a good way to introduce new players to Diplomacy? There will be five of us playing, none of whom have played it before, and I'd hate for any of us to be put off by the complex rules.

I've read the rules, played a short two-player game and watched a couple of videos, so I think I understand it as well as a beginner can at this point. But I don't want everyone playing to have to do that too.

Also, is there a recommended way of deciding who plays as which nation? The rules say "draw lots" but I was hoping there might be something a little more sophisticated.

Hello, what tag should I use for a game that... doesn't have a tag yet?

@Takeshi if you have permission to make tags, do so, otherwise uh... i'm not sure. we usually come along and make that tag.

I don't think I have permission yet. Not enough rep, I think.

@Takeshi this is... a really good question. pick something random and put "retag please" in your title?

Thanks @doppelgreener, will do.

kind of a problem given we're a site about an industry that does new games every week

Agree, too many games haha

Thanks

@doppelgreener In case you were thinking about going to meta with it, I want to say that I like your solution better than giving brand new (sub 102 rep) users the ability to create new tags.

@Rainbolt oh yeah i don't think we'll ever see that happen

i was just thinkin' about whether, say, board-game-tag-needed would work. something people would actually type out when they're thinking "well what tag do I use?". depends on the idea they'd actually try typing "board game" though.

Ohh, that's a good idea.

I should finish reading before I start typing lol

Some interesting new mechanics in Eldritch Moon...

In Mark Rosewater's blog a little while ago, he said that he finally made a mechanic work that he's been trying for a long time. It looks like Meld was that mechanic, going back to B.F.M. and S.N.O.T from Unglued and Unhinged

@murgatroid99 I thought he was talking about something from Kaladesh, reading Rosewater's article from today it sounds like Meld is something Ken Nagle has been trying to use for a while though.

I like when a thing that seemed absurd in Un(glued/hinged) becomes an actual mechanic in a later set.

It's funny that they're going to need to add so many rules for this mechanic, and it's going to apply to so few cards

@tsuma534 Like The Cheese Stands Alone (1998) followed by Barren Glory (2007)

Meld feels like banding for some reason

So apparently the CMC of a meld card is the combined CMC: twitter.com/TabakRules/status/747448917923508224

@JonTheMon That makes sense. It's what I would have guessed

Well, as opposed to Fuse cards.

@JonTheMon You mean Split cards in general?

Yeah.

It's not really surprising that they're different. Split cards are effectively two cards in one. Meld creatures are one object in two cards

Fair enough

@doppelgreener No special case logic. I want to display the card whenever possible (e.g., no search result page when using Black Lotus) and handle as many different cases as possible.

Just pushed an update, hopefully all cards work now (or at least do something that's expected). Black Lotus Sphinx's Revelation R&D's Secret Lair B.F.M. (Big Furry Monster) Alive//Well

It looks like Alive//Well goes to a search page with the card twice

But I would expect that Alive or Well goes right to the card

Nope, both are errors

@murgatroid99 These are weird. Somehow Wizard's website doesn't like searching for Alive or Well. The challenge is to get those working without breaking Black Lotus. Will see if there's another magic incantation needed to make those work.

@MichaelStum I'm curious why you're both splitting the card names with apostrophes into separate words and removing the "'s". As far as I can tell, if you put the "'s" back into each link in the appropriate place, it still works.

Testing Black Lotus and Alive

@murgatroid99 It didn't work for me with "Sphinxs Revelation", but I went through several iterations to handle different cases

I think apart from linking directly to Alive // Well (Alive), cards should link properly now

@MichaelStum What I mean is that currently you're searching for +[Sphinx]+[Revelation]. But it would also work if you search for +[Sphinx's]+[Revelation]

Same with +[R]+[D's]+[Secret]+[Lair]

Indeed. I think I didn't have the "Split and put into individual brackets" logic in place yet. Because +[Black]+[Lotus] wouldn't work. If it works though I'll leave it as-is, unless there are cases where it doesn't open the card it should

@MichaelStum The only case where it wouldn't work is if there were a card named "Foo Bar" and another card named "Foo's Bar". That isn't the case as far as I'm aware, so you're probably fine.

@MichaelStum From your examples, it looks like you "split and put into individual brackets" only when there is an apostrophe (and/or an ampersand). All I'm saying is that in that case, you don't need to do anything to the apostrophe or characters after it.

Angel's Grace, Angel's Mercy

@murgatroid99 I see. I'm porting it to the website markdown code, I should be able to fix that properly for both later tonight

(Both as in "Apostrophes" and "Black Lotus")

I think I just got banned from magiccards.info. I wanted to check something, so I was quickly clicking through pages, and now it's refusing my connections

Hopefully it's temporary

I.e. hopefully you are just throttled, not banned

fwiw Alive // Well doesn't exist in Gatherer

there's just a card called Alive, and a card called Well, both of which just happen to be the same physical card

Gatherer calls them "Alive // Well (Alive)" and "Alive // Well (Well)", at least in search results

And they have the same multiverse ID

And the actual Gatherer page shows the name as "Alive // Well"

I also don't know if it got skipped somehow but I sent a message a day or two ago with a different search URL that seems to be handling the various special cases here just fine if you give it the names verbatim:

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Card+Name

(this message)

OK, it looks like that fixes apostrophes, but not ampersands or split cards

R&D's Secret Lair is handled by replacing ampersands (&) with their escaped form (%26) thus:

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=R%26D's%20Secret%20Lair

Oh, right, ampersand is a meaningful character in query strings

(spaces can either be pluses or space escapes like normal)

I think I didn't notice that suggestion because I didn't realize it was different from the one we're currently using

Right, it is. And it's the one used by SOUP and it's the reason SOUP works with virtually all the cards, including ones with funny accents.

The way to approach split cards with that one is to do `[mtg:Alive]` // `[mtg:Well]` -> Alive // Well, or just link one or the other if one particular side's important (Alive).

It won't work for linking directly to the whole name. :(

Well, nothing else seems to work better for linking to a split card, so I guess that would be fine

@MichaelStum You should take a look at this. The format doppelgreener posted above seems to work for just about all variants, without special casing or modification

@murgatroid99 Thanks. Yeah, I've just changed it (not pushed live yet), it seems to work across the test cases

Thanks for taking on that suggestion. :)