If anyone is interested, the release notes for Dominaria have leaked. Wizards has published an article confirming this, with the full release notes document attached.

Some general highlights:

The planeswalker damage redirection rule is getting removed. Cards that deal damage to "target creature or player" will say "any target" instead, which means "target creature, player, or planeswalker". Cards that damage "target player" will say "target player or planeswalker". Cards that deal untargeted non-combat damage will not get errata, except for Vial Smasher the Fierce.

Card templating will now use "they" instead of "he or she" when referring to players

There are now Legendary Sorceries, which can only be cast if you control a legendary creature or planeswalker

@murgatroid99 wowow

They are introducing a new term "Historic" to refer to any object that is either Legendary, or an Artifact, or the new Enchantment subtype Saga.

They are removing all references to the mana pool. Now Llanowar Elves' ability just says "Add {G}"

And abilities that modify how a spell behaves on the stack now say "this spell" instead of the card name

Other than that, the set has a big Legendary theme, with a bunch of legendary stuff and cards that care about "Legendary"

There's a new variant of Equip written as "Equip [quality] creature", which adds a targeting restriction to the equip ability

There's also a new Hexproof variant "Hexproof from [quality]", which does exactly what it sounds like

Kicker is back too

One thing I find interesting is that there is a ruling on one card that implies that permanents have perpetual access to information about choices made when they were cast.

I guess that's just rule 400.7c, but I think I remember something about that rule being controversial or in dispute.

Huh interesting. I'm glad to see the removal of the redirecting damage rule.

@murgatroid99 I was reading the translated leak yesterday, it was a struggle. A lot of the stuff in it was about specific rules terms so trying to get what is going on from the garbled translation was interesting....

I'm glad that Wizards released the article clarifying things

but jeeze the amount of oracle text that is going to need to be updated....

Neko-Te

There's one specific card that is giving me problems: Hell's Caretaker

He's the card that has an apostrophe in the name and is also an avatar

Hell's Caretaker

Well there we go. I guess it already works

Here's a fiddle if anyone wants to play with it:jsfiddle.net/ws165r64/12

I think another good test case is "Curiosity", where the entire card name is a substring of another card name

I'll add it

If I remember right, that was what really stumped us in the end. I don't think there is any gatherer name search that returns only Curiosity

Curiosity

@Rainbolt are you trying to fix the existing autocard? or is this for the possible switch to scryfall?

@Malco Fix the existing autocard

ahh ok. Say that you do fix it, how would you go about implementing it? Can you do it yourself or do you need to pass it on to a SE employee?

This would be a SE server side code change. We would absolutely need an SE employee to change it

ahh well, that means it will probably take a while won't it...

I have a feeling that if we can come up with an algorithm that solves all of the test cases in the jsfiddle I linked earlier, that it would increase our odds of the devs actually doing something about this bug. Switching to scryfall will take more pushing because it is more work for them.

I am absolutely for switching to scryfall because I hate the Gatherer if we can get them to do it

does anyone have any SE contacts that we could talk with? If we can know sticking points for them we might be able to make implementation faster/easier on the SE side

goes for either staying with gatherer, or going to scryfall

I think the main obstacle is that they have other more important things to do, and we've already had them change change how the search works once or twice

Island

Oh, right, that actually covers the same potential issue that Curiosity, and maybe better because there are more matches

I'm stumped. I can't search the Gatherer for a single word card that is a subset of another card

Island, Curiousity, etc.

Autocard is just trying to build a URL right? it can't check results first and then deliver different output correct?

I bet it can do anything that can be accomplished in JavaScript, which I don't think includes visiting a URL to see results without popping open a window that the user would see

But I honestly don't know what language it's in

What would the url for an exact match look like?

I think it gets redirected

for example your neko-Te from above

If the response coded is 301 (Redirect), use the redirect url. Otherwise, do what it does now

might work?

What would the initial URL be for Island though?

You have to ask before you get redirected

but the redirect only happens once that connection is made between the server and the client

gatherer. wizards. com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?name=%2b%5bIsland%5d

That sends you to a list of results

ahh ya, it won't redirect unless it is the only result of the search

so if there is a way to check for a redirect before it happens you might be able to change the search url to:

Oh, this works! http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Island

ahaha ya

Okay, I think I have a solution that is contingent on there being no single word card that has an apostrophe that is a subset of a another card name

works for http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Curiosity too

If a card like that exists, we are broked

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=neko-te works as well...

The problem comes when you try to search for cards with apostrophes in the name I think

Well, nevermind

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Death's Shadow worked just fine

hmm true, when I went for sun's bounty I got this

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Sun%27s%20Bounty

All test cases passed

jsfiddle.net/ws165r64/36

I think something must have changed because the solution is so simple

I think previously they were dropping the apostrophe from the request or something. I'm only guessing based on some comments from Shog9 from years ago

And not breaking up the word into pieces like we're doing for some cards now

what browser are you testing in?

For example, Death's Shadow becomes +[Death's]+[Shadow]

I am Chrome

Same

I guess I better test Firefox and IE

maybe see how it behaves in others ya

Do you have Opera?

do you have browser stack?

no, no Opera

No

I don't have a Browser Stack account that I can use for this

Firefox works

IE works

IE appears to work

ah ya, looks like something might have changed at Wizards

I'm downloading Opera

I imagine they have been working on gatherer a bit in preparation for that massive Oracle update coming with Dominaria

Opera works too. I guess I'll post it and hopefully the devs see it

And think "Well that's an easy fix."

Longest I've ever spent writing a meta post: boardgames.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1695/6692

This post has some other test cases to try out

And they all seem to work

Except "Alive (Alive/Well)", but nobody can really agree on how that should be written for the autocard thing anyway

Nice!

I can see you guys/gals incrementing the fiddle

I knew that I had ended up on someone else's version because I wrote 'Kongming, "Sleeping Dragon"', while someone else wrote "Kongming, \"Sleeping Dragon\"",

yeah, that was me

@Rainbolt Can you post the link to the jsfiddle people should use along with a short description of what it is? would be useful to star it so it is easier to find and share

Help us find flaws with a new autocard algorithm

Break it now, and get 50% off!

(Offer limited to certain browsers. Other restrictions may apply.)

That's my Azure spending for this month

I'm on track to be shut down on the very last day

OK, I can confirm that this solution works even with a card that has an apostrophe in its name and its name is the substring of another name

What card did you find?

See "Raven's Run" and "Raven's Run Dragoon"

Raven's Run

Interesting. It just takes you to the wrong card lol

That's a result I haven't seen yet. The other failures have all been "takes you to a list of cards" or "doesn't return anything"

It's probably because Raven's Run is a planechase plane card

OK, one minor caveat is that you can only find the Unhinged card Who/What/When/Where/Why by entering exactly the string "Who // What // When // Where // Why"

And for other split cards, it looks like you have to search for just one half

You can look at this version of the fiddle to see the test cases I tried

I have been keeping up lol

I got a kick out of some of the name's you found

Most of these are from the post I linked with test cases, and answers on that post

I almost updated the meta post with the newest fiddle, but then I wouldn't be able to make the claim that it works in Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and IE. So I left it.

If only this were an automated test

It might be possible to do an automated test. Using MTG JSON, we could check every card, and just do some minimal scraping of the result page to check if it's a single-card page.

Part of the reason I am keen on switching to scryfall is because gatherer keeps introducing new bugs

or acquiring, rather

We do this work, and considerable amounts of work, and then it starts breaking a year later & we have to work out a new way to do it & then ask for that to be changed again. I am hoping this one doesn't also break eventually but I don't have the confidence to be sure it won't.

Here's that formula however, appended with all the cards that featured in the "switch to scryfall" proposal, plus some other cases like flip cards & either face of a double-faced card:

jsfiddle.net/1n5vctpx/2

It works for everything, except for split cards, for which you must reference only a front or back face ("Alive" or "Well" but not "Alive // Well")