Heartwarming: Arena Auto-Tapper Leaves Up Correct Mana For The Spell She Wanted To Cast Next
The Internet – Players were pleasantly surprised this Sunday, August 9th, when Brawl player RatColony772 had a positive experience with the MtG: Arena auto-tapper – it left up UU for Counterspell instead of UR for Expressive Iteration.
“I cast Vivi Ornitier, but I completely forgot to tap my lands first,” she informed us. “So when it left up the correct mana for Counterspell I was shocked! I don’t know if it changed the outcome of the game or anything but it saved me from being angry for about two seconds.”
We sent our research team on a deep dive to see why Arena would exhibit such strange behavior, and spent the next 24 hours recreating the circumstances of the event. “When we cast Vivi and thought about casting Counterspell next, we always ended up with UR open, and the opposite was true when thinking about Expressive Iteration,” one researcher explained. “When we tried to trick the system by thinking really hard about the thing we didn’t want to do, it seemed to take into account that we weren’t pure of heart and started auto passing.” We asked RatColony772 to comment on the innocence of her intentions, but she simply responded with a smiling face with horns emoji.
When Wizards of the Coast’s internal observation team flagged anomalous behavior with RatColony’s account, they released this official statement to their social media accounts: “We are actively investigating a bug affecting the Arena auto-tapper. If you have noticed any changes in service please open a support ticket.” Many users asked for further clarification on what changes they should be looking out for, but all were met with an automated response. “Thank you for your concern! If this is an in game issue, please open a support ticket! For legal concerns please send a formal letter of inquiry to our attorneys.”
An anonymous insider suggested there is a more sinister reason for the press release. “The lands are tapped by our interns,” our source said. “Whenever you forget to tap your lands the intern really quickly taps for you so you can cast your spell. They’re told to leave up the worst lands possible, so the fact that the correct lands are being left up means one of the interns went rogue and Wizards is trying to identify them.” For this reason, we’d like to encourage our readers not to submit support tickets for having positive experiences with Arena.
“They have thousands of interns, one for each active Arena match, so tracking down the one that did it is going to be quite difficult,” continued the insider. “Actually, I don’t even think they teach the interns how to play Magic, so the fact that this one knew leaving Counterspell up was the correct play means this is a deeper and intentional sabotage of Arena’s integrity.” When asked why they don’t just use the audit logs for RatColony’s match, we were told, “I don’t think they teach the security team how to read the audit logs either.”
We scoured social media and various channels of communication around Arena attempting to confirm the sabotage claim. While we weren’t able to find any concrete evidence, we did find a Reddit post claiming “I am an Intern at Wizards of the Coast for MtG: Arena, Ask Me Anything!” One user asked RealWizardsInternThrowaway3000 how the company culture was. “It’s wonderful! They never ask me to do anything I morally disagree with, and everyone follows the procedures presented to them by upper management.” When we asked if they knew anything about the auto-tapper situation they suspiciously responded, “Thank you for your concern! If this is an in game issue, please open a support ticket! For legal concerns please send a formal letter of inquiry to my attorneys.”
One of our older researchers claimed a real intern was leaking some info on MtgSalvation Forums, but none of the other researchers knew what that was or how to access it. He then printed out some posts dating back to 2005 where user Wiztern1980 claimed, “I work on MODO for Wizards of the Coast and I’m the one who’s in charge of holding priority. They keep telling me to pass priority even though it’s obvious the player wants to cast Retract in response to their Sensei’s Top activation on the stack. This has been making me so angry! I think I’m going to stay an intern forever just so I can continue to hold priority correctly, or stop whatever other harebrained schemes they come up with in the future.” While we would have asked for further comment, we were informed “Necro-ing the thread is a BBS faux-pas.”
We’re not sure if Wiztern1980 is the same intern behind the auto-tapping, or a predecessor from the ancient times, but we’d personally like to thank all the employees and interns making our games slightly more enjoyable with their defiance!
