Sinister Concoction and Choices

Some people might have noticed that Sinister Concoction doesn’t let you cancel the ability once you get to the discard cost payment step. This was very deliberate. Let me walk through why this is:

The card is, for Limited, intended to be a delirium and madness enabler, as well as a removal spell. So whatever implementation we came up with needed to support that functionality.

In paper, you can pay costs in any order. In MTGO, that’s not really feasible for both technical and UX reasons. (Do you really want to be asked what order you want to pay costs in every time you activate this ability?) In order for this to translate digitally, you need to be able to see the card that you mill before choosing what to discard. If you don’t see it, you can’t choose what card to discard to hit delirium.



Except that normally in that cost payment step, there’s a Cancel button just like there is in the mana payment step. Therein lies the rub: if we let players use a Cancel button, it would undo everything to be exactly what it was before you began activating the ability. That effectively turns Sinister Concoction into “0: Look at the top card of your library.”



Now I’m all for people figuring out new ways to use cards, but that’s not using the card in cool ways. That’s abusing the interface.



As of this writing, there’s a bug on Sinister Concoction that causes a nonfunctional Cancel button to appear. It’s not supposed to be there at all. For that, I’ll apologize. It’s misleading for it to be there and hopefully we’ll be able to fix it soon, though as usual I can’t promise a timetable for the fix.



TL;DR: The choice was either make the card substantially worse at its intended function, or remove a cancel button at the second cost payment step.