March of Swirling Mist and ward
We need a clear ruling on the Gatherer page and/or bug-fix to March of Swirling Mist wrt creatures with Ward.
Atm, having ANY creature with ward (even ward 1) in the set of selected creatures causes the entire spell to fizzle and go directly to the Graveyard.
That's Rules as Written ( see sections 702.21 and 702.26 of the latest official rules). There's also the generic policy of "If a spell or ability has multiple targets and one of them has ward. Does the whole spell or ability get countered or just the effect on the target?" Answer: YES if the entirety of the Ward in the set is not paid.
For auto-targeted or single-target spells where the ward cost isn't initially paid the "Are you sure?" prompt comes up in Arena, but atm, there's no way to pay for ANY additional ward with this spell and no "Are you sure?" warning prompt appears indicating that this a highly-likely unintended action.
Given that this spell is almost always targeted towards groups of creatures at "game critical" moments and the "2 mana discount cards-in-hand sac-payment option" is clearly there to further enable that sort of group targeting game-play, please enable multi-select on a single target to indicate additional ward-payment. It would seem to be in the spirit of the intention of the card.
At the very least, please add an explicit Rulings addendum to this card regarding its current Ward behavior on Gatherer.
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bonsai#70698 commented
As a quick follow-up, just attempted to cast March of Swirling Mist with pure blue mana targeting 3 creatures: Kami of Whispering Hopes, and 2 Quirion Beastcallers (each with 2 +1/+1 counters) with X=3 (so a total of 4 blue mana) w/o utilizing any Sac discounts. There were also no enchantments in-play by either player. The spell just fizzled directly to the graveyard.
Given its inconsistent behavior as reported for...(check posts) months on this board and my own direct experience with this inconsistency (sometimes it does actually work as written) playing it for just over 1 month, I'm excising it from all personal play. Fix this bugged card or take it out of the playable set until it performs as-written. Far too many games are being decided by a spell that seemingly randomly fizzles for no reason.
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bonsai#70698 commented
Replying to Rezzahan#77802, you are absolutely correct.
Unfortunately, the Ward Trigger atm isn't reliably resolving (actually, seemingly at all) which I should have more directly addressed in the original comment. There doesn't need to be any sort of multi-select interface concerns as I suggested--simply attempt to resolve all the Ward triggers in the targeted set as one would do with an individual Warded card.
There's also another current theory (which I hope to test later this week) that this "missing trigger" behavior only happens when the spell is powered by even 1 colorless mana. It so happens that the only deck I play this card in has multiple colorless lands (Demolition Field and Cavern of Souls) so I'm always casting it with "mixed-mana". Perhaps the back-end's mana cost analysis may be the root of the problem since it's atypical.
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bonsai#70698 commented
As a short addendum as this wasn't clear in the initial message, "overpaying" in the initial cast of the card, ostensibly to target more creatures or, as one would normally do with other spells, to accommodate the Ward cost, also has no effect. The spell still fizzles. This would not be in alignment with its current mana cost ruling that "The mana value of March of Swirling Mist while it's on the stack is the value chosen for X plus 1, no matter how much mana you actually paid to cast it.
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[Deleted User] commented
You do not and cannot pay ward up front. Ward is a triggered ability, that goes on top of the stack, after you've cast the spell, and paid for it fully. When the ward trigger resolves, you have to pay the ward or the spell gets countered.
The rules only allow a target to be a target once per instance of the word target. Multitargeting the same target is only allowed if the spell can have multiple targets for different parts of the spell, or if the spell explicitly permits it.