Hey, I just lost a mana crystal in my supposed big swing kael’thas turn. I started the turn at 9 mana and played Kael’thas -> Rising Winds -> Innervate, so 9-7-2+1=1 mana. Everything working so far.
But then I played Nourish (for 0) and my mana went from 1 to 2? I guess my Innervate mana crystal got lost or something?
Here is the replay link: https://hsreplay.net/replay/nLKA9s72PPAhLttUwkD7yN
It happened right at the end of the replay as I conceded immediately after, thinking I had made a stupid mistake and already being tilted.
I think it has to do with the fact that Innervate gives you temporary mana, while Nourish gives permanent mana crystals, and since you weren’t at 10 something went wrong. Still very weird and, if not a bug, I’d like to see this clarified
I actually repeated almost the exact same turn against the innkeeper, but this time I played Kael’thas -> Innervate -> Rising Winds (this time the non-twinspell version, not like the first time) -> Nourish and I correctly had 3 mana.
My theory is that the 0-mana Nourish somehow consumes the 1 Innervate mana since it usually costs mana, so the order is important.
Both times I started the turn with 9 mana, with nourish bumping the max mana from 9 to 10.
One thing I noticed is that the way Innervate and Nourish grant mana crystal are different. Innervate will add one on the right side, while Nourish pushes it from the left side.
My guess is that Nourish pushes off Innervate mana crystal off into the 11th spot (and destroys it). The game probably didn’t notice due to having a gap of spent mana.
That order could definitely lead to a different result. Temporary mana crystals are pretty different from permanent ones in terms of implementation. They’re also always consumed before permanent ones, so with the Innervate → Rising Winds order, you had one normal mana crystal when you played Nourish. But when you played Rising Winds → Innervate, it was a temporary mana crystal.
The temporary crystal should probably be converted to a refilled mana crystal when pushed out of the tray by a 0 mana Nourish, since Innervate ordinarily quietly changes its behavior to “refill a mana crystal” when played at 10 mana.