I played infectious sporeling in combination with houndmaster Shaw* in wild mode.
1: Infectious sporeling attacked enemy minion. It turned into an infectious sporeling.
2 Attacked the enemy infectious sporeling with one of my other minions.
My minion turned into an infectious sporeling.
3: Somehow the new infectious sporeling did not get rush from houndmaster Shaw*. Instead I got the message: this minion already attacked.
How can that be; considering the fact I got a new minion on the field that had not yet declared an attack. Is this a bug or intended?
I’ll assume you meant Houndmaster Shaw (“Your other minions have Rush”) and not Houndmaster (“Battlecry: Give a friendly Beast +2/+2 and Taunt”).
Normally, when a minion transforms, the new minion is considered to be a new, just summoned minion. Which means that one would expect it to have summoning sickness, and that Rush or Charge would partially or completely exempt it from summoning sickness.
Based on what you describe, it seems as if Infectious Sporeling works differently. As if it changes the target minion without making it a new summon, but instead retaining some of the characteristics of the old minion. If that is indeed the case, then the consequence would be that, if I somehow manage to force an opponent Sporeling to attack my minion on my turn, before my minion attacked, it should still be able to attack.
This is definitely an interesting bug report. I first thought that somehow the Houndmaster Shaw effect failed to be applied to the fresh summoned Sporeling. But in that case, you would have seen the “Give that minion a turn to get ready” error when trying to attack, not “That minion already attacked”.
Hard to tell whether this is intentional or not. It seems like a weird and inconsistent choice to me, so perhaps there is indeed an oversight in the code somewhere that should be fixed.
I imagine it’s to prevent endless attacks. If an Infectious Sporeling attacked another Sporeling, they’d both transform, with Shaw giving the new Sporeling Rush, in which the newly transformed Sporeling can attack the opponent’s newly transformed Sporeling, turning them both into… and so on.
The enemy Infectious Sporeling’s trigger goes off when it deals damage, which takes place in the middle of the attack sequence. So it seems that even though the attack was initiated and mostly executed as the original minion, a transformation in the middle of it will cause it to count toward the new minion’s number of attacks made. This would be a consequence of incrementing “number of attacks this turn” after the attack is complete without checking if the identity of the minion has changed. Unclear if this is intended though. Seems a bit unintuitive that the “attack” doesn’t update that statistic until several triggers down the line from the minions actually slamming into one another. Probably will only cause further confusion in the future if left this way.
I think if two Sporelings hit one another, only the attacker’s Sporeling will trigger. The defender’s Sporeling will be transformed first, causing it to abort its trigger before it can reciprocate.
Jetz, perhaps, but that’s not what the card text may indicate.
“After this damages a minion, turn it into an Infectious Sporeling.”
Which indicates that both attacker and defender deal and receive damage.
For example; If my Sporeling attacks an enemy Loot Hoarder, the result would be that my Sporeling dies and the opponent’s Loot Hoarder is transformed into a Sporeling, negating the Deathrattle.
If my Sporeling attacks an enemy Sporeling; both lose 1 health, before both being transformed into new Sporelings.
Didn’t mean to imply that Sporeling could attack a minion, deal damage, then transform it so fast that it could avoid receiving damage in return. They’ll both deal damage to one another and both of their triggers will be queued. But after one of them resolves, the other one will be transformed. And a minion transforming (even into the same minion) will cause any triggers it has queued to be cancelled. So the second minion will never get the chance to transform the first one: https://hsreplay.net/replay/aFXB4mVQmgkxmJKdZvi7Mh#turn=10a
It’ll always be the attacker which triggers first, because even though combat damage to the two combatants appears simultaneous (and are consolidated similar to AoE effects), it’s always “attacker damages defender” then “defender damages attacker”. So effects that react to damage dealt by the attacker are always queued before those that react to the defender’s damage. This is one of the rare cases where that quirk actually makes a difference.
The same thing would theoretically happen if two minions with “whenever this damages a minion, Silence that minion” hit one another. The attacker would Silence the defender, and therefore the defender could no longer Silence the attacker. Doesn’t affect Poisonous - the equivalent but with “Destroy” instead of “Silence” - because of all the complicated death phase stuff we’re so used to explaining 'round these parts.