How does this combo work:

Initiate of Saphery: Kingdom: Action: At the beginning of your turn, heal 1 damage from each unit you control

The Glittering Tower: Kingdom: Action: Whenever you heal a unit, deal 1 damage to one target enemy unit or one target section of an opponent's capital.

If I have three damaged units and trigger the Initiate's ability, can I use the Tower to deal three damage to my opponent's units/capital since I healed 3 units, or can I only damage one since it was a single heal effect? I've felt it was the first option, but another high elf player thinks it works the second way.

I believe the second option is correct and I was going to put up an entire diagram to illustrate why, but I'm tired right now so hopefully someone else will. Textually, the issue is that all the healing from the first card occurs simultaneously, then in the action window that follows, you can use the second card effect.

The way you could do multiple damage is if you played a series of healing spells and, in the action windows in between, use the second card's effect.

I hope that makes sense. Like I said, I was going to do a fancy diagram but have to hit the sack!

I posted this question to James last week. No answer yet.

I was thinking of the same question. Until we get an official ruling I'm going to play it like your second option. I don't believe you can take actions in between a card resolving, and that's what you would have to do to do more than 1 damage. Sucks, but I think that's the ruling. Still an awesome combo though.

As you have to triggered The glittering tower when Initiate of Spahery triggered you can only triggered it once during this action window per copy of glittering tower (cf. FAQ & Errata p.1 & 2, quite the same that for rats Ogres replace at the beginning of your turn by whenever you heal a unit).

If Inititate of Saphery was allowing to heal unit one by one, and so triggered X time, you could triggered Glittering tower X time.

Shindulus said:

We differ in our analysis of the FAQ :

"Response actions are a subset of actions that can only be triggered during the stated trigger in the ability. Each response action can be triggered once per copy of the response action and only once per stated trigger."

Here, the trigger is "whenever you heal a unit". If "Initiate of Saphery" heal 3 units, then you have 3 differents "I heal that unit" trigger that "Glittering Tower" may be used with, allowing you to use 3 times its action.

To bad those "response action" weren't either "Forced" with "may" in their effects, or constant ability (like "Cloud of Flies"). It would have solved many timings issues (and the WAr Hydra would have been able to prevent somethnig else that Combat Damage).

Martin_fr said:

For me there are two reason against that :

The first one :

I am quite sure we agree that Initiate of Saphery trigger once, "at the begining of the turn", during this "begining of the turn action window" you can only trigger action once per copy of a card and so you can only trigger Glittering tower once.

The second one :

Maybe we do not agree, no matter when initiate of saphery triggered, it trigger only once and so you can only trigger Glittering tower once (in this action window, no matter the number of unit healed there is only one action window)

For me it is the same with Troll vomit and

Altar of khaine : Kingdom. Action : if one of your units would be destroyed, you may pay 1 ressource to instead return it into your hand.

You can triggered altar of khaine only once per copy during the resolution of the effect.

Do we have an official ruling on the Altar? Because that ruling would apply to this situation as well multiple units affected, but response only allowed to trigger once.

To me, in both cases, I can see the situation where, even though multiple units are affected, the response action can be triggered off of each unit affected. That is why I want to find this out, as it makes a huge difference in game play effects.

Nah, this one's a power broker, friends and neighbors. If it states, "Whenever you heal a unit....." it is referring to each individual instance of a unit being healed. The applicable rule states, "Response actions are a subset of actions that can only be triggered during the stated trigger in the ability. Each response action can be triggered once per copy of the response action and only once per stated trigger." Therefore, a different trigger brings on a new application of the response action. Their meaning is that the response fires off only once per card per trigger.

Martin_fr said:

If I have Initiate of Saphery out in play, say with 2 other light elves who have 2 hit points each (i'm not concerned about power with this question) somewhere on the field. Now, neither of them have taken damage and when it comes to my turn, does the Initiate do 1 point of healing to each unit even though they have taken no damage? (The same question could be posed but this time with 1 unit unit that has 1 damage token on it and the other does not, what happens to the one that doesn't since the Initiate heals everyone on your field). I guess the quick question is: Is over-healing allowed?

If they "can" complete their healing action when no unit has taken damage then simply having the glittering tower out with this unit will damage something of theirs every single turn. If this really is the case, then we must know how the healing is handled. It's either 1) All units are healed as one action thereby only 1 healing damage is done triggering the glittering tower once or 2) All units are healed as separate actions (including itself) meaning that if you have 3 creatures on the field then you trigger the tower 3 separate times dealing 3 damage.

If they can't complete their healing action when no unit has taken damage, then simply nothing happens.

Either way, we need to know how this "over-healing" works and if it even does in the first place.

You can't heal when there is no damage on the unit. Well you can play the effect, but it does not count as healing if you don't remove any damage tokens.

However, what is the answer to mass healing and Glittering tower i don't know. I would say it triggers once for every unit you heal, cause my understanding of the FAQ ruling is the same as yours.

Once per trigger (unit healed), once per card (1 Glittering tower). The ruling means that i can't respond to the particular unit getting healed more than once, but i get to respond once for each trigger.

With the coming RC i would really like to have an official word on this one.

Are there any news about this topic? Like an official statement?

IMO, this is very clear. Since "Whenever you heal a unit" is a constant effect, you get to do as much damage as units you heal. Otherwise the card would state "whenever an effect heals one or more of your units".

Untill there is an official statement that says otherwise, I play with your first option.

Coastercinder said:

I would argue it can't be a constant effect, because it has "Action:" in the text.

"There are four different types of card effects in the
Warhammer: Invasion LCG. These are: actions,
forced effects, constant effects, and keywords." (p. 15)

Constant effects don't have a bolded trigger on them, Glittering Tower does.

Dam said:

To me, the word "whenever" means pretty much all the time, any turn, any phase. Therefore, I concider this effect to be "constant". The only reason I can think of that this is an "action" is that it makes the damage dealing optional, you don't have to do damage if you don't want to.

Glittering Tower was clarified as being able to trigger off every unit healed. It is not a constant effect, it is an action whose trigger is a unit being healed, regardless of how many other units are being healed simultaneously, each individual unit is a meeting of the trigger condition.

Glittering tower's text should read forced IMHO. That would solve the problem. Still i belive that when an effect is added to the stack/chain, if it implies multiple units being hit/healed it creates separated packages of heal/damage for each.

Conversely that should mean that Altar of Khaine should be able to be triggered aat each instance a unit should be destroyed - meaning multiple activations of it is possible with one Troll Vomit, no?

Yes, multiple AoK triggerings are possible. Though I still don't know if you have to trigger it in response to the Troll Vomit, or after it has resolved.

Regarding Troll Vomit and Alter of Khaine: You probably have to trigger the ability of the Altar in response to Troll Vomit being played unless the resolution of Troll Vomit places a "destroy this unit"-effect on the stack for each unit in play. Otherwise, you would have to be able to interrupt the resolution of the card effect which is highly unlikely.