Does anyone srsly think any average player not hearing this discussion is gonna play this card right… I really think per card FAQ needs more support, this card clearly shows how confusing relying on such timing details is.

You design the card as a function, not as random text to interpret. If the function you made is not clear from the text either you need to change the text or provide better explanation of the text.

I don't think its always possible to provide accessible and strict text, but this card is really horrible. It should state that player who discarded draws other card instead, what harm would it make, its disrupt and stating the non obvious is really the way to go. Assuming player will do a reaserch and find this out is really ridiculous. Discard means get rid of card… not change card… What is the target of this game, hardcore rule experts… I really like this game but cards such as those really hurt my playing experience. If i didn't read this discussion i would argue with my friends for like forever if anyone suggested it lets you draw other card…

[/rage off]

Whats with Alyssa vs Parlor timing, now that Alyssa's true (less awsome) power has been confirmed? You can see the card before you decide weather to trigger the disrupt or not?

.Zephyr. said:

Yes. As I see it now, the following happens with Alyssa+The Parlor: (step numbering according to the timing scheme)

1. Framework Action (oponent wants to draw a card) is initiated.Here the Parlor kicks in (because of the red text about altering effects and its "as initiated" part) and forces my opponent to reveal the card he has to draw.
   In 1b), no target for my opponent's draw is assigned since drawing is something untargeted.
2. Disrupts. I now use Alyssa's disrupt ability to make my opponent discard the top card of his deck.
3. Action is executed. There is still a top card on my opponent's deck, so he may draw that. I think I may not look at that card now, because the revealing caused by The Parlor happens in step 1) because it's an altering effect.

Correct?

If yes, the only thing I'm unsure of is at which substep of step 1) the card gets revealed… Any ideas?

.Zephyr. said:

Having said that, to be honest, I don't think an 'average' player will care much about this discussion (or actually any online discussion about the game). Unless you're playing in a tournament, who cares if you play everything by the book? As long as the players can agree on a ruling, there's no harm done.

I've played countless games without perfect rules knowledge and we still managed and had a lot of fun. On a casual level it's really not that relevant.

****, hope this official answer would have come out some days earlier!! this weekend was the National Championship in Spain and Alyssa Was played the wrong way…

Thanks for clarifying =)

If i understand well :

if i'm the owner of Alyssa and if it's my drawing phase (draw 2 cards)

1) I draw the first card from top deck

2) Disrupt from Alyssa

3) put top card of my discard pile on top of my deck

4) put the first card i drawn in my hand

5) draw my second card from top deck (actually the card i just move from discard pile)

Is it ok ?

KrissS666 said:

Almost; I think it should be silightly different:

1) The drawing is initiated (but not yet resolved, basically you just say what you're going to do)
2) Alyssa's disrupt is triggered and resolved: Place the top card from discard pile on top of your deck
3) Action (= the drawing) is executed: Draw the top card from your deck (which is the one that has been in the discard pile - Damon has written that drawing is something untargeted, so there is no reason that the game "remembers" that the card that has been originally on top of your deck is now under the retrieved card)

After that, you take your next framework action, that is you draw your second card this turn (which is the one that has been on top of your deck initially).

jhaelen said:

In my group this is a real problem - you construct the deck with one interaction in mind, then you play and other player thinks its the other way around… Yeah, we wont fight to death and agree on something, but this does change the game quite a bit, and i pay for a tested game not "do it youreslf kit". The rules were designed and tested - why waste designers and testers work by playing different game… I love the idea of balance and competitive play, even if my decks as as far from tier 1 as possible - this throws it to trash can. Its like banning Zergling rush in SC - when youre new you dont know what should be done- but here i don't know is it a valid play or just some ruling bug…

I might houserule something I dont like, but im really dont like not even knowing what was designers idea in the first place.

See this card - eat half or normal draw or just filter. Its huge difference on balance… and Im not the one to make such decission.

Other small interactions are also really hurting my play experience - I want to use my cards as goog as i can, but not break rules. I really hate undefined rules. Rules you dont understand work just like they ware undefined.

I can understand Zephyr, when you play and a rules isn't really defined, that can ruin your game

Thanks HilariousPete, so even if you draw only 1 card (effect from a support), you can "draw" the top card of your discard pile: it's really a powerfull option !

Alyssa Graham isn't a game breaker. Here's how you handle her:

Neutral - Dimensional Rift/Ice Shaft

Cthulhu - lots of destruction

Agency - Shotguns of various standing, A Small Price to Pay…, new location to kill her when she's insane

Silver Twilight - How dost thou wish to bounce her? Let me count the ways… (Actually, ST may have the hardest time dealing with her)

Hastur - Destroy her when she goes insane, plenty of stuff to keep her insane, or you just steal her

Yog - Sacrifice her, while not caring if stuff goes in the discard pile

Syndicate - Smugglers (for handling stuff going to the bottom of a deck), Low Blow

Shub - She's crazy for Y'Golonac!

Miskatonic - Why is she a big deal? We draw so many cards anyways

So I'm not seeing what the big deal is. Yes, her interaction looks confusing at first, but upon further analysis she does not seem so daunting.

Magnus Arcanis said:

According the game you do. It defines a replacement effect as using the word instead. Anything may cause a redirection or alteration to how something is handled, but it is not a true replacement of the effect without the word instead.

Now here is where it gets a little "weird," something can, for all intents and purposes, act as a replacement effect, without being a replacement effect. It may seem like semantics but when it comes to games that rely on specific wordings and definitions it is the difference between what effects can be triggered off its use or prevent its use, in the same way that destroy, sacrifice, and discard all do the same thing from a player perspective but the game defines each differently and has a card pool that deals with each differently.

yes. alyssa on her own. no big deal. but start recurring her every turn with corrupted midwife or the like, you might want to think about how you'd deal with that - if of course she worked in that way. now, she's just another poo under the snow.

and if someone could explain to me how she works with the parlor, that'd be grand. alyssa effects the card before it is drawn, disrupting it into discard before it is even revealed. the parlor reveals the card AFTER it is drawn, so im supposing that by then its far too late for alyssa to disrupt, as it is no longer 'would' but 'has' been drawn.

Zephyr, the problem is you expect this game to work the way you expect it to work. It is a game with its own language. If you don't learn the language you are going to play it wrong. Every CCG I've ever played has these kinds of problems. Have you seen the cards for L5R or MtG? If you haven't learned the rules and timing of those games those cards make no sense at all. Even when you have learned the rules if you don't have the timing down pat figuring out when and how to use those cards can at times be every bit as difficult. And in Magic's case they have a large team of designers, developers, and professional playtesters, and they still have to errata or ban cards.

I'm not sure what your gaming background is Zephyr but this is not a board game, with a static card pool and set rules which never receives new additions or is going to be applied to pieces created 8 or more years since it was written.

Penfold said:

You are correct.

I didn't realize you could technically do the exact same thing as a replacement effect, but have it not be a replacement effect. I.E. Chess Prodigy vs Professor Sam Campbell.

Not sure if effect's like Sam's were declared as a replacement in the past (I at least certainly thought they were), but definately seperate now.

My background is playing many different boardgames and programming. No real CCG experience, i got into this because of no random packs and nice gameplay with many interesting decisions and deckbuilding.

I do understand that you follow the cards text, timings, detailed rules etc. As a programmer this idea is the core of a programming language. I dont understand why are the cards wording vs timing that crazy complicated to get and play right.

You get biased by initial assumptions, its unavoidable, you have to try to be less biased, but thats not my problem with the game that i read card wrong and got confused; after someone points out text is different than i thought there is nothing to argue about .

My problem is that I simply don't get how those rules are supposed to work despite spending a lot of time with FAQ, timing charts etc. I know i need to understand those conventions and so on. Still, this game fails to educate me on its basic mechanism so i can get those interactions. Even with all FAQ entries laid out it's still absurdly hard to get relatively simple cards with no wording problems whatsoever like Small price to pay used on any problematic target.

My problem is not use of special language - its fine and actually necessary. My problem is: current language + timings + targetting rules combo is incomprehensible and not explained in a way human can understand. Did you try to look at someone getting this without help of designer etc. Rulebook + FAQ should be enough, but it fails so hard.

I want to create something that would educate me and players like me so we can play this game not some houserule variant.

I'm thinking Zephir objective is good.

If player don't need help to understand rules: fine ! but for all players never (or a little) play ccg like game and/or don't want to take all strenght to read ALL special case in faq or read all post in forum, it will be usefull.

Even if player should understand ccg like game is evoluting game with evoluting ruling, if you need to check all faq each time you want to play, it's really a pain and it deserve the game.

We need to understand this game need PLAYERS to not die, so the community should make the game easier to help new player to come

Perhaps I'm the only one, but I think Alyssa makes more sense this way - by which I mean that her wording actually matches this effect.

If she discarded the card someone was drawing, it would have to say something like "after drawing a card" instead of "would draw a card" which specifies that the effect takes place immediately before the card is drawn. Either that or it would have to use replacement effect syntax which it doesn't.

It's only a combination of wishful thinking and misleading talk about the Parlor that I think led us down the wrong path on this one.

I partially agree - wishful thinking was part of the problem, but only part. If you want to educate you need to drive "wishfull thinking" in a right way, and if there are several quite similar but different results state the effect as clear as possible. If it would make cards text too long or not precise enough just write some explanatory document.

You are actually more biased by knowing previous rulings and detailed timings than new player. Your "look at FAQ" is not really true for new player, as it does work for you with all your knowledge, but will not work for new player who doesn't grasp much easier and already explained things.

Use of word "discard" in context of drawing cards suggests that the card you've drawn is discarded, but its just a suggestion. It seems this was not the case here, but its one of the things that naturally enter your mind.

To get it right from card text you need to consider micro details of how exactly is drawing a card defined in really fine details, namely when does "would draw a card" happen, and is it:
- before you chose witch exactly card to draw
- after you chose the card to draw (and what happens when the card you wanted to pick is gone)
- you don't choose, you just target deck and pick up whats on top
and rules didn't really focus on such details.

It also says "discard >that< card", so player needs to know what card was "to be drawn", again it suggests that the card to be picked is already chosen, and now you discard the card that was to be picked.

This is not the designers intention, but still really easy to misinterpret.

And creator of article on discarding hand seems to also got confused, Id say players will have some problems with this card.

.Zephyr. said:

Well this is precisely how I learned to play. It wasn't until years later that discovered that FFG had created a forum for it (or should I say Edge created a forum for it which FFG uses) and probably a year of lurking before I started posting in this particular forum. I didn't send in my first rules question until maybe about a year and a half ago. My rules knowledge comes almost entirely from reading the FAQ. But then while I did some scripting, programming isn't in my background, law is. I don't have a particular problem parsing out the meanings of card text or applying the FAQ/timing charts to them.

But I've also played dozens of CCG's and while I have to set aside all expectations of those games rules, they certainly trained me in how to break things down and know when and how to apply a rule.

You think this game is hard? I started playing Magic about six months into the Beta release. The rule book was about 10 pages of small print in a booklet the size of a card. All sorts of crazy mistakes were made and the rule structure was ridiculous… and by that I mean, there wasn't much beyond the booklet for the next, maybe two years. At the ten year mark Magic had become a byzantine set of rules, which seemed to change every rotation, with numerous errata and bannings that you had to remember, and there was still minimal online resources for it. You were pretty much dependent on the referees for complex card interaction rulings and when you played outside of your local store it was not infrequent that different places played cards differently. I got out right around that point.

That game is almost entirely different now, and their approach to it is closer to how an international federation handles a sport than how an average gaming company handles their games. But then they probably have a larger player base internationally than some of the olympic recognized sports… they certainly bring in more money than a number of them.

dboeren said:

i believe so. but we are not the only ones. i CANNOT believe the spanish nationals were held using her as a draw miller. if she placed, thats a whole lot a hoop-la, or even won against someone when she wouldnt have. one nationals - null and void. i feel sorry for those people……..

COCLCG said:

There is nothing null and void about it. Tons of people play with tons of card incorrectly all the time. it happens. It doesn't invalidate a competition though. Especially if everyone is making the same mistakes with the same cards, or at least agrees that is how it is played. The playing field is even and consensual.

I'm actually a programmer too, Zephyr. I'm sure you never would've guessed it from my handle I've been trying to come up with a way to represent this game's structure explicitly in code for at least a year now (off and on, I have too many other side projects) and it can be very difficult.

Think of this game's language relating to English the way that Java and C# relate. Sure, they look close and essentially try and describe scenarios in similar fashions, but they are still drastically different.

whatever hellfury. sometimes you do really make me wonder. ok. lets all have a tournament, and only a couple of decks get a supercharged card that defies all rules and quite possibly wins the top spot. and then lets give trophies to those decks for winning against the decks that didnt have the supercharged card. and if later those supercharged cards are found to be just average cards, too bad for those that didn't have them. but yeah, you are TOTALLY right.

and we're not talking about 'tons of people' playing casual games, but a NATIONAL TOURNAMENT, where a single faction incorrectly had the power to limit the opponents draw phase ( sure, only a MINOR thing isn't it ). i'm sure the hastur players were quite happy with the 'consensual view' - which wasn't of course "hey guys, everyone happy that we play this card wrong".

His point, one which I agree with, is that everyone there played under the same rules. So the playing field in respect to what each person in that specific tournament experienced was equal. He isn't saying it was fair or proper, just that they were all operating under the same set of rules. The thing to remember is that any and all tournaments prior to theirs where AG was legal would have very possibly been contested following the exact same rules… in which case it is no different than a FAQ coming out following a tournament. People can bemoan that fact that if the FAQ had come out a day or two earlier they may have performed differently, but the Hastur players they faced may have used a different card or different deck that may have had just the same amount of success… or possibly more.

It sucks that it was played wrong, but this is going to happen when the tournament does not have an FFG representative right there.

Going back to discussion on rulings.

Some cards being played wrong is a problem. The main problem is some players think card does X, some players think card does Y. They design decks thinking about two a bit different different games. Turnament is held, TO says we play X. All the guys who thought it was Y have decks that are not prepared for X. Then it is found that designer intended Y and X is mistake. All players who played X can feel like they cheated a bit, and all players who thought it was Y feel cheated for losing to X.

Yeah, in reality it usually is not that big of a difference between X and Y and it even if you thought its otherwise you wouldnt change your deck much. Usually it doesnt influence outcome of a game that much. But with Alyssa X and Y are really different.

Now we have something Magick did not have 10 years ago - Internet, common, possible to access from a cell phone, making cheap communication and collaboration all over the world possible. I really think the cost of maintaining ruling clarifications is not much when you use web correctly.

Just stop saying "its too expensive" and consider how expensive it really is. Posting about 20 short entries a month is expensive? Posting rulings you already mail for ppl to find is expansive?

Setting up a card base would cost some money. But

a) that much? IT tends to be expensive but im not sure how expensive; and it the IT firm does it right you can use this database for all games that use many cards; even stuff like Chaos in the Old world could use some explanation with some cards

b) why not collaborate with sites like cardgameDB; just talk with their admin, i think there is a high chance he will help and set up service for free cause he likes your games

[edit] I just started writing such clarifications on cardgameDB - i did Spawn of the sleeper, the thing that takes me the most time is the fact that i dont understand those interactions, so i need to look them up as i go, someone who understands rules better should be able to write them quite fast; if there ware 3-5 ppl writing from time to time i think 1000/4 is 250 cards each, many cards dont need much explanation so lets say 210 cards, lets say 1 card a day (not really fast, 5 min or so i think) in 2/3 of year would make complete card database with rulings

.Zephyr. said:

You cannot just post rulings you already mailed to someone, as is. They'll have to be edited, formatted, converted, checked and re-checked, and usually go through several iterations before they're made public. More than one person and department is usually involved in this process.

Why do you think, do we get new FAQs at most once or twice a year?

Once something is posted on the internet it'll never go away, ever. That alone will give every company pause.