Greetings all,

A thought came to me earlier regarding a way of dealing with infinite combos and potentially slowing down some aspects of the game that get irritating. What is your opinion on this:

"A individual card can only be brought into play, or played, once per turn. If a player has multiple instances of the same card each can be played once. So if a tactic is played then somehow returned to its owners hand, it cannot be played again this turn. This also affects cards which can be played from out of the direct play zone - such as recycling units with necromancy (I worry this could become a problem at one point) and cards accessed from the deck such as through the Lord Of Change.

For example if a player has Arcane Power in their hand and in their discard pile they could play the one in their hand to return it the second copy to their hand. The second copy could then be played to return the first copy to their hand. However this first copy could not be played again this turn due to card limitations of one play per turn. (For sake of this example, please ignore the recent errata, explaining it this way is easiest)."

In terms of the overall game play and theme, this would represent attrition of resources and time taken for an army to take actions. To me at least it feels like the sort of rule the original Warhammer war game would have. Personally infinite loops and rule loopholes irritate me to no end, especially when they take focus away from the original flow of the game and thematic play to place focus on quickly winning with a cheep combo; even if they can be hard to pull off it pulls away from the original direction of the game.

Anyway, I am in no way affiliated with FFG (if I was, I promise there would be more and much better Lizardman cards that what currently exists…) this is just an idea I had and wanted to see other players opinion on this?

Have a good weekend all!

This rule would mean that you would have to reveal information about your hand to your opponent. You play a card, it somehow gets returned to your hand, you want to play another copy of it, and have to show your opponent (part of) your hand to prove it really is another copy. It would also throw a wrench into some perfectly fine rules and mechanisms - it's not like necromancy is overpowered, for example, so why stop people from animating the same zombie multiple times per turn? If you play a harmless unit and it gets returned to your hand in the same turn, why shouldn't you be able to play it again? As a consequence of this rule, the power of a whole lot of effects (such as any that return a card to hand) would change.

It would be quite a big rules change for a problem that might not be as big. I sympathize if you don't like infinite loops, but when they are not both as simple and devastating as Kurt + 2 Arcane Power or Greatswords / Werner / Hidden Operative were, I can live with them. For example, I'm basically fine with Fists of Mork / Lord of Change, because it takes time and can be disrupted quite easily. I would prefer if there were no infinite loops (or at least only pointless ones), but that doesn't mean loops by themselves are a problem that requires fixing, and on such a fundamental level. If any single loop becomes a problem, there are ways to deal with that instead of changing the whole game and eliminating the highly elaborate, not at all competitive loops too.