Hi,

I have a question about Snotling Ambush :

Action: Discard a card from your hand with X loyalty to discard X resources from target player.

What happen if I have 4 resources and my opponent plays Snotling Ambush with discarding a 5-loyalty card? It doesn't say "discard up to X resources", unlike Dark Elf Infiltrator, so I was thinking it worked different than usual.

Another same question : what happens if I trigger a "look at the top 5 cards of your deck" Action, and my deck has only 3 cards left, can I trigger it ?

Thank you.

Oooh! Well, for Snotling Ambush I'd say the answer is that you cannot discard 5 resources in that case, so you don't. Similar to any action like "Do something to make an opponent sacrifice a unit they control", if they have no unit, they don't have to sacrifice it. I think your opponent could still play that card, though, since there is no target needed. They just don't get the effect of you losing resources.

I'm not sure of "look at the top 5 cards", since one could argue that the top five cards are inclusive of those three, so you are going to look at the top five, which in your case is only three. As opposed to "Look at the top 5 target cards of your deck." This sounds like I'm making stuff up, since you could say by my exact same reasoning for the Snotling Ambush situation, you probably won't be able to look at the top 5 cards so you look at no cards. I'd say this is slightly different in that "top 5 cards" does not mean you cannot look at the top 3 on your way to looking at the top 5, while discarding 5 resources is not the same as discarding 4…

That's how I'd rule it, anyway. I'd like to know if there is a precedent to this one.

Budmilka_fr said:

HappyDD said:

Nope, you have 4 cards in your deck, enemy plays Bathe in Cauldron. It is illegal target? Nope, you loose. With snotling ambush you discard as many resources as possible. You can use cards that say look at 5 top cards of your deck even you have only 1 card in your deck.

Ok, so it looks like we agree with "Look at the top 5 cards" working when there are only 3 cards.

But why are you saying that Snotling Ambush would discard 4 resources when someone discards a card with 5 loyaltly? You wouldn't say that the X's have to match?

No.

Action: Choose a target player. That player discards the top 5 cards of his deck.

Ya, I'm not sure. I might be overthinking this one. Discarding the top 5 cards is sort of like saying "discard the first 5 cards", whereas saying "discard X resources" is not the same as "discard the first X resources" since they don't really have an order. But as far as I can tell, I don't think that's important… I'd have played it the way you say before I saw this thread and thought about it.

Also HappyDD what if you discard a card with 5 loyalty, enemy has 5 resources but plays a tactic for 2 in response. This would cancel the effect of snotling ambush in resolve? This would make it almost unplayable

Ya, that makes sense too! You could just play any stupid little tactic to keep your resources… Here's what Lukas said:

"Thanks for the question. You should fulfill as much as the effect as possible, so your opponent would have to discard as many resources as he is able to. Same with discarding from the top of the deck."

And that makes total sense. As I said, I got confused when I tried to second-guess what I would normally do. Thanks Virgo!

Thank you. It's clear now.