Danakh:

I attack with a big army a martell player who have a prince loyalist and Aero Hotah (ITE)
we go through the claim resolution to the response phase.
My opponent use Areo to kill my army. I play paying the iron price to kill Areo. He now cancel Aero whit his loyalist ...

The save isn't a cancel so aero's effect is still cancelable
But paying the iron price have fully resolve (army is saved, aero have become moridond)
So we end up in a situation where the kill effect is canceled, but the army have been succefully saved and because the save have succeded, aero have been killed

That seems strange !

(as often with me, there is no precise question, but the description of situation that seems strange to me, and i just want to see if i have made a mistake or if there is precision that you can add to see this situation in a more intuitive way )

Quote:
Paying the iron price
Response: Kneel 2 influence to save a character from being killed. Then, choose and kill a character with lower STR, if able.

Quote:
Prince's loyalist
Response: kneel 1 influence to cancel a triggered character ability with influence cost X or lower. X is the number of doomed cards in your dead pile.

Quote:
Areo Hotah
Response: After you lose a challenge by 4 or more total STR, kneel Areo Hotah to choose and kill a character.



Thomas Stark:


He wouldn't be able to cancel Aero's effect after you've initiated a save. You are saving off of the character dying, not off of Aero's trigger. I'm sure ktom will fill in the correct terminology and snaz it up a bit.




ktom:


Thomas Stark wrote:
You are saving off of the character dying, not off of Aero's trigger.

But the character dying and Areo triggering are essentially the same thing here. The opportunity to save from one or cancel the other happen at the same time.

Tom Stark would be correct if these happened the other way around. You cannot save the target of a kill effect after the effect itself has been canceled because the character is no longer about to die, so the Response trigger is invalid. However, as presented by Danakh, the scenario is possible.

Granted, it does seem a little weird that the timing structure does allow a kill effect to be canceled after the target is saved, but it isn't really all that unintuitive. Remember the difference between saves and cancels, though. Just because a character that is saved is considered to never have died in the first place does not mean that an effect that is canceled is considered to never have been triggered in the first place. If that were true, you'd get all the costs back when you canceled an effect. A canceled effect can still be copied and the TRIGGER can be Responded to, which is really what is happening here. You Respond to the trigger before it is clear that the character will not die. You can't take back the Response.

Ask yourself this: Would it be more intuitive if the save in question DIDN'T kill something? Or killed something else?

But here's a non-card example. Say a criminal points a gun at a policeman, who hears a loud bang. He ducks further behind the rock he was trying to hide behind, fires back and hits the criminal. He reacted in a reasonable way to the real stimuli he was faced with, thinking he was about to die. Is the criminal any less dead if it turns out his gun was a toy and the sound was a car backfiring down the street? If the policeman had realized that BEFORE he had Responded to save himself, his reaction would have been different because it would no longer have been a reasonable Response.



Trump:

So essentially this isn't any different than if the player who's about to have his character killed freaks out and plays a response to save his character and a response to cancel the killing effect? It's redundant but allowed?



ktom:


Trump wrote:
It's redundant but allowed?

That's the key. It's redundant, but allowed. Most players would probably not do both (unless the save itself was canceled).

The only situation I can think of where it might be worth it is if your opponent triggered a mass kill or discard. If you saved a single character, then canceled the effect, you'd protect all of your character from the mass effect, but also set up an "after a character is saved" trigger for something like The Reader.


eaeisd:


ktom wrote:
Trump wrote:
It's redundant but allowed?

That's the key. It's redundant, but allowed. Most players would probably not do both (unless the save itself was canceled).

The only situation I can think of where it might be worth it is if your opponent triggered a mass kill or discard. If you saved a single character, then canceled the effect, you'd protect all of your character from the mass effect, but also set up an "after a character is saved" trigger for something like The Reader.


Am I right in understanding that the controller of the loyalist gained nothing by canceling areo's ability?




ktom:

Correct. In the situation as described, there was no benefit to triggering the Loyalist. The damage was done before the cancel activated.