So yeah last night a bunch of us were playing Oofs at the local store (sans our scout). Well we had an interesting delemma pop up.

So my buddy Andrew blocks something with a Rejection, which in turn his opponant SoCs away. Is this still possible? Or possible at all? Also same goes for KFT and actions played as blocks. Possible?

Cheers,

Brad

Yes you can still negate action cards as blocks with SOC and KFT at least that I know of nothing changed right now in the TR about that.

Stamp for Scuba. Because Seal of Cessation just says "Action card", if one is played as a block, SoC can negate the effect of blocking.

Are they able to attempt to block again? or are they forced to take the damage since they "played a block" ?

They have already attempted to play a block. Unless they have an effect that will allow another block to be played, they move to the damage step.

Which I still think is quite possibly the stupidest ruling, nay, the stupidest concept, ever created, even more than inbreeding.

Cascade said:

Wait, you're saying the concept of negation is stupid? Welcome to CCGs...?

Tagrineth said:

I'm saying this ruling is foolish. This is the only instance where an 'effect' refers to something outside the text box. Blocking ability is suddenly an effect ONLY for this situation. It's ludicrous.

Cascade said:

Welcome back to Set 1 when Power of the Edge was released?

edit: small history lesson... originally, just removing the card from the card pool canceled the block, even. People used to run that unwieldy as heck 5/2 foundation from Penny Arcade - Treachery - because it could respond and discard your opponent's block from the card pool, and originally that meant the block would not take effect.

So what you've just said is that it's the remove-from-card-pool part of the effect that stopped the block, not the negation of the effect.

Cascade said:

no, thats what the ORIGINAL rulling back on STG back in the first 2 sets was, they had to change the rulling for clarity reasons, and stop trying to bug them enough to get this rule overturned, if you have a problem with it you KNOW the link to go to, the arbiters cannot overturn the FFG rulings go to Hata himself and argue your case or just WAIT for the new rules in a couple weeks to see if this has changed, and stop badgering everyone about it...

N.J.

uh... actually... I brought this up with James last night.

This ruling will not change with the revised tournament rules.

Sorry.

By the rules, a block is an effect of the action card being played.

Negating the effect of the action card, means you've negated the block.

The block was played, you've met the window for "you can only play 1 block to an attack."

There are cards that allow a second block to be played against an attack.

Perhaps try those if your action cards are being negated on a regular basis.

Antigoth said:

Are there any in block 3?

And I still think Blocking falls under the umbrella of "game mechanic" rather than "effect".

Side note: Calm down there NJ.

well, it's a game mechanic (blocking) which allows the cards to have the effect of blocking an attack.

Is R negation that hard to come by now days?

And who blocks anyways?

And why is this still in Q & A?

Tagrineth said:

What kind of effect would blocking be then? R? Static? Or something all it's own?

Cascade said:

It would be an effect of the block step. Normally you can't just play blocks, but during a specific window you can.

Attacks are forms.

Reversals are R

Blocks are their own specific effect.

to add to what antigoth put forth-

if the card you are using to block with gets cancelled, that means you didn't successfully play a block, and you're going to get hit.

where exactly is the problem coming from?

GouHadou said:

It's the use of the word "effect".

I do not believe that this was what the developers had in mind when they made Seal of Cessation/Power of the Edge/Kung-Fu Training etc. But I'm not incorporating my beliefs into my argument if I can help it.

What I would like to do, is ask the Rules Arbiters, in their own words, to explain why this ruling makes sense to them. I'm gonna take a Socratic approach to this.

Because if a card gets negated, it does nothing . How does negating a card still allow it to do something?

You aren't negating a card though are you? You're negating an effect. Kung-Fu Training and Seal of Cessation actually take care to mention this in their abilities. Neither one says "negate the card", only "Negate that action card 's effects " and "after an ability or action card is played, negate it's effects " respectively.

The negation really isn't the problem here. Nobody's really explained why 'effects' come into the game mechanic of blocking at all, which is what I think is questionable.

I might email FFG, see if they can give me the contact details for the guys who came up with the original mechanics of the game, if I can I'll ask them.

Cascade,

You play a block to create the effect of block.

Forms - Are a card that create a Form effect.
Enhances - create an Enhance Effect
Responses - create a response effect.
Blocks - Create a blocking effect.

an action card, whether it is played as an F, E, R, of Block, ignores the rest of the effects on the card, and becomes only that type of card when it is played.

As for FFG getting a hold of David Freeman about game design and intention, that's not going to happen. Dave is no longer involved with UFS. He is working on some other projects of his own. What ever his intention might have been, we have to go with the wording and the game mechanics.

If you want intention - the intention of the injury assets were for cards like Holding Ground to be able to reset damage after they were played. Sadly, the wording did not support that.

When the revised tournament rules are rolled out, this area of concern will be very clearly delineated, you have my assurances on that.

I *Promise* that blocking will be clearly defined in the game rules as an effect.

Cascade said:

Why would blocking not be an effect of a card though? I mean, really, how does that make sense? If you negate all the effects of a card, how can it still do something?

Curse you Tag for replying when I'm in the middle of composing a reply to Antigoth. Alright, I'll split this post up. First part goes to Antigoth.

"You play a block to create the effect of a block." - I can't be the only one who sees the redundancy of this statement. This is my main query. What purpose is there for having blocking be an effect when the only purpose of that effect is to block an attack?

What exactly would be the effect, in full, of playing a block?

Now here's Tag's part.

Who is to say it's the card doing anything? If we think about it in terms of, say a ranged attack, you're chucking a card in the way of your opponent's attack so it doesn't get to you. The card itself doesn't have to do anything except be a physical presence, you can negate it's effects all it wants, it still gets in the way (or in this case, the card pool). You could say that any "effect" used would come from you, rather than the card used as a block, which is just something to get in the way, so negating the effects of a block would do nothing, you'd have to negate the effect of the person performing a block in the first place.

As for blocking making sense as an effect, that's only if we use the proper english meaning of "effect", which is synonymous with "outcome", whereas in this and other CCGs effect is closer to "ability". I'd say the consequence of playing a block would be that the attack was blocked, rather than the ability of the card played as a block would be to block the card, which I hope I've shown is rather redundant.

(I have no idea whether this is sensible or not, it's 4:45am, I'm gonna sleep for a while then come back to this, g'night all)

Cascade said:

Lets take a look at some cards shall we:

Blocks are created by cards. Most blocks are created during the block step, however in some instances, like those highlighted here, they are created as a response to the attack being played, or during the enhance step. (See Also: Tycho).

A block effect is either a full block (blocking matching the correct zone of the attack) or a partial block, (successfully blocking, but not matching the zone of the attack).

Lets flash back for a second to .:Tira:. when she moved the zone of a block, even if it was made into an illegal block, there was still a partial block applied.

While it may seem redundant declaring that a block card is used to create the "block effect", it's true.

Ultimately we could call the block effect something else, but that would be unintuitive. If there is no such thing as a "block effect" how can you simply declare that a card is "blocked" without blocking it.

If a block card, is not it's own type of card, that creates a block effect, then the card must be something else.

We've already figured out that's an even bigger NPE.

If an action card played as a block, does not create a block effect, then it must be some other type of card, creating a different type of effect.

We've already figured out that having an action card with an E printed on it, played as a block is not an enhance. (Otherwise you could simply negate the effect of the enhance card. And again, we've figured out that's bad.) Blocking certainly isn't an enchance, if we classified it as a response, that would be a whole other pile of worms.

I get that you're not comfortable with this. That you personally don't like this. We've tried to give you the respect of answering you, but now we're going into circles. There is no disagreement on this. All three rules arbiters are all on the same page. Saturday night I took the time to discuss this directly with James, to make sure we're not on the wrong page.

You can appeal to FFG, sure. But leveling with you... having seen the revised tournament rules. This situation is clearly addressed in the revised rules.

Sit tight... wait a couple of weeks, and you'll have it in front of you, in the game rules.