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[eHalcyon]

For example, if you buy a Border Village and gain something else (say a Witch) with it, you can't put the Witch on on top of your deck with Watchtower and then put the BV on top of it.

This stuff has always confused me a bit but I never really bothered to work through it all.  But isn't there some sort of lose-track thing that happens?

When you gain the Witch, it covers up the BV in the discard which makes WT lose track of it.  You can then topdeck the Witch, but WT can no longer topdeck the BV (even though you can see it right there again).

Something like that.

[Watno]

yeah, exactly that is the problem

[AJD]

For example, if you buy a Border Village and gain something else (say a Witch) with it, you can't put the Witch on on top of your deck with Watchtower and then put the BV on top of it.

This is true; but you can put the BV on top of your deck with Watchtower and then put the Witch on top of that, which is usually just as good.

[Awaclus]

For example, if you buy a Border Village and gain something else (say a Witch) with it, you can't put the Witch on on top of your deck with Watchtower and then put the BV on top of it.

Why couldn't you? You can still decide the order of Border Village's and Watchtower's effects.

[Watno]

But then they'll end up the other way around.

[eHalcyon]

For example, if you buy a Border Village and gain something else (say a Witch) with it, you can't put the Witch on on top of your deck with Watchtower and then put the BV on top of it.

Why couldn't you? You can still decide the order of Border Village's and Watchtower's effects.

So you have two events to resolve -- BV gaining and WT to put BV on top.

You can choose to resolve WT first and top-deck the BV.  Now you resolve BV and gain a Witch.  Because you gained another card, you can use WT to top-deck that as well.  In the end, you have Witch on top of BV on top of your deck. 

But what if you wanted those two cards in the other order?

So you choose to resolve BV first and gain the Witch.  Now you have two pending events: WT for BV an WT for Witch.  You can't use WT on BV though because it is covered up by Witch in the discard pile, which means that WT has lost track of BV.  You can use WT to top-deck Witch.  The tricky thing now is, can you use WT to top-deck the BV?  By the rules, you cannot -- WT lost track of BV; it doesn't get it back even though you can see it in the discard again.  This may be something that people will house rule though, and it wouldn't make a huge difference either way.

So it's impossible to get both cards top-decked with BV on top.  Overall it's probably not a big deal, though it can make a difference in some cases.  Maybe you are gaining BV during your action phase, and after doing so you have one action left and only a cantrip in hand.  You want to draw and play BV before Witch so that you don't draw any actions dead.  Unfortunately, you can't stack the cards that way with WT.

[AJD]

For example, if you buy a Border Village and gain something else (say a Witch) with it, you can't put the Witch on on top of your deck with Watchtower and then put the BV on top of it.

Why couldn't you? You can still decide the order of Border Village's and Watchtower's effects.

Because of a silly side-consequence of the lose-track rule.

To put the BV on your deck first, this is what happens:

Gain a Border Village.
...Reveal a Watchtower.
......Put the Border Village on top of your deck.
...Gain a Witch.
......Reveal a Watchtower.
.........Put the Witch on top of your deck.

If you try to do the opposite, this is what happens:

Gain a Border Village.
...Gain a Witch. (The Border Village is now officially lost-track-of, since it's been covered up in the discard pile.)
......Reveal a Watchtower.
.........Put the Witch on top of your deck.
...Reveal a Watchtower.
......You can't move the Border Village because it's been lost track of (even though it's visible again).

[Donald X.]

The general rule is, for any "when x happens, do y," y happens directly *after* x happens. I would apply this to all games that don't specify otherwise (Magic: The Gathering is a significant exception). For example: "When you pass Go, collect $200." When do you collect $200? Directly *after* passing Go.

Why is MTG an exception? "When a creature enters the battlefield, gain 1 life"... you gain the 1 life after the creature is actually on the battlefield.

The "after" isn't different in Magic, but the "directly" is.

Obv. in any game it might be the case that four things have to happen "when x happens." They probably can't all happen at once; so some things don't happen immediately. And possibly other effects feed off of some of those things - there's a "when x happens do y" and "when y happens do z" and z happens before we get to the second "when x happens." That's how it is in Dominion.

In Magic however you can do a broad class of things in response to other things, whether they relate or not; x happens, there's a "when x happens" ability on the table, it goes on the stack, and I decide randomly to play a card-drawing spell that resolves first, then do some other things. The "when x happens" thing sits there, hanging around, until there's nothing else we want to do ahead of it.

Magic does have a lot of "replacements" too (when x would happen), and those obv. come first, but that's not an exception and not what I was talking about.

I am glad you guys are on top of the when-gain / Watchtower / lose-track madness.

[GendoIkari]

The general rule is, for any "when x happens, do y," y happens directly *after* x happens. I would apply this to all games that don't specify otherwise (Magic: The Gathering is a significant exception). For example: "When you pass Go, collect $200." When do you collect $200? Directly *after* passing Go.

Why is MTG an exception? "When a creature enters the battlefield, gain 1 life"... you gain the 1 life after the creature is actually on the battlefield.

The "after" isn't different in Magic, but the "directly" is.

Obv. in any game it might be the case that four things have to happen "when x happens." They probably can't all happen at once; so some things don't happen immediately. And possibly other effects feed off of some of those things - there's a "when x happens do y" and "when y happens do z" and z happens before we get to the second "when x happens." That's how it is in Dominion.

In Magic however you can do a broad class of things in response to other things, whether they relate or not; x happens, there's a "when x happens" ability on the table, it goes on the stack, and I decide randomly to play a card-drawing spell that resolves first, then do some other things. The "when x happens" thing sits there, hanging around, until there's nothing else we want to do ahead of it.

Magic does have a lot of "replacements" too (when x would happen), and those obv. come first, but that's not an exception and not what I was talking about.

I am glad you guys are on top of the when-gain / Watchtower / lose-track madness.

We're getting into the interview thread now, but was there ever a time that you were considering having a "stack" in Dominion?

[Donald X.]

We're getting into the interview thread now, but was there ever a time that you were considering having a "stack" in Dominion?

No, a stack is a computing thing that's just way too much to ask of players. It's a significant flaw in Magic imo. What you want is an implicit stack like Dominion has - just having a game complex enough for multiple "when x happens" rules means you may have some feed off each other, but it can be clear what happens without bringing stacks into it.

[jl8e]

No, a stack is a computing thing that's just way too much to ask of players. It's a significant flaw in Magic imo. What you want is an implicit stack like Dominion has - just having a game complex enough for multiple "when x happens" rules means you may have some feed off each other, but it can be clear what happens without bringing stacks into it.

It’s probably an inevitable feature of any game that allows a free-for-all reaction environment with effects that can affect other effetcts like Magic has.

Dominion’s reactions can’t interact with each other, so less-complicated timing rules work just fine.

[Donald X.]

No, a stack is a computing thing that's just way too much to ask of players. It's a significant flaw in Magic imo. What you want is an implicit stack like Dominion has - just having a game complex enough for multiple "when x happens" rules means you may have some feed off each other, but it can be clear what happens without bringing stacks into it.

It’s probably an inevitable feature of any game that allows a free-for-all reaction environment with effects that can affect other effetcts like Magic has.

Dominion’s reactions can’t interact with each other, so less-complicated timing rules work just fine.

Magic could get by just fine with an implicit stack. You wouldn't be able to, say, play your draw-cards instant at a random time, but they have shifted away from that stuff anyway. Reactive stuff would really be reactive. You would lose a little flexibility - my go-to example is, you wouldn't end up with Giant Growths phrased in a way that would let me stop an Orgg from attacking - but it so wouldn't matter.

Dominion's reactive things do interact with each other (though they aren't all marked as reactions). In this thread, Border Village / Watchtower.

[Donald X.]

Oops, I accidentally deleted your post while intending to click "quote." Sorry about that. I don't see how to undo it. Anyway we won't forget your post, this is what it said:

“Interact” was a poor choice of words on my part. Reactions can trigger each other, but there aren’t any reactions that cancel other reactions, for instance. Trader is the only reaction that effectively alters the way another reaction behaves, and that just isn’t enough to need a complex timing structure.

Counterspell works fine as a "reaction." That's how it worked in Portal even (the for-beginners Magic expansion with simpler rules).

The main trick is you have cards called "reactions" (not like Dominion ones, but like Dominion's were originally) that tell you when you can play them. You can only play them then. Counterspell says "Play only when a spell is played. Counter that spell."

[theblankman]

Counterspell works fine as a "reaction." That's how it worked in Portal even (the for-beginners Magic expansion with simpler rules).

The main trick is you have cards called "reactions" (not like Dominion ones, but like Dominion's were originally) that tell you when you can play them. You can only play them then. Counterspell says "Play only when a spell is played. Counter that spell."

Richard Garfield might agree with you.  Long before Portal existed, in the early days of MTG, there was no stack, and Counterspell, instead of the Instant it is now, had a now-defunct card type, "Interrupt," whose function was to affect other cards as they were being played.  Interrupts could only be played during the process of someone playing another card.  Besides counterspell variants, Interrupts could do things like change a card's target if it had one (Deflection), or change other properties of the card before it resolved (Sleight of Mind, Magical Hack).  That sounds more or less like the "reaction" type you've described, and works for any purely responsive effect. 

But MTG has other "response-like" cases that shouldn't have the restriction of "play only as a reaction."  The classic example is when you try to kill my creature with a Lightning Bolt and I try to save it with a Giant Growth.  Giant Growth shouldn't be a "reaction" because it clearly has other non-reactive uses, so what to do? 

- They could've made cards like Giant Growth multi-typed: Instant/Interrupt or in Dominion terms, Action/Reaction but with the same effect on both uses.  But then I suspect people would've come up with sneaky and confusing ways to get an advantage by specifying that they're playing the card as one type and not the other.  Maybe not with Giant Growth, but MTG has much more complicated "response-likes" than that. 

- They could've let all non-Interrupts resolve in the order they're played, the simplest possible timing.  Then Giant Growth only saves my creature if I do it preemptively.  So now we're talking about betting on what's in an opponent's hand, bluffing about what's in one's own hand, and "races" where my opponent starts to say "Lightning Bolt" and I try to say "Giant Growth" before he finishes speaking.  The first two do happen in MTG, but that last one is definitely undesired; it would cause arguments between players and be a big hassle for tournament judges. 

- That leaves timing rules that let Instants act as responses, which is what the game originally had, just without the word "stack."  The first rulebooks said that when everyone's done announcing their competing Instants, they resolve in the reverse order from how they were announced.  The phrase "last in first out" even appeared in the rules, with the same meaning it has when CS 101 professors use it to describe a stack. 

So that's how MTG started, with an "implicit stack," and a reaction card-type, and some gray areas in how to properly mix the reaction and non-reaction card types, which came up annoyingly often.  Maybe multi-typed cards would've worked for MTG, I'm not sure.  But I am pretty sure that introducing the stack explicitly, declaring that all Instant-speed effects go on the stack, and errata-ing all Interrupts into Instants made the game simpler than it had been before. 

Sorry for the wall of MTG history, I guess the TL;DR is that they did try it the Dominion way, more or less, back in the day, and it didn't work for MTG, so they did something else. 

[Donald X.]

But MTG has other "response-like" cases that shouldn't have the restriction of "play only as a reaction."  The classic example is when you try to kill my creature with a Lightning Bolt and I try to save it with a Giant Growth.  Giant Growth shouldn't be a "reaction" because it clearly has other non-reactive uses, so what to do? 

You don't need Giant Growth to have a good, strategic game (Dominion for example does not have Giant Growth). However much you like whichever card, you really don't need it.

With reactions, I would do things similar to Giant Growth, but they would be different. You could do multiple varieties: combat Giant Growth, creature-saving Giant Growth, do-more-damage Giant Growth. There is a phrasing that actually mostly simulates the current one, but I think it's too confusing to use (play this only when a creature's power or toughness is checked. it has +3/+3 until end of turn). It doesn't matter though, it would be a fine game despite giving up some flexibility from Giant Growths.

- That leaves timing rules that let Instants act as responses, which is what the game originally had, just without the word "stack."  The first rulebooks said that when everyone's done announcing their competing Instants, they resolve in the reverse order from how they were announced.  The phrase "last in first out" even appeared in the rules, with the same meaning it has when CS 101 professors use it to describe a stack. 

The *first* rulebook said no such thing. It is probably available online somewhere. I have it but I'm not digging it out to quote it. Originally instants could be played "any time" and the rulebook just waved its hands at two effects contradicting each other. There was no implicit stack. Later they had a stack, which resolved all at once rather than resolving one item and then getting to add more to it; as of 6E you could add more things after resolving one thing.

Magic is an old game. In its day it was not so weird to just hope things would work out. With an endless stream of new cards they had to figure out how to actually make interacting rules on cards work.

But I am pretty sure that introducing the stack explicitly, declaring that all Instant-speed effects go on the stack, and errata-ing all Interrupts into Instants made the game simpler than it had been before. 

For sure the stack makes the game more complex and is not worth it. It is unlikely that you will convince me otherwise; I have devoted a lot of time to this issue, both for Magic and for my own games. You can have a very simple system with no stack that does everything you need; I have made such systems and so am confident they exist. Wizards meanwhile avoids saying "the stack" on cards because it confuses people. The game is not just for computer programmers and so should not have a stack.

Sorry for the wall of MTG history, I guess the TL;DR is that they did try it the Dominion way, more or less, back in the day, and it didn't work for MTG, so they did something else.

I was there dude, it's just not true. There was a time period where damage prevention/redirection and countermagic had their own special windows of resolution, but there was never a time with reactions as I envision them, and I remain confident that they are a better solution then the stack.

[theblankman]

First of all thanks for the in-depth response!  Not every day you get to talk about game design with Donald X, so now I'm jumping at the chance...

With reactions, I would do things similar to Giant Growth, but they would be different. You could do multiple varieties: combat Giant Growth, creature-saving Giant Growth, do-more-damage Giant Growth. There is a phrasing that actually mostly simulates the current one, but I think it's too confusing to use (play this only when a creature's power or toughness is checked. it has +3/+3 until end of turn). It doesn't matter though, it would be a fine game despite giving up some flexibility from Giant Growths.

Yes, you could do that and have a fine but very different game.  Instants would be played a lot less, I think, because flexibility is what made a lot of them worthwhile compared to other card types.  Situational variants of popular Instants have been tried, but they tend to see less play than their flexible counterparts because you don't want to risk drawing them dead when you could instead have, say, a creature or artifact in your deck that's playable almost every time you draw it. 

The *first* rulebook said no such thing. It is probably available online somewhere. I have it but I'm not digging it out to quote it. Originally instants could be played "any time" and the rulebook just waved its hands at two effects contradicting each other. There was no implicit stack. Later they had a stack, which resolved all at once rather than resolving one item and then getting to add more to it; as of 6E you could add more things after resolving one thing.

I probably have my editions confused, and I'm not looking it up either, but I distinctly recall the "last in first out" rule existing before the stack was made explicit (in the Revised - 4E time frame).  It may not have been there from day 1, but I know I played in at least a couple relatively early sanctioned tournaments with that rule. 

But I am pretty sure that introducing the stack explicitly, declaring that all Instant-speed effects go on the stack, and errata-ing all Interrupts into Instants made the game simpler than it had been before. 

For sure the stack makes the game more complex and is not worth it. It is unlikely that you will convince me otherwise; I have devoted a lot of time to this issue, both for Magic and for my own games. You can have a very simple system with no stack that does everything you need; I have made such systems and so am confident they exist. Wizards meanwhile avoids saying "the stack" on cards because it confuses people. The game is not just for computer programmers and so should not have a stack.

Note I said "simpler than Magic was before," not "as simple as possible" or "as simple as it should be."  I can definitely be convinced that there's a better way than the stack.  I'm just not sure reactions are it. 

There was a time period where damage prevention/redirection and countermagic had their own special windows of resolution, but there was never a time with reactions as I envision them, and I remain confident that they are a better solution then the stack.

Maybe I'm missing something important about your vision of reactions.  It sounds to me like they would be similar to existing instants, but restricted in when and how you could use them.  Back when I played a lot more Magic than I do now, instants with restrictions existed, but the restrictions made those cards worse overall than cards with the same cost in other types, usually creatures.  So those instants didn't see competitive play unless their effect was big enough to make it worth building your deck around overcoming the obstacles to playing the card. 

[Donald X.]

Yes, you could do that and have a fine but very different game.  Instants would be played a lot less, I think, because flexibility is what made a lot of them worthwhile compared to other card types.  Situational variants of popular Instants have been tried, but they tend to see less play than their flexible counterparts because you don't want to risk drawing them dead when you could instead have, say, a creature or artifact in your deck that's playable almost every time you draw it.

The idea isn't to make cards you can never play - it's to have the simplest way to handle the stuff you do all the time.

I do not think the game would be all that different. The bulk of what you did would be the same. Some of the actual differences are great, like not teaching new players "okay do as much as possible in your opponent's end step."

Aside from the beauty of getting rid of the stack, a big thing reactions do for you is get rid of possibilities you don't actually use anyway. I don't just randomly cast Giant Growth (there will always be an exception and Orgg is my example here); I cast Giant Growth when it matters. It's reactive! The rules letting you do it any time is not doing much for strategy.

If you are up on things you will be familiar with New World Order, which is essentially them working out that new players play with expansions, not just the main set, so expansions need to be simpler for new players. They switched to having simpler commons; rarer cards are allowed to be more complex. This worked out fantastically for them, sales have never been better.

Part of NWO is getting rid of stuff like Wyluli Wolf at common. You can use the ability any time; this adds a lot of board complexity. Whereas a triggered effect only happens at a certain time and is simpler, so those are better at common. So they are already shifting in this direction on permanents; Reactions would let them also do this for instants (rather than just use sorceries at common).

Maybe I'm missing something important about your vision of reactions.  It sounds to me like they would be similar to existing instants, but restricted in when and how you could use them.  Back when I played a lot more Magic than I do now, instants with restrictions existed, but the restrictions made those cards worse overall than cards with the same cost in other types, usually creatures.  So those instants didn't see competitive play unless their effect was big enough to make it worth building your deck around overcoming the obstacles to playing the card.

Reactions - not Dominion-style - are just cards that say when you can play them. You play them then. Some could give you two timing options, such as the option to play them as Sorceries or at a certain other time.

Counterspells are already similar to reactions, because you can only play them at the only time they make sense. Damage prevention is similar; you can randomly play that Bandage but are mostly saving that stuff for when it does something.

Cards that are really reactive have natural times to play them and can just spell it out. I want to play Giant Growth when my creature is going to deal or receive damage; limiting me to those situations is not limiting me much. Cards that you just play in your opponent's end step because you can, that's something to be glad to be rid of rather than to try to preserve, but you could even preserve that if you wanted; play New Inspiration as a sorcery or in an opponent's end step.

You can endlessly find situations where you lose whatever strategic option. You play Armageddon and I can't play my card-drawer to dig for a counterspell in response. Those situations just don't add up; you keep almost all of the strategy you have and have a game with less barrier-to-entry.

[theblankman]

I guess it's been so long since I internalized "abuse your opponent's end step" that it started seeming like a feature instead of a bug, but I must admit the strategies lost there are ones the game would be better off without.  As fun as it was to unload a hand full of direct damage over 1.5 turns for a surprise win, that deck probably had no business working as well as it did. 

So I'm coming around to reactions.  If several reactions from different players are played off the same initial event, or in the same step, how would you have them resolve?  Still LIFO/"implicit stack"?  It seems like those situations could still come up a lot if you have during-combat reactions that affect attacking and/or defending creatures. 

[Donald X.]

So I'm coming around to reactions.  If several reactions from different players are played off the same initial event, or in the same step, how would you have them resolve?  Still LIFO/"implicit stack"?  It seems like those situations could still come up a lot if you have during-combat reactions that affect attacking and/or defending creatures.

If multiple players want to respond to the same event, it's still APNAP (active player non-active player). Effects can feed off of other effects - I counter your counterspell - and that effectively gives you an implicit stack, like in Dominion, but it's just implicit, and always a chain of things that triggered off of each other.

I "contributed" to the 6E rules, but did not think of this in time. They probably wouldn't have done it anyway (since it requires errata for every Instant), but it would have been nice to have offered it up.

[theblankman]

If multiple players want to respond to the same event, it's still APNAP (active player non-active player). Effects can feed off of other effects - I counter your counterspell - and that effectively gives you an implicit stack, like in Dominion, but it's just implicit, and always a chain of things that triggered off of each other.

I "contributed" to the 6E rules, but did not think of this in time. They probably wouldn't have done it anyway (since it requires errata for every Instant), but it would have been nice to have offered it up.

That doesn't sound too far off from what I recall in the Revised/4E era, if there had only been one timing window to worry about back then.  And your wording is simpler than either "last in first out" or the explicit stack.  I wonder if maybe the multiple timing windows (for instants, counters, prevention effects, etc) were as much a part of the confusion as instant resolution itself, and just putting everything on the same timing, without adding the stack, would've worked as well or better. 

It seems like if your version were tried now, with the single fast effect timing, it could work even if you don't bother to errata the instants.  You'd effectively have a bunch of reactions that say "play whenever you want," so things would still happen in end steps and upkeeps and all the weird times that only hyper-competitive players know or care about, but at least the stack would be gone. 

[Donald X.]

That doesn't sound too far off from what I recall in the Revised/4E era, if there had only been one timing window to worry about back then.  And your wording is simpler than either "last in first out" or the explicit stack.  I wonder if maybe the multiple timing windows (for instants, counters, prevention effects, etc) were as much a part of the confusion as instant resolution itself, and just putting everything on the same timing, without adding the stack, would've worked as well or better. 

Countermagic, damage prevention / redirection, and non-countermagic interrupts (stuff like Sleight of Mind and Purelace) had special windows, effectively limiting when you could play them so that they were like reactions as I propose (except you could also just play some interrupts nonreactively). They didn't spell this out though (no "play only when damage would be dealt") and they didn't use it for anything else. There were tons of instants and only a small number fell into those categories.

It seems like if your version were tried now, with the single fast effect timing, it could work even if you don't bother to errata the instants.  You'd effectively have a bunch of reactions that say "play whenever you want," so things would still happen in end steps and upkeeps and all the weird times that only hyper-competitive players know or care about, but at least the stack would be gone.

You can't just get rid of the stack and support old instants with no errata. I mean the stack is what they came up with to handle timing. If you don't actually replace it, you haven't replaced it.

[theblankman]

You can't just get rid of the stack and support old instants with no errata. I mean the stack is what they came up with to handle timing. If you don't actually replace it, you haven't replaced it.

Wouldn't a general ruling like "Any instant that doesn't say otherwise has, 'Play this as a sorcery or a reaction to any other effect,'" still create the implicit stack you mentioned a couple posts ago? 

[Donald X.]

You can't just get rid of the stack and support old instants with no errata. I mean the stack is what they came up with to handle timing. If you don't actually replace it, you haven't replaced it.

Wouldn't a general ruling like "Any instant that doesn't say otherwise has, 'Play this as a sorcery or a reaction to any other effect,'" still create the implicit stack you mentioned a couple posts ago?

The implicit stack arises from the fact that everything but the first item triggered off of another item. You play a spell, I counter it, you counter my counter. People can understand that without needing to talk about a stack. It's not like that if the effects are unrelated, you do something, I do anything else, you do anything else. There the stack is explicitly how it works.

[theblankman]

The implicit stack arises from the fact that everything but the first item triggered off of another item. You play a spell, I counter it, you counter my counter. People can understand that without needing to talk about a stack. It's not like that if the effects are unrelated, you do something, I do anything else, you do anything else. There the stack is explicitly how it works.

So you don't think a player saying "I react to A with B" is sufficient to establish that B triggered off A, and make the implicit stack arise? 

[Donald X.]

So you don't think a player saying "I react to A with B" is sufficient to establish that B triggered off A, and make the implicit stack arise?

I would like to be there for you, but I can only devote so much time to this. Handling timing in games was a tricky issue, not really addressed thoroughly until Magic. Magic didn't do as well as you can but well standing on the shoulders of giants.