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[ehunt]

(I'm not asking for an official wording- just an expository account and some examples.)

[Davio]

Here's an original post by Donald on the BGG forums concerning TR / Mining Village, explaining the rule: http://boardgamegeek.com/article/5049419#5049419
Here's a another post by him concerning Watchtower / BV: http://boardgamegeek.com/article/8163839#8163839

Quoting from his first post:

The "lose track" rule is this (don't hold me to this precise wording okay): If card A is doing stuff with card B, and something other than card A moves card B somewhere else, card A can no longer keep moving card B. It "loses track" of it.

And a quote from his other post:

I will try to get the lose-track rule into a rulebook before we're done. As I said in the linked thread, for the moment, but I don't know if it will stay like this, I am saying that once a card covers up a card in your discard pile, the covered-up cards are "lost" and cannot be moved by stuff like Watchtower, even though you personally remember what's going on. So: If after buying Border Village and putting it into your discard pile you choose to resolve gaining a Duchy before Watchtower, the Duchy is on top of Border Village and Border Village can no longer be moved by Watchtower. You can reveal the Watchtower for Border Village, but it fails to move Border Village because it has "lost track" of it.

[paddyodoors]

So does this mean you can't top deck both BV and the Duchy with your Watchtower in that case?  (Or a more powerful example, BV and Torturer?)

[barsooma]

So does this mean you can't top deck both BV and the Duchy with your Watchtower in that case?  (Or a more powerful example, BV and Torturer?)

I would say you can, since you could choose to topdeck the BV first, then the 2nd card.
If you wanted the 2nd card to be topdecked first it's more ambiguous - does a card have to touch the discard pile before "on-gain" abilities can touch it?
I would say no, due to this sentence in the original rules:
"A player places cards he Buys or otherwise acquires during the game on his Discard pile unless he is specifically directed to place them elsewhere."

Either way I'm curious what the point of this rule is supposed to be.

[Davio]

I have sometimes thought that events could trigger while cards were in mid-air (halfway between the kingdom and discard pile), but this is not true.

Cards are always somewhere.

This means for BV that when you buy or gain it, it always goes straight to your discard pile (barring Develop shenanigans).
Now you have to choose whether to resolve BV first or Watchtower.

If you resolve BV first, you gain a Duchy and it goes to your discard pile.
You then resolve WT and choose whether to move it to your deck or the trash.
It's important to note WT actually moves cards, it doesn't catch them in the air and bounces them back.
WT can't dig deeper than one card however, so you can only put the Duchy on top.
If you gain a Copper and a Curse because of Mountebank, you have to reveal WT twice and decide for each card. You can't gain the two cards, reveal WT once and trash them both.

If you resolve WT first you move BV from your discard pile to the top of your deck (or trash) and get a Duchy for which you can do the same, but may opt not to.

[Jeebus]

I would say you can, since you could choose to topdeck the BV first, then the 2nd card.
If you wanted the 2nd card to be topdecked first it's more ambiguous - does a card have to touch the discard pile before "on-gain" abilities can touch it?
I would say no, due to this sentence in the original rules:
"A player places cards he Buys or otherwise acquires during the game on his Discard pile unless he is specifically directed to place them elsewhere."

Either way I'm curious what the point of this rule is supposed to be.

In order for the gained card to go somewhere else when you gain it, you have to be instructed to do so in the gaining instruction (Bureaucrat, Sea Hag, Mine, etc). So if you gain Border Village normally, like when buying it, it goes to discard. Now when-gain can happen -- either Watchtower or Royal Seal can move it out of the discard.
Nevertheless, you can topdeck both cards, in either order. If you want to topdeck the second card: You gain the Border Village to discard, and then do when-gain effects. First, you gain the second card to discard. You reveal Watchtower and topdeck that card. Then you reveal Watchtower as a Reaction to gaining the Border Village. It's now where Watchtower expects it to be, on top of the discard pile, so you can topdeck it. The Border Village was covered by another card for a second though, so it's ambiguous. But, Donald ruled that this is how we should play it "until there's a published rule": http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=1028.msg16408#msg16408

[Jeebus]

WT can't dig deeper than one card however, so you can only put the Duchy on top.

Everything you said was correct except for this. It's easy to think that lose-track is stopping you from also moving the BV after you moved the Duchy, but as I just quoted, Donald ruled that you can. (It's only if you choose to leave the Duchy there, on top of the BV, that you can't. But, in that case it would behoove you to move the BV before gaining the Duchy, so it doesn't matter in practice.)

[Anon79]

WT can't dig deeper than one card however, so you can only put the Duchy on top.

Everything you said was correct except for this. It's easy to think that lose-track is stopping you from also moving the BV after you moved the Duchy, but as I just quoted, Donald ruled that you can. (It's only if you choose to leave the Duchy there, on top of the BV, that you can't. But, in that case it would behoove you to move the BV before gaining the Duchy, so it doesn't matter in practice.)

Refer to Donald's post on BGG, quoted by Davio on the 2nd post of the thread. Hmm, does that mean he has ruled both ways...??!!

[Davio]

It seems like he came back on this one.

This reminds me about the whole Trader/Ironworks debate.

I guess you're often best served by just doing what seems logical. If you buy BV with Watchtower in hand, I would suggest you can choose whether you want none, one or the other, or both cards on deck. That seems the best way to me and the least complex....

[Jeebus]

It seems like he came back on this one.

This reminds me about the whole Trader/Ironworks debate.

I guess you're often best served by just doing what seems logical. If you buy BV with Watchtower in hand, I would suggest you can choose whether you want none, one or the other, or both cards on deck. That seems the best way to me and the least complex....

But that is the effect of Donald's rulings here too. I don't agree that it seems like he changed his mind here. That's not how I interpreted it.

He had already written a couple of places that you can topdeck BV and bonus card, in either order. The quote in the second post in this thread, which is from a very new thread, says exactly what I wrote in my last post (in the parenthesis), namely that if you choose to leave the Duchy on top of the BV, you can't move the BV. Yes, he does write this: "Once a card covers up a card in your discard pile, the covered-up cards are "lost" and cannot be moved by stuff like Watchtower, even though you personally remember what's going on." But again, that was about that example. It doesn't necessarily mean that a card is "lost" forever, such as when it's no longer covered-up when an ability resolves. He doesn't write anything in that post about changing previous rulings, so it's quite plain that he isn't. In this post he even specifically addresses the implication of lose-track on BV+Watchtower: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=1028.msg16408#msg16408.

Anyway, the lose-track rule really has little to do with BV+Watchtower; since you can gain the two cards in either order you can just ignore it. But if you add Develop and Inn to the mix, you get a complex case where lose-track actually will have a practical effect (see http://boardgamegeek.com/article/7937101#7937101). But the most important case where we need lose-track, is to explain why TR+Mining Village works the way it does, and also, in a related but different case, Possession+TR+Mining Village. See the original lose-track thread linked to before.

To be complete, this is the one other application I've found of lose-track in Donald's posts: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=1028.msg16184#msg16184. It explains why you can't reveal Watchtower twice to the same card, first to trash it and then to topdeck it (or vice versa). This doesn't matter with published cards, since you never want to, but might possibly in the future.

[Anon79]

Seems like you're right. The only way you can top-deck BV + (the other card) in either order on top of the deck is if the BV is allowed to be found again, after it was momentarily "lost" when the other card sat on top of it in the discard pile before Watchtower was revealed.

[Jeebus]

I want to take a new crack at explaining the "lose track" rule, as I understand it, because I see that people are misapplying it (which isn't that strange since there's been a lot of debate and confusion).

Every instruction that tells you to move a card, tells you to move it from some place to some other place. Often the place to move it from is implicit, but it's there.

If not instructed where to move the card from and to, the default is:

• Gaining a card: Move it from Supply to discard
• Discarding a card: Move it from your hand to discard
• Trashing a card: Move it from instructed location to Trash
• Playing a card: Move it from your hand to the play area

The "lose track" rule applies when an ability is trying to move a card, but the card isn't where it's trying to move it from. This is what's been called the card's "expected location". And what happens then, is that the card can't be moved. Looked at this way, it's hardly a new rule; it's kind of given from the basic rules.

The card's current location is often implicitly given. Golem talks about revealing cards from your deck, so when it tells you to play them it means from your deck to your play area. A card that talks about itself in its play-instruction, expects that it's in the play area. So Embargo and Mining Village mean to move themselves from the play area to Trash.

We can also have cases where an ability (on a card) says to move a card somewhere, and then to move it again. The second move implicitly tries to move the card from where the first move put it. This is the case with Throne Room + Mining Village. TR plays MV, moving it from your hand to the play area. Then it plays MV again, moving it from the play area to the play area. If it's not in the play area (such as if it was moved to Trash in the meantime), the move fails. (Since a card can't be trashed by moving it from Trash to Trash, MV can't Trash itself again.)

To also include the TR + MV + Possession case: TR plays MV, moving it to the play area. MV moves itself from the play area to Trash. Possession's when-trash ability moves MV to set-aside area. TR plays MV again, failing to move it first just like in the previous case. MV moves itself from the play area to Trash, but since it's not in the play area, this move fails. (So also in this case TR can't trash itself again, but for different reasons.)

Important: This rule only means that sometimes a card can't be moved. It never stops a card from being played (i.e. its intructions resolved).

[ecq]

It took me a few minutes of digging to fully understand Jeebus' post.  I'll try to clear up the piece I wasn't getting:

The "lose track" rule says that when following the instructions on cards, we don't consider other cards which may be acting concurrently.

Example: We buy a Border Village, choosing to gain a Duchy.  We have a Watchtower in our hand.

We gain the Border Village, taking it from the supply and placing it on top of the discard pile.  Now we resolve the Border Village on-gain effect, doing the same with a Duchy.  Now we resolve the Watchtower on-gain effect.  The Watchtower has no knowledge of of the Border Village's effect.  It's reacting to the gain only.  We gained the Border Village, placing it on top of the discard pile.  In order to place it on top of the deck, we take it from the top of the discard pile and... wait, where'd it go?  We've lost track.

Another Example: We play a Develop with Watchtower in our hand

We Develop, say, a Silver into an Estate and there's no $4 card.  We don't want the Estate; we just have a thing against Silver, so we reveal a Watchtower to trash the estate.  In this case, we're reacting to gaining the Estate.  Nothing came between the gain and Watchtower's reaction.  Watchtower knows that we gained to the top of the deck.  It looks there, finds the Estate, and trashes it.

[Jeebus]

You got it.

Yeah, we can't think that a card keeps track of what other cards are doing while it's resolving. It's certainly easy to fall into that trap. Throne Room just knows that it put Mining Village in the play area and told it to resolve its abilities. After that it wants to do the same thing again, but didn't pay attention to what happened to the Mining Village in the mean time. It has no idea where it is, so it can't move it. Oh well, it still can tell it to resolve its abilities again. Or, like in your example, Watchtower only knows what triggered it, the gaining of Border Village to the discard pile.

When you think about it, this is the straightforward interpretation, doing what the card says every time. The problem in practice of course is that we never break it down like that, so it's not that clear what should happen.

[ecq]

My understanding is that Mining Village doesn't work this way.  Throne Room can play it twice, even if you trash it the first time.  You only get the $2 if you trash it, though, and you can't trash a card twice.  Embargo is different because the language is different.  You get coins and place an Embargo token regardless of whether you successfully trashed it, so TR + Embargo = $4 and 2 tokens to place.

At least, that's my understanding and how Isotropic behaves.

[ehunt]

My understanding is that Mining Village doesn't work this way.  Throne Room can play it twice, even if you trash it the first time.  You only get the $2 if you trash it, though, and you can't trash a card twice.  Embargo is different because the language is different.  You get coins and place an Embargo token regardless of whether you successfully trashed it, so TR + Embargo = $4 and 2 tokens to place.

At least, that's my understanding and how Isotropic behaves.

If I understand correctly, this isn't in contention. Throne room plays mining village twice regardless of whether you trash it the first time or not. The point of the throne room/mining village example is the following.

What you might think is: if I throne a mining village, then trash it on the first play, then when I play it the second time, the throne room moves the mining village from the trash to the play area in order to play it, and thus after all is said and done, I put it in my discard pile (or trash it again on the second play for two more dollars). The lose track rule is what prevents this from happening. It says that the throne room can't move the mining village because the mining village isn't in the right place. Again, the lose track rule is about movement, not about whether the action takes place or not.