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[cascadestyler]

So I was playing online the other day and played a replace with a trader in my hand. I trashed a copper to gain an estate, then used trader to gain a silver instead. My opponent still got a curse (though they trashed it with watchtower so it made very little actual difference to the game) and I can't remember if the silver was topdecked.

According to my interpretation of the famous "Blue Dog Rule" (and my interpretation is probably what's at fault here), this is wrong.

AFAIK, the BDR was formulated for Ironworks/Trader, and the upshot there is that, if you gain, say, and action, with Ironworks but use Trader to switch it to a silver, then you get neither +1 action nor +$1, because the Ironworks didn't actually gain you anything, instead Trader gained you silver. So, my reasoning for Replace is the same: Replace tried to gain me an Estate (thus triggering a cursing) but failed, and Trader gained me a silver instead. Since it was Trader, not Replace, that gained me that silver, then it shouldn't even go on top of my deck.

But the coding on ShuffleIT clearly disagrees with me here, so can somebody tell me why?

[cascadestyler]

I decided my explanation wasn't very clear - so here's an edited version:

So I was playing online the other day and played a replace with a trader in my hand. I trashed a copper to gain an estate, then used trader to gain a silver instead. My opponent still got a curse (though they trashed it with watchtower so it made very little actual difference to the game) and I can't remember if the silver was topdecked.

According to my interpretation of the famous "Blue Dog Rule" (and my interpretation is probably what's at fault here), this is wrong.

AFAIK, the BDR was formulated for Ironworks/Trader, and the upshot there is that, if you gain, say, and action, with Ironworks but use Trader to switch it to a silver, then you get neither +1 action nor +$1, because the Ironworks didn't actually gain you anything, instead Trader gained you silver. So, my reasoning for Replace is the same: Replace tried to gain me an Estate (thus triggering a cursing) but failed, and Trader gained me a silver instead, so Replace failed to gain an estate and shouldn't curse, just like Ironworks would fail to gain, say, a Menagerie, and thus shouldn't give +1 action in the same situation. Since it was Trader, not Replace, that gained me that silver, then it shouldn't even go on top of my deck, just like if I wouldn't get +$1 if this happened with Ironworks/Trader.

But the coding on ShuffleIT clearly disagrees with me here, so can somebody tell me why?

[singletee]

You can hit the Modify button on the upper right corner of your post to edit it.

You are correct, you shouldn't get any bonus from Replace if you replace (agh!) the gain by revealing Trader. Looks like a bug.

[GendoIkari]

Yeah this seems like an even clearer version of the Ironworks/Trader situation... the reason Ironworks/Trader was unclear was that Ironworks says "if it is an...", and there was uncertainty about what "it" referred to (did it refer to the card you chose to gain, or the card you actually gained?). Here, Replace specifically says "the gained card", so no "it" to question.

Also, I just now found out that Ironworks second edition has been updated to also say "the gained card".

[werothegreat]

Yeah, that's definitely a bug.  You should report that on their forum.

[JW]

I posted it: http://forum.shuffleit.nl/index.php?topic=1716.msg6134#msg6134

[Asper]

Isn't Replace even linked as an example on the "Blue Dog Rule" page of the wiki?

[GendoIkari]

Isn't Replace even linked as an example on the "Blue Dog Rule" page of the wiki?

It is, but I don't think I agree that it should be. As mentioned above, the blue dog rule is all about what "it" refers to; even the original blue dog quote given in the wiki was all about defining "it". With Replace, there's no "it" to define.

I also it find it quite ironic that the rule given by the blue dog quote is flat-out wrong. In the end, it was analogy that didn't hold up.