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[AJD]

Okay so we all know that if you have only five cards in your entire deck, and one of them is a Caravan, then when you play the Caravan it stays in play till the next turn even though there won't be any cards in your deck to draw when your next turn comes around. And I know the intuitive reason for that—anything can happen, maybe by the time you get to your next turn you'll have gained more cards and have something to draw. But I can't figure out how this is compatible with the rules as stated: if the card can't do anything on the next turn, it's not supposed to stay in play. We could say "trying to give you +Cards (and not finding any)" still counts as the card doing something, but then why isn't "trying to give you the set-aside cards (and not finding any)" enough to keep a Gear in play with nothing set aside?

Maybe I'm overthinking this.

[mxdata]

The difference between things like Gear and duration draw, I think, is that the setting-aside for Gear happens when you play it, so that's when it's determined whether it'll stay out or not.  Once you've finished resolving Gear, there's nothing that can change that.  With duration draw, the draw doesn't happen until the start of your next turn, and there's several ways that the availability of a card to draw can change between the end of one turn and the start of another - you could be hit with a discard attack, and that would leave cards available to draw, or you could be hit by a junking attack which would also give you a card to draw.  Of course, there are kingdoms where none of those possibilities exist, but it seems simpler to just make it a general rule that duration draw stays out than to define the cases where it would stay out vs the ones where it wouldn't

[kieranmillar]

You still get an effect next turn, +1 Card. If it was +0 Cards, because it was something like a Duration Apprentice that trashes now and draws next turn and you trashed a Copper, then it wouldn't stay out. It may not draw you any cards in the end, but you still got a valid non-zero effect. A card only fails to stay out if the next turn result is all zeroes, if you get what I mean.

Consider as well Mastermind, giving you a "you may" choice next turn, and you are planning to decline the offer for some reason. It would still stay in play because it will still be doing something next turn, giving you a choice, even if that choice ends up having no practical outcome.

[Jeebus]

To add to what Kieranmillar said, unlike "draw 1 card", "put the set-aside cards into your hand" refers to specific cards. And those cards are undefined if you don't set aside any.

[ConMan]

I think of it as a question of scope - effects can "know" about things in their scope, and can't know about things out of them, and so anything that touches on that space has to behave more conservatively.

Gear's scope includes the cards it set aside, because it's responsible for those. If there are none, it knows it can let itself be discarded during Clean-up. Caravan's scope doesn't include your deck, so it's unable to tell whether there's any possible combination of cards, effects, or whatever that may suddenly mean that you'll have a card to draw next turn, and so it has to hang around to check.

It's kind of like the whole "Prince can't find its set-aside card" thing - Prince's scope is just its own set aside card, and when it plays the card it gives it a tag to say "this is my card, it gets set aside again later", but pretty much anything happening to that card causes the tag to get removed and so Prince can't find the card again even if you, the player, can 100% guarantee that it's the same card.

[GendoIkari]

To add to what Kieranmillar said, unlike "draw 1 card", "put the set-aside cards into your hand" refers to specific cards. And those cards are undefined if you don't set aside any.

I had almost posted a longer answer talking about how Gear's effect would become "undefined", but I had a problem with the fact that "put these 0 cards into your hand" seems to be just as clearly defined as "put these 2 cards into your hand". Haven is different; Haven refers to "it", meaning "the set aside card", which is NULL if you had no cards in hand or deck when you played Haven. The "put it into your hand" is actually an undefined instruction because the "it" simply doesn't exist.

While I think that the rules for Gear are going for the same thing, I feel like it doesn't work out in a strictly logical reading. Gear says "them", not "it", and "them" is defined as the set of cards (up to 2 cards) that it set aside. That set can be size 0, 1, or 2. In any of those cases, it's a clearly defined set.

So really I think it comes down to an unwritten but obvious rule that says that "put 0 cards into your hand" is equivalent to "do nothing". Similarly, a duration card that says "at the start of your next turn, +0 cards", wouldn't stay in play, because "+0 cards" is equivalent to "do nothing".

[Jeebus]

To add to what Kieranmillar said, unlike "draw 1 card", "put the set-aside cards into your hand" refers to specific cards. And those cards are undefined if you don't set aside any.

I had almost posted a longer answer talking about how Gear's effect would become "undefined", but I had a problem with the fact that "put these 0 cards into your hand" seems to be just as clearly defined as "put these 2 cards into your hand". Haven is different; Haven refers to "it", meaning "the set aside card", which is NULL if you had no cards in hand or deck when you played Haven. The "put it into your hand" is actually an undefined instruction because the "it" simply doesn't exist.

While I think that the rules for Gear are going for the same thing, I feel like it doesn't work out in a strictly logical reading. Gear says "them", not "it", and "them" is defined as the set of cards (up to 2 cards) that it set aside. That set can be size 0, 1, or 2. In any of those cases, it's a clearly defined set.

So really I think it comes down to an unwritten but obvious rule that says that "put 0 cards into your hand" is equivalent to "do nothing". Similarly, a duration card that says "at the start of your next turn, +0 cards", wouldn't stay in play, because "+0 cards" is equivalent to "do nothing".

I was not talking about Gear specifically, but all these cards: Cargo Ship, Haven, Archive, Ghost, Crypt, Gear, Research. You're right that Gear and Crypt are different, since they allow you to set aside 0 cards, so the cards would not be undefined. So I should have said, all these cards refer to specific cards, which could be either undefined or a set of 0 cards. This is unlike "draw 1 card", which does not refer to any specific cards.

You're right that we need the rule that "do 0 of something" means "do nothing", but I don't think that was the question here. The question was, isn't "draw 1 card" with an empty deck the same as "draw 0 cards" (or equivalent to "put 0 cards into your hand")? I don't see how that rule resolves the issue.

I think the clue is actually timing, like Mxdata said. Caravan is not trying to draw you a card now, it just says, "next turn draw 1 card". Gear is saying, "next turn put 0 cards in your hand", and Haven is saying, "next turn do nothing/undefined".