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[newb246]

Well, here's my attempt to clarify a lot of what's been said already into one post.

=

My question here is if you can have a situation where the 10 normal cards are neither bm nor YW but YW is in the BM and BM is the bane, so each one justifies the other but the entire loop is unnecessary.

This cannot happen. If neither is in the Kingdom, there is no Black Market deck. The only reason for Black Market to be the Bane is if Young Witch is already chosen as one of the 10 Kingdom cards. If Black Market then is chosen as the Bane, Young Witch could not be in the Black Market deck since it's already in the supply.

Thanks for your reply which is similar to some of the earlier replies.  I still don’t fully understand.  I will explain myself in three ways
1. By logic, 2. By reference to the rules, 3. By analogy

1. By logic:
It would seem to me that there are 2 fundamental ways to conceive of dominion set-up rules:

A. The chronological set-up method which has 3 steps
i.   Pick 10 Kingdom piles and the basic treasure/victories.
ii.   Do any special set-up for the 10 chosen cards (YW, BM, tournament, looters etc)
iii.   Begin play

B. The logical set-up method.  This has no steps.  Rather, any Kingdom at all can be chosen as long as it meets all of the the following four criteria:
i. it has the basic treasures/victory
ii. it has 10 normal Kingdom cards
iii. it meets the special set-up conditions of all of the cards
iv. it has no additional Kingdom cards

Under this understanding, we are not following a specific set process but are free to construct any Kingdom that meets all of these four boundary conditions (sort of like solving an ODE or PDE).

My question, then, was, which of these two understandings is correct?  Most of the answers above, including yours, assume that understanding A (the “chronological” understanding) is correct and then explain why based on understanding A, the situation I described is impossible.  Yes, this is quite obvious.  But my question is which of these two understandings are correct and none of the answers seem to address this question; they simply assume that understanding A is correct

2. By reference to the rules:

There is nothing in the rules that I see which confirm the chronological  understanding.  In fact, if anything, I believe the logical understanding is supported by the rules.  One line of the Cornucopia rules reads as follows “As with previous Dominion games, players must choose 10 sets of Kingdom cards for each game.”  Another reads as follows “In games using YoungWitch, choose an additional Kingdom card costing 2 or 3 , put its pile into the Supply, and mark its pile with the Young Witch randomizer card (underneath it, sideways).”  There is nothing in the rules to confirm that the chronological understanding is correct.  If anything, it seems to support the logical understanding because the Kingdom I posed would in fact fulfill both of the two sentences which I quoted from the rule book.   

3. By analogy:

The best analogy I can think for my question is the philosophical debate regarding the principle of sufficient reason.  In case you are unfamiliar with this, the scenario posed by philosophers is this: suppose the universe is one large time-loop in which the “last” event in the universe causes the “first” event in the universe.  Would such a scenario be an adequate explanation for the cause of the universe?  Some philosophers believe yes since under that scenario every event in the Universe has a cause.  Most events are caused by the event before them.  The “first” event is caused by the last event so every event has a cause.  Other philosophers, however, dispute this because while every specific event has a cause, there is no explanation for the existence of the entire casualty  loop itself.  Why should the loop exist rather than not exist?  This view is known as the “principle of sufficient reason” as it argues that causality loops cannot exist unless there is sufficient reason for them to exist.  I should think the analogy to my query is obvious. 

Of course, the principal of sufficient reason is an open question in philosophy and even were it resolved, there is no reason that the Dominion rules need to conform to the principles of causality in the Universe.  But perhaps that helps to clarify my question.

I hope you don’t mind me following-up on your answer.  I tried to follow-up a bit with some of the earlier responders but they seemed agitated by my question so I decided it was best to just drop it.  I hope you don’t have a similar lack of patience with my following-up. 

[shMerker]

I think the question they want answered is, what do you do if you need to pick a Bane card for Young Witch, but literally every single $2 or $3 card is already in the Black Market deck? I'm pretty sure the answer is, don't be an idiot, select a Bane card and take it out of the Black Market deck.

I don't think so, if that would be the case, we would not have needed the thread.

We dont really need the thread.

But some of us are idiots.

[Dominionaer]

1. By logic:
...
B. The logical set-up method. ...
iii. it meets the special set-up conditions of all of the cards
iv. it has no additional Kingdom cards

Because one has to break either iii or iv, one can't fullfill B for BM or YW, so it is false by logic.

2. By reference to the rules:

May be i don't understand your logic, but the steps of choosing ten, seeing YW is in use, then choosing Bane seems quite chronological to me.

3. By analogy: ... that helps to clarify my question.

No!

[RiemannZetaJones]

Donald X. has said that the "Do as much as you can" principle applies to setting up the kingdom. As applied to the no available Bane paradox, this implies that as much of the set-up that is possible is carried out (the chronological view of setting up the game). It is therefore possible to play a game of Dominion in which there is a Young Witch but no bane pile. This is most clearly if the kingdom consists of all the low-cost cards at hand.

I don't think the, admittedly obscure, topic of the YW/Black Market is satisfactorily resolved by even this ruling, however.

Here is what one might do:

Make a kingdom in which there is a Black Market, and a Young Witch. Deal with the set-up of the Black Market first (bear in mind, the agent setting up the game should have a choice here of which to deal with first, and the problem is almost certain to go away if the other order is chosen). Make a Black Market deck which contains one copy of every card not in the supply. Do the set-up for the Young Witch second. Find a card costing <4 that is not in the supply (9 copies of this card are in the box, one is notionally in the Black Market deck even if a randomizer card is used for it in that case). Try to add this card to the kingdom as a bane.

At this point we have an unresolved question. There are 9 copies of the card in the box. Do we do as much as we can, and add a stack of 9 cards to the kingdom? Or do we do as much as we can which is discover there is no card not already appearing and not add any bane to the kingdom at all?

Nobody reasonable should ever be in this position.

[blueblimp]

At this point we have an unresolved question. There are 9 copies of the card in the box. Do we do as much as we can, and add a stack of 9 cards to the kingdom? Or do we do as much as we can which is discover there is no card not already appearing and not add any bane to the kingdom at all?

Young Witch's setup instructions on the card:

Add an extra Kingdom card pile costing $2 or $3 to the Supply. Cards from that pile are Bane cards.

Cornucopia rule's preparation section:

In games using Young Witch, choose an additional Kingdom card costing $2 or $3, put its pile into the Supply, and mark its pile with the Young Witch randomizer card (underneath it, sideways).

Nowhere does it say that the entire pile has to be in the box. So I think that you'd add a 9-card pile. (The tenth card can't be added because Young Witch has lost track of it. )

[RiemannZetaJones]

Nowhere does it say that the entire pile has to be in the box. So I think that you'd add a 9-card pile. (The tenth card can't be added because Young Witch has lost track of it. )

This seems reasonable. During the game the piles can be referred to as such, even though they are not complete, so this is presumably the case during set-up as well.

[wrathofmine]

At this point we have an unresolved question. There are 9 copies of the card in the box. Do we do as much as we can, and add a stack of 9 cards to the kingdom? Or do we do as much as we can which is discover there is no card not already appearing and not add any bane to the kingdom at all?

But it's the same question that this one :
I create a random kingdom. The 3rd card I draw from randomizer is black market. I create a pile with all other kingdoms cards to be the Black Market pile. Now I don't have enough cards left to create the other piles of the supply. Do I play with a 3 cards kingdom ?
As I assume nobody will play with a 3 cards kindom (or 1 if the black market is the first card we draw from randomizers)

[pingpongsam]

Donald X. has said...

Actually, in his most recent posts to this thread he basically says this thread is (and I paraphrase) a fruitless mental exercise and that in practice producing a bane is not a realistic obstacle. That the thread continues is testament to this forum's propensity for fruitless mental exercises.

[pingpongsam]

BTW, my solution to this fruitless mental exercise is to make the BM deck the bane pile.

[pst]

It would seem to me that there are 2 fundamental ways to conceive of dominion set-up rules:

The main part of the set-up rules is "In later games, players can choose the 10 Kingdom cards using any method they agree on". I think that it's sensible to extend that to the rest of the setup as well, so there is no one correct way of doing this, and that's a reason the game rules as such don't need to address this. Instead this question might come up for example if a tournament says "we will use random Kingdoms". Then that tournament might need more precise rules on what that really means.

A. The chronological set-up method which has 3 steps
i.   Pick 10 Kingdom piles and the basic treasure/victories.
ii.   Do any special set-up for the 10 chosen cards (YW, BM, tournament, looters etc)
iii.   Begin play

The thing that makes this into a "fruitless mental exercise" is that there aren't that many cards that have set-up instructions, so in practice this is only a BM-YW "problem" that is already answered.

But I agree that this "fruitless mental exercise" is interesting anyway. We know that cards can have set-up instructions, so it's feasible that there could be future cards with more of those (and inofficial fan cards could have them as well), so it's possible to imagine all kinds of interactions between them.

There doesn't have to be a loop to matter. As an example, think if there was a card with the set-up instruction "if there is no Reaction in the Kingdom, add one randomly". If YW and this card are both in the game we will get different probabilities of the possible Kingdoms depending on what set-up instruction we follow first. (Expensive Reactions like Horse Traders have lower probability of entering the game if we do set-up for YW first, since it might find a cheap Reaction as Bane.)

In the "chronological method" the second step should take one card at a time, and it would have to be determined how that is done. One way would be to pick one card with set-up instructions randomly until all is done. (If it's done that way it's not certain all set-up instructions for the ten original cards are done first. Maybe we randomly pick YW first out of a set with at least one more card with set-up instructions, and the Bane happens to have a set-up instruction as well. Now the Bane might be chosen next, and that's fine with me.)

B. The logical set-up method.  This has no steps.  Rather, any Kingdom at all can be chosen as long as it meets all of the the following four criteria:

This could work for "hey, let's agree to play with this Kingdom (that fulfills all the rules)!", but it's not feasible for doing random Kingdoms. If that should mean that every Kingdom that is possible should have the same probability it could be really hard to to compute in practice, and if not, then what does it mean? It's not enough to classify a random method by what results are possible, but by what probabilities they have.

So my take is that if you choose a Kingdom you want to play (or others to play) and all the rules are fulfilled (B) there's no point in discussing if that Kingdom really was possible to achieve by doing all the set-up instructions in some particular order (A). But if you're not choosing but using a random method that has to be done chronologically (A).

Finally, I don't know if this point has been made, and maybe it's a stretch, but I could interpret Black Market's "Before the game, make a Black Market deck ..." that this is something to be done immediately before starting play (iii) and not immediately when reading that set-up instruction. This would be good if there were many cards that put cards in and out of the game as part of set-up to always do the BM deck last anyway.

[RiemannZetaJones]

At this point we have an unresolved question. There are 9 copies of the card in the box. Do we do as much as we can, and add a stack of 9 cards to the kingdom? Or do we do as much as we can which is discover there is no card not already appearing and not add any bane to the kingdom at all?

But it's the same question that this one :
I create a random kingdom. The 3rd card I draw from randomizer is black market. I create a pile with all other kingdoms cards to be the Black Market pile. Now I don't have enough cards left to create the other piles of the supply. Do I play with a 3 cards kingdom ?
As I assume nobody will play with a 3 cards kindom (or 1 if the black market is the first card we draw from randomizers)

I think the choice of 10 kingdom cards precedes the additional setting-up those cards require.