The question is, after the original Sir Martin is bought, is it still in the supply for talisman to try to gain, or is it in some limbo land where it's not in the supply anymore, but hasn't been gained yet?
Logic tells me it would be in the supply, but my gut says limbo land. And I tend to go with gut here.
Both tell me we want Donald to clarify this zany scenario.
For the moment (hopefully a neverending moment) let us say that it is still in the supply.
Buying a card means paying for it. Again think of it in terms of Amazon. You buy a CD. It's still in their warehouse. They'll get around to shipping it to you eventually. When you buy a card you then gain it, but Trader and Possession mess with that. You can buy Sir Martin with Talisman in play and Trader in hand, take a Silver instead, then take Sir Martin (or another Silver).
Okay, I find this very odd.
On buying Sir Martin, Talisman activates and tries to give you a copy, but it doesn't find one. How can you get two Silvers here?
Like WW said: When you buy the last Village and Talisman activates, you don't get an extra non-existing Village which you could turn into a Silver right?
I would expect that Talisman only works on copies that are actually there.
Trader works on "would gain", but it's very odd that you would gain a copy of Sir Martin which doesn't exist. You would gain nothing, so you can't get Silver instead.
Look at Ruins: This ruling would mean that you could always get two Silvers with Trader and Talisman if you buy the top Ruins. But that's so counter intuitive. I mean, the way I would solve it is this:
- You name the top Ruins as the card you want to buy
- Talisman's on-buy event triggers first and you turn over the next Ruins to see what it is
--- If it's the same as the top one, you would gain it and can choose whether to reveal Trader
--- If it's not, it's not a copy and you can't gain it
- You now would gain the top Ruins as that's the one you originally bought
- You can choose whether to reveal Trader to get a Silver instead of the top Ruins
- Whatever you do, make sure that at the end of your turn only the top Ruins is face up
Ambassador has some rules clarifications in the Dark Ages manual on revealing the top Ruins, so I would expect this to work for Talisman as well...