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[ashersky]

Mainly I'm arguing that it doesn't hurt nearly as much as many people seem to think, sometimes actually helps, and quite often does nothing much at all as far as the possessed player is concerned.  Many players seem to think that Possession is super powerful and utterly crippling when they first learn about it, and they are surprised that it isn't classified as an attack.  I certainly felt that way.  But experience and logic shows that giving it the attack type would be silly.  Most of the impact of Possession is indirect (changing your strategy just because it's there) or psychological (remembering the bad times when it cost you a Province far more often than the good or neutral).

We may have argued a lot, ash, but that was mostly during Mafia.

I agree with all of this completely.

[Davio]

Cutpurse never helps you.  The best case (as always, barring edge cases) is that it doesn't hurt you at all, whether it's because you had no copper or because you didn't need the copper you tossed.  If it hurts you once, then averaging all its plays means that it is a net negative.  If you are arguing this, then your definition of the average case is very different than mine, and I'd argue that it's an inaccurate use of the word.

I was not arguing that Possession never hurts, and I apologize that I made it seem that way.  Mainly I'm arguing that it doesn't hurt nearly as much as many people seem to think, sometimes actually helps, and quite often does nothing much at all as far as the possessed player is concerned.  Many players seem to think that Possession is super powerful and utterly crippling when they first learn about it, and they are surprised that it isn't classified as an attack.  I certainly felt that way.  But experience and logic shows that giving it the attack type would be silly.  Most of the impact of Possession is indirect (changing your strategy just because it's there) or psychological (remembering the bad times when it cost you a Province far more often than the good or neutral).

We may have argued a lot, ash, but that was mostly during Mafia.

I always viewed Possession as Outpost's evil big brother, you just play with your opponent's deck instead of your own.
The key thing about is that whoever buys and plays Possession usually already has a better deck (by being able to afford it), and in that case Possession is little more than a glorified Workshop, because during the Possession turn you're playing the lesser deck and likely have less to spend than during your own turns.

Possession just irks people, because you're playing their deck. It's like you're playing with their favorite toy. I think Possession can be mean and it's definitely not my favorite card, but it certainly isn't an attack.

[heron]

Possession: Action-Psychological Attack $6P

[Witherweaver]

Possession: Action-Psychological Attack $6P

That's the fix!

[silverspawn]

Mainly I'm arguing that it doesn't hurt nearly as much as many people seem to think, sometimes actually helps, and quite often does nothing much at all as far as the possessed player is concerned.  Many players seem to think that Possession is super powerful and utterly crippling when they first learn about it, and they are surprised that it isn't classified as an attack.  I certainly felt that way.  But experience and logic shows that giving it the attack type would be silly.  Most of the impact of Possession is indirect (changing your strategy just because it's there) or psychological (remembering the bad times when it cost you a Province far more often than the good or neutral).

but that's just not true. you can make your opponent have a bad next hand, and that's a powerful attack. not just with some cards, but all the time, just in varying degrees. yes, obv you can't do it if there aren't any other cards in the kingdom, but whenever you play possession there are other cards in the kingdom, and usually there is draw/trashing/sifting, because these are also the cards that make possession viable.

sometimes possession does nothing. sometimes it hurts the next hand by 1 card, like minion (e.g. through courtyard). sometimes it absorbes key cards and puts them far away into your discard pile. sometimes it disrupts your engine and makes your next hand dead. sometimes it makes you pass/exile a key card. and sometimes it's a complete pin.

i don't know how much it hurts on average, but it's more than, let's say, militia, or spy.

[Lekkit]

I consider Spy one of the weakest attacks in the game. Along with Scrying Pool. And I'd still say the attack there is much better than the potential disruptiveness of Possession.

[Awaclus]

Mainly I'm arguing that it doesn't hurt nearly as much as many people seem to think, sometimes actually helps, and quite often does nothing much at all as far as the possessed player is concerned.  Many players seem to think that Possession is super powerful and utterly crippling when they first learn about it, and they are surprised that it isn't classified as an attack.  I certainly felt that way.  But experience and logic shows that giving it the attack type would be silly.  Most of the impact of Possession is indirect (changing your strategy just because it's there) or psychological (remembering the bad times when it cost you a Province far more often than the good or neutral).

but that's just not true. you can make your opponent have a bad next hand, and that's a powerful attack. not just with some cards, but all the time, just in varying degrees. yes, obv you can't do it if there aren't any other cards in the kingdom, but whenever you play possession there are other cards in the kingdom, and usually there is draw/trashing/sifting, because these are also the cards that make possession viable.

sometimes possession does nothing. sometimes it hurts the next hand by 1 card, like minion (e.g. through courtyard). sometimes it absorbes key cards and puts them far away into your discard pile. sometimes it disrupts your engine and makes your next hand dead. sometimes it makes you pass/exile a key card. and sometimes it's a complete pin.

i don't know how much it hurts on average, but it's more than, let's say, militia, or spy.

More than Spy, perhaps, but Spy isn't very hurtful in the first place. I wouldn't say it hurts more than Militia, though.

[Polk5440]

Cutpurse never helps you?

Menagerie. Edge Cased.

But I agree "on average" Cutpurse hurts.

[eHalcyon]

Cutpurse never helps you?

Menagerie. Edge Cased.

But I agree "on average" Cutpurse hurts.

Yes, I mentioned that there were edge cases in another post. Draw-to-X cards are another.

Mainly I'm arguing that it doesn't hurt nearly as much as many people seem to think, sometimes actually helps, and quite often does nothing much at all as far as the possessed player is concerned.  Many players seem to think that Possession is super powerful and utterly crippling when they first learn about it, and they are surprised that it isn't classified as an attack.  I certainly felt that way.  But experience and logic shows that giving it the attack type would be silly.  Most of the impact of Possession is indirect (changing your strategy just because it's there) or psychological (remembering the bad times when it cost you a Province far more often than the good or neutral).

but that's just not true. you can make your opponent have a bad next hand, and that's a powerful attack. not just with some cards, but all the time, just in varying degrees. yes, obv you can't do it if there aren't any other cards in the kingdom, but whenever you play possession there are other cards in the kingdom, and usually there is draw/trashing/sifting, because these are also the cards that make possession viable.

Sifting can allow the possessor to mess with the player's next turn, but draw and trashing don't except in extreme cases.  As much as we love full-draw engines on f.ds, those do not happen every game.  Even if such an engine is available, a smart player will only build that engine if it can get going before Possession hits.  If that's not possible, a smart player will do something else instead.

sometimes possession does nothing. sometimes it hurts the next hand by 1 card, like minion (e.g. through courtyard). sometimes it absorbes key cards and puts them far away into your discard pile. sometimes it disrupts your engine and makes your next hand dead. sometimes it makes you pass/exile a key card. and sometimes it's a complete pin.

i don't know how much it hurts on average, but it's more than, let's say, militia, or spy.

You know what else can make you miss key cards?  Tribute.  And you are skipping the times when I get possessed with a poor hand, allowing me to play a good hand for my regular turn.

I think you are vastly over-estimating the power of Possession.  That, or you are only considering the boards where Possession is worth buying because of the factors that make it good.  But do you buy Possession every time it's available?  I doubt it.  I skip it most of the time, because most of the time it is just a big Workshop. 

Militia definitely hurts more than Possession.  And Spy, weak as it is, more consistently hurts the other player in making them skip good cards and keep bad cards than Possession does.

[scott_pilgrim]

Cutpurse never helps you?

Menagerie. Edge Cased.

But I agree "on average" Cutpurse hurts.

Yes, I mentioned that there were edge cases in another post. Draw-to-X cards are another.

Possession is another (getting cutpursed right before getting possessed)

[TheMirrorMan]

Regardless whether we consider it an attack ... You can't turn it into an attack. Possession, squire and trashing on the board (preferably chapel) and I have 2 consecutive turns from turn 5 on. Of course my opponent probably will too. So we have a complete stalemate.

[sudgy]

Masquerade isn't an attack when it probably is bad for your opponent more often than not (because you have a larger choice of cards to give him than he does).

[Awaclus]

Masquerade isn't an attack when it probably is bad for your opponent more often than not (because you have a larger choice of cards to give him than he does).

More like it's probably good for your opponent more often than not, but sometimes it's very bad for your opponent and that makes a bigger difference.

[GendoIkari]

The replies will go with the fork.

Discovered an annoying issue with forking though... the links to the posts in quotes still go to the other thread, where the post doesn't exist.

[GendoIkari]

I am not arguing that Possession never hurts.  Yeah, it definitely does sometimes.  But any harm it causes is indirect.

It usually doesn't hurt as much as or more than actual attacks.

but it does!!!

Again, not on its own.

eHal, if there was a card that just said "Discard your hand and draw five cards," would you say that hurts?

Your argument is: Possession, alone, does not "hurt" you.  But at the very least, it's a discard attack (that's weaker than Minion), but with other stuff that affects you.  If you are arguing that the only hurt caused by Minion is going from a 5-card hand to a 4-card hand, then your argument that Possession is just making you go from one 5-card hand to a different 5-card hand works, I suppose.  I'd disagree, though.

I think an argument can be made that the disruption alone (basically discarding your hand plus losing any other cards your opponent plays/draws while possessed) is "hurting" you.  That's just Possession on its own, alone, by itself.  Of course, in the same way that discard attacks sometimes help you (Tunnel, Margrave card exchange, etc.), Possession can help you skip a crap hand.  But that's not an argument to say that Possession BY ITSELF cannot hurt you.

Minion hurts more than "discard down to 4" because you can't choose which card to discard. If instead of "discard your hand, draw 4" Minion said "discard 1 card at random", it would be just as painful and annoying. Maybe moreso because you lose the free cycling. Obviously there's edge cases like Alchemist and Scheme. But no, a card that said "each opponent discards his hand and draws 5 cards" would not hurt on average, and shouldn't be considered an attack.

[GendoIkari]

No, that's false and a poor comparison.  Cutpurse hurts sometimes, but at best it is neutral (barring edge cases).  That still means that Cutpurse hurts you on average.  You discarded 4 coppers from 10 plays of Cutpurse, so you discarded 0.4 Coppers on average because of Cutpurse.  That's a net loss. 

Here is my actual claim, in case things got confused in the heat of rhetoric and I said something I didn't mean:

On its own, Possession does not hurt opponents on average.  The effect of Possession alone is that a player replaces a random hand of 5 cards with another random hand of 5 cards.  On average, a random hand is equal to an average hand.  Sometimes it actually hurts (causing opponents to skip a good hand) and sometimes it actually helps (causing opponents to skip a bad hand), but the average effect of Possession on its own is net neutral.  Some cards tip the scales to give the possessing player a way to do some more damage (e.g. durations, coin tokens) but this can be avoided by smart play.  Some other cards can make things even nastier (Ambassador, Masquerade) and that is the nature of the beast.  In all these cases, the problem comes from the combination of cards. 

Looking back, I stated that Possession "doesn't directly harm an opponent".  I meant that it doesn't do this on average.  The rest of the discussion (at least from my perspective) is about whether Possession should have an Attack type.  My answer to that question is an emphatic No.




As an aside, it would probably be better to point to Thief as an attack that doesn't hurt on average.  It actually helps most of the time.  That's why it's a terrible attack.

I disagree with your Cutpurse disagreement.  If I had Gold-Gold-Silver-Copper-Estate and was buying a Province, discarding the Copper had zero negative effect.  So I didn't lose anything.  It can't be said to be a negative.  I think "hurt on average" isn't a comparison of how often it hurts you vs. how often it helps you.  I think it's how often it hurts you vs. how often it helps you OR has no effect at all.  I would argue that, like Thief, more than 50% of all plays of Cutpurse against you in the course of a normal lifetime (say ~85 years) would either help you or have no effect at all.

I don't understand your definition of average at all. Sounds more like you're talking about "what are the chances that a single play of Cutpurse will hurt you?" That's not at all the same as saying "does Cutpurse hurt on average". It doesn't matter if the card is neutral 99 out of 100 times, and hurts the last 1 out of 100 times, that card would be hurtful on average. "On average" doesn't mean "most often."

[ashersky]

"On average" doesn't mean "at least once" either.

We are all using it wrong, anyway.  We should be arguing how often on average
Possession hurts you.  As in, "on average, it hurts you 27% of the times it is played."  That's the adverbial use we are seeking.

My argument is better phrased "slightly more often than not" while eHal is arguing "much less often than not" or something similar.  That's the 50% point I was making.

[scott_pilgrim]

ashersky, I think everyone else is using the sentence "Possession hurts you on average" to mean, the total utility I gain whenever I am possessed averages to a negative amount.  Whether that is what that sentence should mean, or if that is a useful metric, is another discussion, but I think that's where the confusion is coming from.

[SCSN]

The proper term to use is "expectation", which is the weighted average of all possible outcomes. In expectation Possession most definitely hurts the possessed player, and should therefore in principal be considered an attack.

There are, however, some good design reasons for not attributing the "Attack" card-type to Possession:

- The card isn't very strong as it is, so you don't want to have a single card like Lighthouse make it completely impotent.
- Same, but to a slightly lesser extent for Moat.
- Squire would be insanely overpowered on boards with Possession and some form of trashing.

[Davio]

I think Possession would be more fair if you couldn't take advantage of duration cards (Tactician being the biggest), Masq/Amb shenanigans, or any trashing of the Possesses player's cards (with Salvager for example).

What I'm trying to say with this is: It should only let you do things the player would have done himself.


What if after the Possession turn, the Possessed player puts his deck in the exact same state as before he was Possessed? So you get the bonus from your durations, important cards don't miss the reshuffle, etc... This is awkward in real life of course, but very easy to implement online. Any Masq'd and Amb'd cards should be returned of course.

[markusin]

I think Possession would be more fair if you couldn't take advantage of duration cards (Tactician being the biggest), Masq/Amb shenanigans, or any trashing of the Possesses player's cards (with Salvager for example).

What I'm trying to say with this is: It should only let you do things the player would have done himself.


What if after the Possession turn, the Possessed player puts his deck in the exact same state as before he was Possessed? So you get the bonus from your durations, important cards don't miss the reshuffle, etc... This is awkward in real life of course, but very easy to implement online. Any Masq'd and Amb'd cards should be returned of course.

In that case, it mostly would be a glorified Workshop.

[Holger]

I think Possession would be more fair if you couldn't take advantage of duration cards (Tactician being the biggest), Masq/Amb shenanigans, or any trashing of the Possesses player's cards (with Salvager for example).

What I'm trying to say with this is: It should only let you do things the player would have done himself.


What if after the Possession turn, the Possessed player puts his deck in the exact same state as before he was Possessed? So you get the bonus from your durations, important cards don't miss the reshuffle, etc... This is awkward in real life of course, but very easy to implement online. Any Masq'd and Amb'd cards should be returned of course.

In that case, it mostly would be a glorified Workshop.

Like Davio, I'd prefer to call it a glorified (or "JoaTed") Outpost, since it can gain any number of cards. And most games have Trash for Benefit, which make it preferable to play with the opponent's deck than with your own. I wonder if a "5 card-hand Outpost" would work at Possession's price...

[SirPeebles]

I think Possession would be more fair if you couldn't take advantage of duration cards (Tactician being the biggest), Masq/Amb shenanigans, or any trashing of the Possesses player's cards (with Salvager for example).

What I'm trying to say with this is: It should only let you do things the player would have done himself.


What if after the Possession turn, the Possessed player puts his deck in the exact same state as before he was Possessed? So you get the bonus from your durations, important cards don't miss the reshuffle, etc... This is awkward in real life of course, but very easy to implement online. Any Masq'd and Amb'd cards should be returned of course.

In that case, it mostly would be a glorified Workshop.

It would also give your opponent a bunch of information about what is coming next in their deck.

I like having card interactions.  Possession has some interesting interactions precisely because of its ability to shape the opponent's deck.  Unless the effect breaks the game -- which I don't believe Possession does -- it seems best to leave it as is, particularly since it is already wordy enough.  The current effect is rather elegant in its idea.  The ugliest part is in place to prevent one from trashing her opponent's deck, which must have been deemed too broken.  But Masq and Amb are less common, and are really only acutely abusable in two player games (since Amb gives your other opponents the card too).

[GendoIkari]

I think Possession would be more fair if you couldn't take advantage of duration cards (Tactician being the biggest), Masq/Amb shenanigans, or any trashing of the Possesses player's cards (with Salvager for example).

What I'm trying to say with this is: It should only let you do things the player would have done himself.


What if after the Possession turn, the Possessed player puts his deck in the exact same state as before he was Possessed? So you get the bonus from your durations, important cards don't miss the reshuffle, etc... This is awkward in real life of course, but very easy to implement online. Any Masq'd and Amb'd cards should be returned of course.

In that case, it mostly would be a glorified Workshop.

Like Davio, I'd prefer to call it a glorified (or "JoaTed") Outpost, since it can gain any number of cards.

Yes but Outpost is a glorified Workshop.

[GendoIkari]