Dominion > Rules Questions

Smugglers / Changeling targeting a card not available any more

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jonaskoelker:

--- Quote from: Donald X. on December 12, 2017, 03:12:55 am ---You have to name a card they gained for Smugglers, or a card you have in play for Changeling.

--- End quote ---
Ah, then constructing a counterexample is easy, at least for Smugglers: if I play smugglers and none of the relevant piles are empty, I must gain a card; with my non-equivalent formulation, I could name NullPointerException and not gain anything.

Of course, I can always choose not to play Smugglers, but edge case Possession says hello (and really weird corner cases relying on Diadem, Storyteller and shuffle control also say hello, but only parenthetically).

(I believe a similar distinguishing example works the same way for Changeling: if there are copies in the supply of all the cards you have in play, you must gain a card if you play Changeling.)

EDIT: Man, now I'm out $0 on my stupid bet :(

Jack Rudd:

--- Quote from: jonaskoelker on December 12, 2017, 04:23:07 am ---Of course, I can always choose not to play Smugglers, but edge case Possession says hello (and really weird corner cases relying on Diadem, Storyteller and shuffle control also say hello, but only parenthetically).

--- End quote ---
Herald and Golem are somewhat more normal ways to have a card force-played.

chipperMDW:

--- Quote from: Donald X. on November 19, 2017, 06:06:34 pm ---The tricky part is that they say "a copy of a card..." and the ruling is that what you are picking is the "a card" not the "a copy." You can pick the card even though the copy isn't available.

--- End quote ---

Of course, you can't really be picking an actual card they gained, not as it currently exists. If they gained a BoM and played it later that turn as Caravan, then (I presume) you can't gain Caravan even though the card they gained happens to currently be a Caravan. (And, in general, you have no way of knowing what the card they gained currently even looks like.)

It must be more like you're picking a memory of a card they gained at the time they gained it. Similar to what Treasure Map and Ritual look at.

jonaskoelker:

--- Quote from: chipperMDW on December 12, 2017, 11:32:59 am ---Of course, you can't really be picking an actual card they gained, not as it currently exists. If they gained a BoM and played it later that turn as Caravan, then (I presume) you can't gain Caravan even though the card they gained happens to currently be a Caravan. (And, in general, you have no way of knowing what the card they gained currently even looks like.)

--- End quote ---
Right, you're picking something that bijects onto the set of card names (I think), among the things they gained. They gained a BoM and so you can gain a BoM because it was a BoM when they gained it. (That's my theory.)

Anything else would also lead to unsolvable tracking issues. Suppose they have a BoM in their deck, then gain a second one and an Inn, shuffling the two BoMs together. Then they draw them and play one as a Caravan and another as Dungeon. What can you gain? One coherent answer is {BoM}, another is "either {BoM, Caravan} or {BoM, Dungeon} but you can't tell which", and a third is "either {Caravan} or {Dungeon} but you can't tell which". Only in the first case is the answer knowable, and that's a crucial characteristic for a system of rules to have, so that must be the right awser.


--- Quote from: chipperMDW on December 12, 2017, 11:32:59 am ---It must be more like you're picking a memory of a card they gained at the time they gained it. Similar to what Treasure Map and Ritual look at.

--- End quote ---
How does the same issue arise with Treasure Map and Ritual?

chipperMDW:

--- Quote from: jonaskoelker on December 13, 2017, 09:41:53 am ---
--- Quote from: chipperMDW on December 12, 2017, 11:32:59 am ---It must be more like you're picking a memory of a card they gained at the time they gained it. Similar to what Treasure Map and Ritual look at.

--- End quote ---
How does the same issue arise with Treasure Map and Ritual?

--- End quote ---

Play BoM as Treasure Map; trash it and trash a "real" Treasure Map from your hand. You get four Golds because, regardless of what one of those cards looks like now (a BoM), it was a Treasure Map at the time you trashed it, and Treasure map is checking the memory of what the cards were at the time you trashed them.

Inherit Village. Play Quarry; your Estates cost $0. Buy Ritual, trashing your $0 Estate. The Estate stops being yours, so it stops being an action, so it changes to costing $2. But Ritual says "per $1 it cost" (past tense), so it's been ruled that Ritual checks the memory of what the card looked like at the time you trashed it. You get 0VP instead of 2VP.

These examples are in contrast to how everything else works in Dominion: you check what the card looks like right now; you don't care what it looked like at the moment you trashed it or whatever. So, in the case for Ritual above, if you had instead Villa'd back and trashed the Estate with Remodel (which uses present tense), it wouldn't care that what you trashed used to cost $0; the card you trashed now costs $2, so you can turn it into a $4.

(The fact that the rules work as described in the previous paragraph is my Dominion pet peeve. Nothing's broken yet, but it seems liable to create situations that lead to, as you called them, unresolvable tracking issues.)

EDIT:
Some trivia: M:tG has a concept of looking at the "memory" of an object; it's called "last known information." I think I read in an interview somewhere that Donald was somehow the one who proposed that idea.

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