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[Donald X.]

I am changing some rules and errata-ing some cards. And this post is telling you all about it.

The reasons behind these changes are:
- It's possible for two copies of a card to have different abilities. This causes problems, the worst (extremely exotic) situation being, you play a card and don't actually know what it should do. The cards that do this are also confusing in general.
- There are cases where card interactions fail in an unintuitive way, due to it mattering if cards in a discard pile are covered up.
- Two minor rules clarify things a little and simplify texts a little, and are just coming along for the ride.

These changes will be implemented in the online program soon, and are effective now. Of course if you are playing irl you may not know about them, or may choose to do whatever you choose to do. These are changes for the better though, and I recommend using them.

Edit: I didn't think those words through and should clarify. New printings of the sets will have the new wordings, just as with Possession and Masquerade earlier. Online we will have the new wordings soon, because we can. But obviously anyone with a physical copy has whatever version they have; there's no obligation to play with the errata, and it's not great having to tell your friends, "here's some text to remember about what this card actually does." You can do it if you want but it's not essential for good times. I'm telling people about the changes now instead of whenever the sets get reprinted, because we can have the changes online in the meantime.

1. Errata

Eight cards are getting errata. Four are "shapeshifters" - they can change what they are, or what something else is. These create lots of rules questions and a few problems, and are switching to be like Captain and Necromancer - they'll play a card instead of becoming the card. Three are one-shots that would behave differently with the shapeshifters; they're changing to be more like they previously were, though this will change how they work in some other situations (e.g. with Necromancer and Captain). And then Procession is getting rid of the tracking problem introduced when the Throne/Duration rule changed a few years ago.

Someday those expansions will get printed again, and will have the new wordings, with FAQs to go with them. You can play with them right now though, through the magic of knowing about them.

New card texts:

Band of Misfits: Action, $5
Play an Action card from the Supply that costs less than this, leaving it there.

Overlord: Action, 8D
Play an Action card from the Supply costing up to $5, leaving it there.

Inheritance: Event, $7
Once per game: Set aside a non-Victory Action card from the Supply costing up to $4. Move your Estate token to it. (During your turns, Estates are also Actions with "Play the card with your Estate token, leaving it there.")

Lantern: Artifact
Border Guards you play reveal 3 cards and discard 2. (It takes all 3 being Actions to take the Horn.)

Death Cart: Action - Looter, $4
You may trash this or an Action card from your hand, for +$5.
----------
When you gain this, gain 2 Ruins.

Pillage: Action - Attack, $5
Trash this. If you did, gain 2 Spoils, and each other player with 5 or more cards in hand reveals their hand and discards a card that you choose.

Embargo: Action, $2
+$2
Trash this. If you did, add an Embargo token to a Supply pile. (For the rest of the game, when a player buys a card from that pile, they gain a Curse.)

Procession: Action, $4
You may play a non-Duration Action card from your hand twice. Trash it. Gain an Action card costing exactly $1 more than it.

2. Tracking for the former shapeshifters

Some cards, like the new Band of Misfits, can play a card that isn't put into play. When you play Band of Misfits, leave it in play as long as you would have left the card it plays in play. Normally that will be the same turn's Clean-up. For a Band of Misfits playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the last turn the Duration card has any effects. For a Band of Misfits playing a Throne Room playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the turn the Duration card leaves play. For a Band of Misfits playing a card that can move itself from play, like Mining Village, the Mining Village can't move itself, and Band of Misfits would still stay out until Clean-up anyway, due to the normal rule for leaving cards out until Clean-up. If a Band of Misfits plays multiple Duration cards (e.g., you used Throne Room on it), leave it out until the Clean-up of the last turn that one of them still had effects.

These rules apply to all of the cards that play cards without putting them into play: currently, Band of Misfits, Overlord, Inheritance, Necromancer, and Captain.

3. The new lose-track rule, now stop-moving, and getting things from your discard pile

Sometimes, the game wants you to not move a card further. I used to call this lose-track, because it existed due to situations where you'd really lose track of the card. But mostly you know right where the card is, so now I am calling it the stop-moving rule. And it's changing too, as follows.

The stop-moving rule: An effect can move a card if it specifies where the card is coming from, or if the effect put the card where it is now. If a card isn't where the effect would expect it to be, or has moved away from there and then back, it can't move the card. Played cards expect to be in play; they can't move themselves if they aren't. Gained cards are expected to be where they were gained to, even if this isn't the discard pile. Cards in discard piles can be moved even if covered up by other cards; cards on top of a deck can't be moved once covered up.

Additionally, when you are told to get a card from your discard pile, you can look through it to get the card. That's just implicit. You don't have to just look at the top couple of cards, you can look through the whole discard pile.

The main change here is that previously you'd lose track of something if it were covered up in your discard pile, and now you don't. So for example if you Replace an Estate into Skulk, previously you would lose track of the Skulk when you gained a Gold and covered it up, but now you won't, you will put the Skulk onto your deck.

4. You can gain non-Supply cards when called out.

When a card tells you to gain a non-Supply card by name, you can gain it from its pile, even though it's not in the Supply.

This is just letting me drop "from its pile" from those cards, which wasn't a great way to make it clear that you really get to gain them.

5. Costs don't go below $0.

The cost in $ of a card can't go below $0. The cost in [potion] of a card can't go below 0 [potion]; the cost in [debt] of a card can't go below 0 [debt].

This is something that cards like Bridge have said; now it's just a rule, and covers the potion and debt cases since people ask. What does Vineyard cost with a Highway in play? Same as without it - zero coins, one potion, and zero debt.

*** Update! ***

Did I say that was the errata? There is more errata.

As a result of posting the errata, people have talked about it in forums and things, and the ShuffleiT version has gotten worked on. And this has resulted in two more desired changes. Well I'm counting it as two. And well the cards still won't be printed for months at least, but the online version is changing soon, so here they are.

The first is, when you are told to get a card from your discard pile, if it's not on top, or the card is chosen, you can look through your discard pile to get the card. You don't get to look through your discard pile to take the top card (again unless you're choosing a card from your discard pile). This change is because, well the idea to messing with when you could look in your discard pile was to fix some weird situations, not to add "look through your discard pile" to cards like Watchtower that never had it. In the rare situations where you gain a card and want to use Watchtower and the card is no longer on top, you get to look through your whole discard pile; when it's on top, just take the card like you used to.

The second is, further errata for four cards to prevent loops. You could do things like, play a Bridge and use Inheritance on Band of Misfits and then play Band of Misfits to play Estate to play Band of Misfits to play Estate and it's a loop. The fix here is a type on these cards, that they then don't work with. This affects very little other than getting rid of the loops; Courtier is better with these cards, and if you e.g. have an Adventures token on Band of Misfits and wanted to play Captain to play Band of Misfits (with a Bridge) to take advantage of that, well, now that doesn't work. This fix includes Overlord even though it wasn't part of the loops, just to be safe for the future and because it looks like the other cards and this seems less confusing. And hey it was already getting errata. To avoid "non-Victory non-Command" on Inheritance, I'm dropping non-Victory, which was just there for the old way Inheritance worked.

So:

Band of Misfits: Action - Command, $5
Play a non-Command Action card from the Supply that costs less than this, leaving it there.

Overlord: Action - Command, 8D
Play a non-Command Action card from the Supply costing up to $5, leaving it there.

Inheritance: Event, $7
Once per game: Set aside a non-Command Action card from the Supply costing up to $4. Move your Estate token to it. (During your turns, Estates are also Actions with "Play the card with your Estate token, leaving it there.")

Captain: Action - Duration - Command, $6
Now and at the start of your next turn: Play a non-Duration non-Command Action card from the Supply costing up to $4, leaving it there.

[Donald X.]

oops, left off the +$2 on Embargo.

[Tables]

oops, left off the +$2 on Embargo.

Don't worry, we've all forgotten about Embargo's +$2 at one point or another...

[GendoIkari]

Moving my comments from the rules thread.

Obviously you chose to not deal with errata on removed first edition cards... but what is your recommendation for Feast's wording? Should it be conditional on trashing (thus breaking Throne Room + Feast); or should it stay the same (thus making BoM + Feast more powerful with new BoM)?

New Procession seems weird. Aside from the fact that it's suddenly weaker, for someone who buys only base game Dominion, and then the Dark Ages expansion, they are going to have no clue with a "duration" is. I guess the FAQ in the new Dark Ages rulebook will explain this.

[Donald X.]

Moving my comments from the rules thread.

Obviously you chose to not deal with errata on removed first edition cards... but what is your recommendation for Feast's wording? Should it be conditional on trashing (thus breaking Throne Room + Feast); or should it stay the same (thus making BoM + Feast more powerful with new BoM)?

New Procession seems weird. Aside from the fact that it's suddenly weaker, for someone who buys only base game Dominion, and then the Dark Ages expansion, they are going to have no clue with a "duration" is. I guess the FAQ in the new Dark Ages rulebook will explain this.

I didn't errata every one-shot to say "if you do." Death Cart was a bad case because you get +$5 (and it's in Dark Ages with BoM), and Embargo and Pillage because they attack in a way that could become oppressive.

If Feast were in the main set still I might have errata'd it too, just to answer the very common rules question right on the card. The game supports Feast, even if it isn't in print; no-one spoke up to say, you should change Feast too, and well it didn't seem like as much of a problem as the three I errata'd, so I didn't change it. You can now BoM as Feast to gain $5's.

When Dark Ages was first published, "non-Duration" would have been too weird. At this point there are Duration cards in Seaside, Adventures, Empires, Nocturne, and Renaissance, plus two promos. People know about Duration cards. And yes the FAQ can mention it, which is how we handle the Debt symbol on Possession.

[GendoIkari]

This also changes Throne Room + BoM rules, right? Previously, in the case of a non-one-shot; BoM would be locked in and have to be played as the same thing both times. But now you can play it as a different things each time.

[Chris is me]

This is a neat change that simplifies a lot of things. I am especially glad I don't have to explain the whole thing about covering up cards in your discard pile or whatever. Yeesh.

One side note is that BoM / Overlord copying Encampment or Experiment now play a lot more nicely, and they also don't move themselves to the Tavern mat to be stuck there forever now.

Does throning a BoM now let you choose two different cards? That's super huge, and makes some infinite loops much easier (don't need a self-trashing card now)

[Titandrake]

I like all these changes, except that Procession no longer lets you Throne Duration cards. I understand why it's changed but that's a fairly notable nerf to the card.

If Procession had always worked this way I wouldn't have been upset, so sure, whatever, it's a brave new world.

[GendoIkari]

I like all these changes, except that Procession no longer lets you Throne Duration cards. I understand why it's changed but that's a fairly notable nerf to the card.

If Procession had always worked this way I wouldn't have been upset, so sure, whatever, it's a brave new world.

I'm going to miss my cost Hireling that gained a King's Court when played.

[pubby]

Since Estates are now actions in the supply it opens up the inifnite Captain combos:

1. Reduce the cost of Captain
2. Inherit Captain
3. Play Estate as Captain
4. Play Captain as Estate
5. Goto 3.

It's not too rare, you only need Inheritance, Captain, and one of { Bridge, Highway, Quarry, Tournament, Ferry, Bridge Troll, or Inventor }. Previously you need four cards as it required Ferry + another cost reducer.

You can also do it with BoM, but it's not as good.

[LibraryAdventurer]

ugh. I was afraid of this.

I really don't like the changes to BOM/Overlord/Inheritance and will not be using them IRL. I'm sure I'm going to forget and get confused when I play with those cards online as some points but oh well. Anything unclear or weird about the old rules came up pretty rarely (I don't think I ever had it come up in a game), so I wish they hadn't been changed.

While the new rules make interactions with certain cards (like one-shots) stronger, they kill the interaction with anything that has "While this is in play" (and reactions in the case of Inheritance) which is a lot more common than one-shot cards. I'm going to miss using those cards online with the original rules.

[NoMoreFun]

Since Estates are now actions in the supply it opens up the inifnite Captain combos:

1. Reduce the cost of Captain
2. Inherit Captain
3. Play Estate as Captain
4. Play Captain as Estate
5. Goto 3.

It's not too rare, you only need Inheritance, Captain, and one of { Bridge, Highway, Quarry, Tournament, Ferry, Bridge Troll, or Inventor }. Previously you need four cards as it required Ferry + another cost reducer.

You can also do it with BoM, but it's not as good.

What was wrong with the old Inheritance anyway?

[markusin]

ugh. I was afraid of this.

I really don't like the changes to BOM/Overlord/Inheritance and will not be using them IRL. I'm sure I'm going to forget and get confused when I play with those cards online as some points but oh well. Anything unclear or weird about the old rules came up pretty rarely (I don't think I ever had it come up in a game), so I wish they hadn't been changed.

While the new rules make interactions with certain cards (like one-shots) stronger, they kill the interaction with anything that has "While this is in play" (and reactions in the case of Inheritance) which is a lot more common than one-shot cards. I'm going to miss using those cards online with the original rules.

It kills some interactions, but creates new ones. Procession feels like it got hit the hardest though. Full on nerf of the card.

[Commodore Chuckles]

Can you explain how Tunnel works with the new rules? I remember someone saying that you can't use Tunnel's Reaction over and over because it gets covered up by the first Gold gained.

For a Band of Misfits playing a card that can move itself from play, like Mining Village, the Mining Village can't move itself, so Band of Misfits doesn't leave play any earlier than normal.

Does this mean the interaction becomes a ridiculously abusive Grand Market Village? Does the same abusiveness apply to Death Cart?

For a Band of Misfits playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the last turn the Duration card has any effects.

If a Band of Misfits plays multiple Duration cards (e.g., you used Throne Room on it), leave it out until the Clean-up of the last turn that one of them still had effects.

This seems horrible to track. It also seems counterintuitive to the point of doing something that clearly isn't written or implied on the card. The new text just says play the (Duration) card but leave it in the supply. To me this implies that you simply don't get the benefit at the start of your next turn(s) that you normally would. I see nothing in the text that would make me think I have to leave BoM in play instead of discarding it as usual.

[dz]

Can you explain how Tunnel works with the new rules? I remember someone saying that you can't use Tunnel's Reaction over and over because it gets covered up by the first Gold gained.

To reveal Tunnel for Gold, you have to discard it. If you can only discard it once, you can only reveal it once.

Does this mean the interaction becomes a ridiculously abusive Grand Market Village? Does the same abusiveness apply to Death Cart?

To get $2 from Mining Village, you have to move it from play to trash. Band of Misfits doesn't move it to play, so that doesn't work. Same scenario with Death Cart.

This seems horrible to track. It also seems counterintuitive to the point of doing something that clearly isn't written or implied on the card. The new text just says play the (Duration) card but leave it in the supply. To me this implies that you simply don't get the benefit at the start of your next turn(s) that you normally would. I see nothing in the text that would make me think I have to leave BoM in play instead of discarding it as usual.

There's also nothing in the text for any Throne Room that implies that you keep Throne in play with a Duration it replayed. It's only in the rulebook. How has no one complained about this?

[Jimmmmm]

Did you consider introducing a new term which means "Play x, leaving it there", or "Follow the instructions without moving the card"? For example, BoM could read "Activate an Action card from the Supply that costs less than this." Obviously you'd've had to have thought of it before Captain came out.

I'll admit that I was initially confused by Captain's wording, and thought that somehow "leaving it there" meant leaving it in play.

[Donald X.]

This also changes Throne Room + BoM rules, right? Previously, in the case of a non-one-shot; BoM would be locked in and have to be played as the same thing both times. But now you can play it as a different things each time.

Yes now it can be a different thing each time.

[Donald X.]

ugh. I was afraid of this.

I really don't like the changes to BOM/Overlord/Inheritance and will not be using them IRL. I'm sure I'm going to forget and get confused when I play with those cards online as some points but oh well. Anything unclear or weird about the old rules came up pretty rarely (I don't think I ever had it come up in a game), so I wish they hadn't been changed.

While the new rules make interactions with certain cards (like one-shots) stronger, they kill the interaction with anything that has "While this is in play" (and reactions in the case of Inheritance) which is a lot more common than one-shot cards. I'm going to miss using those cards online with the original rules.

The exotic things came up very rarely; but the common things were common. The cards were just endlessly confusing, in addition to being a hole in the rules, a hole that let you actually play a card and not know what its abilities were.

The game still has every other fun interaction, and of course gained whatever new ones. In most situations Band of Misfits does what it used to.

I can't just ban a card that doesn't work within the rules; the game has to support the card somehow. I have supported these cards with errata to make them actually work.

[Donald X.]

Can you explain how Tunnel works with the new rules? I remember someone saying that you can't use Tunnel's Reaction over and over because it gets covered up by the first Gold gained.

The difference now is that it doesn't matter if Tunnel gets covered up, it still works. You are allowed to look through your discard pile for it.

For a Band of Misfits playing a card that can move itself from play, like Mining Village, the Mining Village can't move itself, so Band of Misfits doesn't leave play any earlier than normal.

Does this mean the interaction becomes a ridiculously abusive Grand Market Village? Does the same abusiveness apply to Death Cart?

No, neither one does anything like that. When Band of Misfits plays Mining Village, Mining Village can't trash itself from the supply, thus you don't trash Mining Village, thus you don't get the +$2.

All cards that trash themselves (or return themselves to their pile) have an implicit "from play"; they expect to be in play, which is where they'd normally be, and can't move themselves if they aren't.

For a Band of Misfits playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the last turn the Duration card has any effects.

If a Band of Misfits plays multiple Duration cards (e.g., you used Throne Room on it), leave it out until the Clean-up of the last turn that one of them still had effects.

This seems horrible to track. It also seems counterintuitive to the point of doing something that clearly isn't written or implied on the card. The new text just says play the (Duration) card but leave it in the supply. To me this implies that you simply don't get the benefit at the start of your next turn(s) that you normally would. I see nothing in the text that would make me think I have to leave BoM in play instead of discarding it as usual.

It seems fine to me, but I mean, good luck. I made some mistakes years ago making certain cards; I have fixed them as best I knew how, with advice from anyone else who cared to comment.

[Donald X.]

Did you consider introducing a new term which means "Play x, leaving it there", or "Follow the instructions without moving the card"? For example, BoM could read "Activate an Action card from the Supply that costs less than this." Obviously you'd've had to have thought of it before Captain came out.

I'll admit that I was initially confused by Captain's wording, and thought that somehow "leaving it there" meant leaving it in play.

No, I wouldn't want a rulebook term that was used so rarely. If "leaving it there" is confusing, the move is to have a better wording that clears it up, but still try to really fit the entire needed explanation on the card itself.

[Donald X.]

What was wrong with the old Inheritance anyway?

http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=18598.0

It turns out that it's bad to let different copies of a card have different abilities at the same time (which Band of Misfits and Overlord also did). It means you can arrange to play a card and not know its abilities.

[NoMoreFun]

Was an errata that changed when you trash the card from Procession considered? (Eg have it be trashed during clean up similar to Improve)?

[Donald X.]

Was an errata that changed when you trash the card from Procession considered? (Eg have it be trashed during clean up similar to Improve)?

Yes it was brought up, but that's a significant change too; it stops you from gaining a card with Procession and playing it the same turn. The people in the conversation cared more about that.

[Commodore Chuckles]

Can you explain how Tunnel works with the new rules? I remember someone saying that you can't use Tunnel's Reaction over and over because it gets covered up by the first Gold gained.

To reveal Tunnel for Gold, you have to discard it. If you can only discard it once, you can only reveal it once.

But then it gets covered up by a Gold, which, according to the new rules, lets you reveal it again.

This seems horrible to track. It also seems counterintuitive to the point of doing something that clearly isn't written or implied on the card. The new text just says play the (Duration) card but leave it in the supply. To me this implies that you simply don't get the benefit at the start of your next turn(s) that you normally would. I see nothing in the text that would make me think I have to leave BoM in play instead of discarding it as usual.

There's also nothing in the text for any Throne Room that implies that you keep Throne in play with a Duration it replayed. It's only in the rulebook. How has no one complained about this?
[/quote]

The difference there is that the Duration card itself remains in play. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like a card played but left in the supply shouldn't have any lingering effects.

[Donald X.]

But then it gets covered up by a Gold, which, according to the new rules, lets you reveal it again.

I see what you're saying.

You only get to reveal the Tunnel once. I'm not worried about people misplaying that, but it's something for the Tunnel FAQ.

The difference there is that the Duration card itself remains in play. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like a card played but left in the supply shouldn't have any lingering effects.

Initially BoM/Overlord/Inheritance just weren't going to work on durations. It's sad for Inheritance, because maybe you deal out 10 Adventures cards to play with, or 5 and 5 of something else; there are not many good options for Inheritance left at that point. But, it seemed necessary. Then I got around it.

The root problem, under these other things, is that cards can have effects when not in play. We use the card in play to track the effect, and if it's not in play we aren't tracking the effect. It should be that the next-turn part is below a dividing line - as Hans im Gluck did theirs - and doesn't work if the card isn't in play. And then Throne would be sad with them, and you can't do Band of Misfits anything like that, and so on. [Another direction is to provide other components to track the effects.]

If I were making the game today, I would fix that up. I am not though, I am dealing with a published game with lots of cards out there. So the fix is as small as possible.

[GendoIkari]

Can you explain how Tunnel works with the new rules? I remember someone saying that you can't use Tunnel's Reaction over and over because it gets covered up by the first Gold gained.

From what I remember last time this was discussed; Tunnel can only be used once because “when X, do why” only lets you do Y once each time X happens. This is the same for reaction cards as well as non-reaction things with the same wording (Goons in play when you buy a card).

An exception to that rule exists for revealing reactions from your hand; this is why you can reveal Moat more than once if an attack is played. That exception is necessary because you wouldn’t be able to prove if you were revealing the same Moat or a different Moat the second time.

So Lose Track was never necessary for Tunnel to work properly. You could only reveal it once because it was only discarded once.

[GendoIkari]

The new text just says play the (Duration) card but leave it in the supply. To me this implies that you simply don't get the benefit at the start of your next turn(s) that you normally would.

Why would it imply that? Duration cards have never needed to be in play to give you the next turn benefit. The effect has always been set up when the card is played, what happens to it after that has never mattered... this has always been the case when a Procession played a Duration, for example.

BoM staying in play follows the same rules for Throne Room staying in play when it plays a Duration. Since the beginning of Dominion durations, there has always been a rule that says that a card that plays a Duration stays in play as long as that Duration has something to do.

[Sparafucile]

Any chance we could get an errata update pack with the modified wordings for the most important changed cards?    I can’t afford to buy all of the expansions again ...

Heck - I would buy an annual update pack to keep the most update rules in my set ...

[Donald X.]

Any chance we could get an errata update pack with the modified wordings for the most important changed cards?    I can’t afford to buy all of the expansions again ...

Heck - I would buy an annual update pack to keep the most update rules in my set ...

So far there is no plan for an update pack. It doesn't sound like a very good product, though a few people would want it.

I should repeat, as I often say, that of course people should play by whatever house rules they want, including ignoring errata. I have to make the rules work though and this is what I have done there.

[scolapasta]

So far there is no plan for an update pack. It doesn't sound like a very good product, though a few people would want it.

Instead of an update pack, what about selling them as promos through BGG? (similar to Pathfinding)

[scolapasta]

2. Tracking for the former shapeshifters

Some cards, like the new Band of Misfits, can play a card that isn't put into play. When you play Band of Misfits, leave it in play as long as you would have left the card it plays in play. Normally that will be the same turn's Clean-up. For a Band of Misfits playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the last turn the Duration card has any effects. For a Band of Misfits playing a Throne Room playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the turn the Duration card leaves play. For a Band of Misfits playing a card that can move itself from play, like Mining Village, the Mining Village can't move itself, so Band of Misfits doesn't leave play any earlier than normal. If a Band of Misfits plays multiple Duration cards (e.g., you used Throne Room on it), leave it out until the Clean-up of the last turn that one of them still had effects.

Quick question on BoM / TR vs TR / BoM interaction:

Scenario 1: BoM playing TR playing Duration - all cards stay out until Duration gets cleaned up

Scenario 2: TR playing BoM playing Duration (as one of its two plays) - TR gets cleaned up that turn, BoM and Duration stay out until Duration gets cleaned up

Is that correct? (if so, I'm now imagining a larger TR / BoM / TR / BoM ... chain. :p)

[Donald X.]

Instead of an update pack, what about selling them as promos through BGG? (similar to Pathfinding)

That sounds more possible at least. Though there a bunch of them. Even just the shapeshifters not counting Lantern is 3 cards (which is to say, 23, since there's only one Inheritance but there are randomizers). And you know, we give away the promos; BGG makes a profit on them, but not us. It's to support BGG.

If I ever did a Dark Ages 2E, I could just replace Band of Misfits / Procession / Pillage with related new cards, new cards being what's exciting to get in an update pack.

[Donald X.]

2. Tracking for the former shapeshifters

Some cards, like the new Band of Misfits, can play a card that isn't put into play. When you play Band of Misfits, leave it in play as long as you would have left the card it plays in play. Normally that will be the same turn's Clean-up. For a Band of Misfits playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the last turn the Duration card has any effects. For a Band of Misfits playing a Throne Room playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the turn the Duration card leaves play. For a Band of Misfits playing a card that can move itself from play, like Mining Village, the Mining Village can't move itself, so Band of Misfits doesn't leave play any earlier than normal. If a Band of Misfits plays multiple Duration cards (e.g., you used Throne Room on it), leave it out until the Clean-up of the last turn that one of them still had effects.

Quick question on BoM / TR vs TR / BoM interaction:

Scenario 1: BoM playing TR playing Duration - all cards stay out until Duration gets cleaned up

Scenario 2: TR playing BoM playing Duration (as one of its two plays) - TR gets cleaned up that turn, BoM and Duration stay out until Duration gets cleaned up

Is that correct? (if so, I'm now imagining a larger TR / BoM / TR / BoM ... chain. :p)

1: The Throne is never in play of course, but otherwise yes.
2: Yes.

[dbclick]

Wikified:
http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Dominion_2019_Errata_and_Rules_Tweaks
http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Stop-Moving_rule (needs more info like the old lose-track page - which should be left in-tact for posterity and those with physical cards).

I also edited the card text on each changed card's page, but there are no official Card Notes for the new changes. I may propose some unofficial ones later (and leave the official ones in a separate section until new printings occur).
I'm also not sure where to best integrate the other new rules across the board (maybe best to reference as needed from particular card pages).

EDIT: I added unofficial FAQs for the new versions of the 3 main modified cards. BoM and Overlord got shorter. Inheritance got longer (but there are fewer strange cases and needed clarifications, so it's for the best).

[chipperMDW]

5. Costs don't go below $0.

The cost in $ of a card can't go below $0.

It might be worth it to point out that there is still the concept of a negative coin cost that comes up when you Develop Coppers.

[dbclick]

Question: Does Inheriting something change the type of the Estate pile to Action - Victory during your turns as well (which has implications for other events and Teacher, etc.)? I don't think so, but just wanted to verify.

[Donald X.]

Question: Does Inheriting something change the type of the Estate pile to Action - Victory during your turns as well (which has implications for other events and Teacher, etc.)? I don't think so, but just wanted to verify.

No. Normally you go by the randomizer card. Estate once had one for some reason and now does not. But, the "pile" is still always the printed Estate.

[spineflu]

Instead of an update pack, what about selling them as promos through BGG? (similar to Pathfinding)

That sounds more possible at least. Though there a bunch of them. Even just the shapeshifters not counting Lantern is 3 cards. And you know, we give away the promos; BGG makes a profit on them, but not us. It's to support BGG.

If I ever did a Dark Ages 2E, I could just replace Band of Misfits / Procession / Pillage with related new cards, new cards being what's exciting to get in an update pack.

Could you do it as a print-on-demand type thing (via GameCrafter or DriveThruCards or whoever)? I know FFG did their Game of Thrones miniexpansions this way; makes it so you don't have to estimate how many to make - they're made to order, like pizza*.


*$5 hot-n-readys notwithstanding.

[trivialknot]

It seems like with the new Inheritance rule, it's no longer necessary to restrict to non-victory cards.  I suppose you don't want to change what it does any more than necessary, but we might house-rule it so we can inherit Islands and Mills, if it ever matters.

The stop-moving rule is an improvement.  I was explaining the errata to my partner, and he was incredulous at the pre-errata interaction between Death Cart and Summon.

[majiponi]

I played BoM as Fishing Village.
Jenny bought the last Fishing Village

The tracking issue still remains, I suppose.

[SSLY]

2. Tracking for the former shapeshifters

Some cards, like the new Band of Misfits, can play a card that isn't put into play. When you play Band of Misfits, leave it in play as long as you would have left the card it plays in play. Normally that will be the same turn's Clean-up. For a Band of Misfits playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the last turn the Duration card has any effects. For a Band of Misfits playing a Throne Room playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the turn the Duration card leaves play. For a Band of Misfits playing a card that can move itself from play, like Mining Village, the Mining Village can't move itself, so Band of Misfits doesn't leave play any earlier than normal. If a Band of Misfits plays multiple Duration cards (e.g., you used Throne Room on it), leave it out until the Clean-up of the last turn that one of them still had effects.

Quick question on BoM / TR vs TR / BoM interaction:

Scenario 1: BoM playing TR playing Duration - all cards stay out until Duration gets cleaned up

Scenario 2: TR playing BoM playing Duration (as one of its two plays) - TR gets cleaned up that turn, BoM and Duration stay out until Duration gets cleaned up

Is that correct? (if so, I'm now imagining a larger TR / BoM / TR / BoM ... chain. :p)

1: The Throne is never in play of course, but otherwise yes.
2: Yes.

you BoM a TR playing Durations, then Bonfire the Durations. the BoM still stay in play until the Durations finish all effects, right?

[dbclick]

2. Tracking for the former shapeshifters

Some cards, like the new Band of Misfits, can play a card that isn't put into play. When you play Band of Misfits, leave it in play as long as you would have left the card it plays in play. Normally that will be the same turn's Clean-up. For a Band of Misfits playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the last turn the Duration card has any effects. For a Band of Misfits playing a Throne Room playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the turn the Duration card leaves play. For a Band of Misfits playing a card that can move itself from play, like Mining Village, the Mining Village can't move itself, so Band of Misfits doesn't leave play any earlier than normal. If a Band of Misfits plays multiple Duration cards (e.g., you used Throne Room on it), leave it out until the Clean-up of the last turn that one of them still had effects.

Quick question on BoM / TR vs TR / BoM interaction:

Scenario 1: BoM playing TR playing Duration - all cards stay out until Duration gets cleaned up

Scenario 2: TR playing BoM playing Duration (as one of its two plays) - TR gets cleaned up that turn, BoM and Duration stay out until Duration gets cleaned up

Is that correct? (if so, I'm now imagining a larger TR / BoM / TR / BoM ... chain. :p)

1: The Throne is never in play of course, but otherwise yes.
2: Yes.

you BoM a TR playing Durations, then Bonfire the Durations. the BoM still stay in play until the Durations finish all effects, right?

I'm pretty sure the BoM leaves play once the last Duration does, just like it would if you had played a Throne Room normally.

Bonfire can still cause tracking issues when you trash a card that wouldn't be discarded from play during the current turn. It could be changed to something like "Trash up to 2 cards you have in play that you would discard from play this turn" to "fix" it, but it's so rare you actually want to trash these, it's not much of an issue, IMO.

[dbclick]

I played BoM as Fishing Village.
Jenny bought the last Fishing Village

The tracking issue still remains, I suppose.

The tracking issue that is fixed with the new tracking rule is having the BoM still able to be on the table when it played a Duration or Throne-played-Duration to remind you to do that extra effect later.

The tracking issue that still exists is having to remember what card you played with BoM. This will always be an issue unless you do some real weird stuff that probably wouldn't be worth it (or not do BoM and it's kin).

[SSLY]

you BoM a TR playing Durations, then Bonfire the Durations. the BoM still stay in play until the Durations finish all effects, right?

I'm pretty sure the BoM leaves play once the last Duration does, just like it would if you had played a Throne Room normally.

uh thx, I misunderstood. BoM playing TR playing Duration operates just in the same way TR plays Duration.

Bonfire can still cause tracking issues when you trash a card that wouldn't be discarded from play during the current turn. It could be changed to something like "Trash up to 2 cards you have in play that you would discard from play this turn" to "fix" it, but it's so rare you actually want to trash these, it's not much of an issue, IMO.

seconded, seriously.

[werothegreat]

So far there is no plan for an update pack. It doesn't sound like a very good product, though a few people would want it.

Count me as one of those people.

[Donald X.]

Could you do it as a print-on-demand type thing (via GameCrafter or DriveThruCards or whoever)? I know FFG did their Game of Thrones miniexpansions this way; makes it so you don't have to estimate how many to make - they're made to order, like pizza*.

Well it's not something I know anything about. We need the cards to match, so I suspect anything like that would still be through a regular printer.

For the people thinking, "why would I use errata irl," I am sympathetic. If you don't have the physical card with the new wording, you have to really like the change to want to tell the people you're playing with, "oh here's some new text to remember." And well we will see what the level of interest is in getting physical copies of just the errata'd versions, but I am pessimistic as to that product existing. I think there's a better chance of just Band of Misfits / Overlord / Inheritance being BGG promos like Pathfinding, or of me someday making a Dark Ages 2E with an update pack that just replaces the changed cards with new takes on them.

Looking back at the changes today, the one thing I feel like, why did I do that, is renaming "lose track" to "stop moving." The people who know "lose track" by name don't get anything out of this, and when we talk about "where a card expects to be," saying "it loses track" is still natural, even though everybody knows where the card is.

[Donald X.]

It seems like with the new Inheritance rule, it's no longer necessary to restrict to non-victory cards.  I suppose you don't want to change what it does any more than necessary, but we might house-rule it so we can inherit Islands and Mills, if it ever matters.

Yes, I don't need it to say non-Victory anymore, but the idea wasn't to make all changes I might want, but just to fix what needed fixing. I didn't need to drop non-Victory from Inheritance and it does say that.

[Donald X.]

you BoM a TR playing Durations, then Bonfire the Durations. the BoM still stay in play until the Durations finish all effects, right?

Bonfire messes up tracking and has not been fixed (the fix would be adding "non-duration," which still doesn't fix all cases, e.g. you can Bonfire the Throne that played a Duration) (edit: no the fix is what dbclick said, the Improve trick of seeing if the card would be discarded) (or I mean, just limit it to Coppers). If you play a Duration and Bonfire it, you still get the effect. If you Throne a Duration and Bonfire the Duration, the Throne goes away, remember that rule is that it stays out as long as the Duration, and the Duration is gone. But the effect still happens. The effect also still happens if you Bonfire both of them or just the Throne. If you BoM a Throne playing Durations, and Bonfire the Durations, the Throne wouldn't stay out, so BoM doesn't either. Anyway as noted, the Bonfire scenarios where tracking is messed up do not actually happen. We can construct a scenario where you're Bonfiring Hirelings to Graverobber them or whatever, but it's just not a thing.

The rule "Throne stays out with the Duration" has corner cases where everything isn't tracked perfectly. The main one though is storage cards, like Haven / Archive / Gear, where the stored cards themselves handle the tracking, so irl it's not confusing (if you Throne Gear but only set aside cards once, you know just what to do even though a Throne is pointlessly sitting there). If you Throne a Secret Cave and only discard once, or a Tactician and only discard once (e.g. no Pathfinding trick), then Throne stays out but isn't tracking anything.

We discussed fixing all the corner cases. Stef was in favor. The problem is that the rule that covers everything is way way harder to learn/understand than "Throne stays out with the Duration." We've been doing great with the current rule for a few years now. So in the end I didn't change it.

[GendoIkari]

I don't think that sort of tracking issues are problems at all. The game does a great job in general with tracking; I don't think there's a problem that in some corner cases; an effect needs to happen that has no physical tracking. The durations sitting there are just a helpful reminder; they aren't a necessity.

If anything; I think a bigger tracking issue would be a very simple case of BoM (either old or new version) playing a Duration in a Kingdom with multiple Durations. You have to remember what it is. I don't think this would be an issue often; but if you played multiple BoMs (maybe 2 as Caravan and 1 as Fishing Village); I could see a real issue where you can't remember which one was the one with 2 copies.

But still, Dominion has required some memory aspects to play properly for a long time. Smugglers, Treasure Hunter, and Duration attacks that care if a player revealed Moat when they were played require remembering what happened on a previous turn. Squire and Pawn require remembering which choices were made when you get to your buy phase... there's plenty of things like this. I don't think it's a big problem.

[popsofctown]

Additionally, when you are told to get a card from your discard pile, you can look through it to get the card. That's just implicit. You don't have to just look at the top couple of cards, you can look through the whole discard pile.

Will the online implementation let us look through our discard pile whenever this occurs, for those of us weak at card-counting?

Will it do so even when it is in fact just the top card that needs to move?

[Donald X.]

Additionally, when you are told to get a card from your discard pile, you can look through it to get the card. That's just implicit. You don't have to just look at the top couple of cards, you can look through the whole discard pile.

Will the online implementation let us look through our discard pile whenever this occurs, for those of us weak at card-counting?

Will it do so even when it is in fact just the top card that needs to move?

I don't know, but ideally, since them's the rules.

[scolapasta]

you BoM a TR playing Durations, then Bonfire the Durations. the BoM still stay in play until the Durations finish all effects, right?

Bonfire messes up tracking and has not been fixed (the fix would be adding "non-duration," which still doesn't fix all cases, e.g. you can Bonfire the Throne that played a Duration) (edit: no the fix is what dbclick said, the Improve trick of seeing if the card would be discarded) (or I mean, just limit it to Coppers). If you play a Duration and Bonfire it, you still get the effect. If you Throne a Duration and Bonfire the Duration, the Throne goes away, remember that rule is that it stays out as long as the Duration, and the Duration is gone. But the effect still happens. The effect also still happens if you Bonfire both of them or just the Throne. If you BoM a Throne playing Durations, and Bonfire the Durations, the Throne wouldn't stay out, so BoM doesn't either. Anyway as noted, the Bonfire scenarios where tracking is messed up do not actually happen. We can construct a scenario where you're Bonfiring Hirelings to Graverobber them or whatever, but it's just not a thing.

So, (first noting that this in not a real concern, but only to sate my desire of understanding all edge cases properly), I had thought Bonfiring a TRed Hireling left the TR out:

(from https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1367747/hireling-and-champion-duration-if-losttrashed-play)

Yes, if you Throne Room etc. a Hireling and somehow the Hireling leaves play, the Throne still stays in play. And if something makes the Throne leave play, that still doesn't stop anything from happening every turn.

Of course that's from 2015, so it's quite likely this was overturned in some other hard to find thread...

[Donald X.]

you BoM a TR playing Durations, then Bonfire the Durations. the BoM still stay in play until the Durations finish all effects, right?

Bonfire messes up tracking and has not been fixed (the fix would be adding "non-duration," which still doesn't fix all cases, e.g. you can Bonfire the Throne that played a Duration) (edit: no the fix is what dbclick said, the Improve trick of seeing if the card would be discarded) (or I mean, just limit it to Coppers). If you play a Duration and Bonfire it, you still get the effect. If you Throne a Duration and Bonfire the Duration, the Throne goes away, remember that rule is that it stays out as long as the Duration, and the Duration is gone. But the effect still happens. The effect also still happens if you Bonfire both of them or just the Throne. If you BoM a Throne playing Durations, and Bonfire the Durations, the Throne wouldn't stay out, so BoM doesn't either. Anyway as noted, the Bonfire scenarios where tracking is messed up do not actually happen. We can construct a scenario where you're Bonfiring Hirelings to Graverobber them or whatever, but it's just not a thing.

So, (first noting that this in not a real concern, but only to sate my desire of understanding all edge cases properly), I had thought Bonfiring a TRed Hireling left the TR out:

(from https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1367747/hireling-and-champion-duration-if-losttrashed-play)

Yes, if you Throne Room etc. a Hireling and somehow the Hireling leaves play, the Throne still stays in play. And if something makes the Throne leave play, that still doesn't stop anything from happening every turn.

Of course that's from 2015, so it's quite likely this was overturned in some other hard to find thread...

Yes, the rule for throne-duration changed a few years ago. Now throne just looks for the duration card in play.

[NoMoreFun]

Will cards that involve the discard pile and cost reduction be changed to  remove extraneous words?

[crj]

By a close reading of these new rules, it seems to me that Ferry on Wine Merchant, followed by playing Band of Misfits and choosing Wine Merchant has suddenly become very nifty, because you get the +$4,+1Buy but the Band of Misfits never goes on your Tavern mat, and gets cleared up as normal the turn you play it?

[majiponi]

I inherited Haunted Woods.
I played Estate.
Sally bought a Province.
Doesn't Sally have to put her hands onto her deck, does she?

[NoMoreFun]

I inherited Haunted Woods.
I played Estate.
Sally bought a Province.
Doesn't Sally have to put her hands onto her deck, does she?

 Haunted Woods' attack is all in the text; it's not a "while this is in play" effect.

[Donald X.]

Will cards that involve the discard pile and cost reduction be changed to  remove extraneous words?

Where possible. Getting a card from the discard pile can't always save words; e.g. Harbinger is optional, you get to look before deciding to do it, so we have to say, look.

[Donald X.]

By a close reading of these new rules, it seems to me that Ferry on Wine Merchant, followed by playing Band of Misfits and choosing Wine Merchant has suddenly become very nifty, because you get the +$4,+1Buy but the Band of Misfits never goes on your Tavern mat, and gets cleared up as normal the turn you play it?

Yes that all works.

[Donald X.]

I inherited Haunted Woods.
I played Estate.
Sally bought a Province.
Doesn't Sally have to put her hands onto her deck, does she?

 Haunted Woods' attack is all in the text; it's not a "while this is in play" effect.

Correct. Haunted Woods works fine as an inherited card (when you can manage it).

[mxdata]

I have a question about the new rules as they relate to Band of Misfits.  So, I understand that it can't trash itself if it plays things like Mining Village, but what about when it plays Sir Martin?  If I use BoM to play Sir Martin, and it trashes another player's knight, what happens?  Does my BoM get trashed, or does Sir Martin get trashed from the supply, or is nothing trashed?

[mxdata]

Also, what about using BoM to play a Hermit?  In the old rules, if you played BoM as a Hermit, and bought nothing, it would trash itself and you'd get a Madman.  But in the new rules, a BoM playing a Hermit cannot trash itself, but since the Hermit does not include an "if you do" clause, does that mean that if you used BoM to play Hermit and bought nothing, you'd get a Madman without trashing anything?

[hhelibebcnofnena]

I have a question about the new rules as they relate to Band of Misfits.  So, I understand that it can't trash itself if it plays things like Mining Village, but what about when it plays Sir Martin?  If I use BoM to play Sir Martin, and it trashes another player's knight, what happens?  Does my BoM get trashed, or does Sir Martin get trashed from the supply, or is nothing trashed?

Nothing is trashed.

Also, what about using BoM to play a Hermit?  In the old rules, if you played BoM as a Hermit, and bought nothing, it would trash itself and you'd get a Madman.  But in the new rules, a BoM playing a Hermit cannot trash itself, but since the Hermit does not include an "if you do" clause, does that mean that if you used BoM to play Hermit and bought nothing, you'd get a Madman without trashing anything?

Nothing gets trashed, and no Madman is gained, because the trigger is "when you discard this from play". The Hermit is left in the supply when played, so it doesn't get discarded.

[mxdata]

Nothing gets trashed, and no Madman is gained, because the trigger is "when you discard this from play". The Hermit is left in the supply when played, so it doesn't get discarded.

Oh, of course!  That makes perfect sense, I should've realized that.  Thanks!

[Dominionaer]

Question: Does Inheriting something change the type of the Estate pile to Action - Victory during your turns as well (which has implications for other events and Teacher, etc.)? I don't think so, but just wanted to verify.

No. Normally you go by the randomizer card. Estate once had one for some reason and now does not. But, the "pile" is still always the printed Estate.

I believe dbclick stumbled over the omitted "your" as i did:  What about other players Estates? Does Rabble discard them, if i inherited something?

[dz]

Question: Does Inheriting something change the type of the Estate pile to Action - Victory during your turns as well (which has implications for other events and Teacher, etc.)? I don't think so, but just wanted to verify.

No. Normally you go by the randomizer card. Estate once had one for some reason and now does not. But, the "pile" is still always the printed Estate.

I believe dbclick stumbled over the omitted "your" as i did:  What about other players Estates? Does Rabble discard them, if i inherited something?

Yes.

[hhelibebcnofnena]

Question: Does Inheriting something change the type of the Estate pile to Action - Victory during your turns as well (which has implications for other events and Teacher, etc.)? I don't think so, but just wanted to verify.

No. Normally you go by the randomizer card. Estate once had one for some reason and now does not. But, the "pile" is still always the printed Estate.

I believe dbclick stumbled over the omitted "your" as i did:  What about other players Estates? Does Rabble discard them, if i inherited something?

All Estate cards are Action-Victory, including in the supply. The Estate pile itself, however, is still only a Victory pile, if I've interpreted that correctly.

[phyphor]

Since Estates are now actions in the supply it opens up the inifnite Captain combos:

1. Reduce the cost of Captain
2. Inherit Captain
3. Play Estate as Captain
4. Play Captain as Estate
5. Goto 3.

Except:

Question: Does Inheriting something change the type of the Estate pile to Action - Victory during your turns as well (which has implications for other events and Teacher, etc.)? I don't think so, but just wanted to verify.

No. Normally you go by the randomizer card. Estate once had one for some reason and now does not. But, the "pile" is still always the printed Estate.

And:

All Estate cards are Action-Victory, including in the supply. The Estate pile itself, however, is still only a Victory pile, if I've interpreted that correctly.

[LastFootnote]

But for Captain, it's the type of the card that matters, not the type of the pile. Most things that care about pile types are effects that put tokens on piles. You can't use Lost Arts to put your +1 Action token on the Estate pile, even if you've Inherited Estates.

[urza]

It's possible for two copies of a card to have different abilities. This causes problems, the worst (extremely exotic) situation being, you play a card and don't actually know what it should do.

I'm curious what exactly this means and what the specific situation is that causes it to happen.  Is there some way to have two cards competing to apply becomes-a-copy effects to a single card?

[Cave-o-sapien]

It's possible for two copies of a card to have different abilities. This causes problems, the worst (extremely exotic) situation being, you play a card and don't actually know what it should do.

I'm curious what exactly this means and what the specific situation is that causes it to happen.  Is there some way to have two cards competing to apply becomes-a-copy effects to a single card?

It's described in detail elsewhere, but the gist of it is not knowing who an Estate belongs to, i.e. which of these Estates is my Inherited one and which is yours?

http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=19000.msg770358#msg770358

[Jeebus]

Oh boy, huge changes in rules.

As others have noted, Death Cart, Embargo and Pillage are changed, but there are many others that were untouched. Previously those three cards worked normally with BoM/Overlord/Inheritance, and were super-good with Necromancer/Captain. To avoid too much super-goodness, Donald changed them, so now they are useless with BoM/Overlord/Inheritance AND with Necromancer/Captain (except Death Cart is gimped but not useless).

The cards that were untouched: Acting Troupe, Farmers' Market, Feast, Knights, Tragic Hero, Wine Merchant, Encampment, Experiment, Island. These are all super-good with BoM/Overlord/Inheritance now (except Island) - in addition to with Necromancer/Captain.

Some cards used to be normal with Bom/Overlord/Inheritance, and useless with Necro/Captain, but are now useless with all: Mining Village, Pixie, Treasure Map, Urchin, Page, Peasant, Distant Lands, Prince (only gimped: Raze, Small Castle)
(Obv. Small Castle can't be played with Inheritance, and Prince requires a lot of cost reduction)

EDIT: Knights were in the wrong list!
EDIT2: Distant Lands was always useless with these cards.

[Donald X.]

I have a question about the new rules as they relate to Band of Misfits.  So, I understand that it can't trash itself if it plays things like Mining Village, but what about when it plays Sir Martin?  If I use BoM to play Sir Martin, and it trashes another player's knight, what happens?  Does my BoM get trashed, or does Sir Martin get trashed from the supply, or is nothing trashed?

Your BoM doesn't get trashed; it used to get trashed because it became the card, and now it doesn't become the card, it's just a bystander.

Sir Martin doesn't get trashed from the supply; this is because it expects to find itself in play instead. This is from the stop-moving rule.

Hermit isn't discarded and so that ability doesn't trigger; and hey someone else answered these correctly already.

[Jeebus]

Looking back at the changes today, the one thing I feel like, why did I do that, is renaming "lose track" to "stop moving." The people who know "lose track" by name don't get anything out of this, and when we talk about "where a card expects to be," saying "it loses track" is still natural, even though everybody knows where the card is.

Why can't you change it back to "lose track"? Have you printed this somewhere?

[Jeebus]

About the new "stop-moving" rules. Read literally, since it doesn't mention keeping or losing track, it now seems that a card that is moved and then put back, CAN be moved. This would be a change from the old lose-track rule. For instance Prince a Duplicate; start of turn it goes to the Tavern, then call it that same turn, Prince sets it aside.

[Donald X.]

Why can't you change it back to "lose track"? Have you printed this somewhere?

No; I posted it on the 4 sites, that's it. I could still say, you know what, let's call it lose-track still. I guess I'll just see what people actually call it.

[Donald X.]

About the new "stop-moving" rules. Read literally, since it doesn't mention keeping or losing track, it now seems that a card that is moved and then put back, CAN be moved. This would be a change from the old lose-track rule. For instance Prince a Duplicate; start of turn it goes to the Tavern, then call it that same turn, Prince sets it aside.

I will re-read it and edit it if that's so; once a card moves, that's that.

[Jeebus]

"You can gain non-Supply cards when called out"

I'm not a fan of this change, because it creates an extra rule that doesn't seem to be needed. Before you had to know that "gain" meant from Supply except if stated otherwise. "From its pile" is stating it otherwise, so to me it's sufficient. We still need that rule because of cards like e.g. Noble Brigand, Exorcist and Tournament. But now we need this other rule too.

[Jeebus]

The main change here is that previously you'd lose track of something if it were covered up in your discard pile, and now you don't. So for example if you Replace an Estate into Skulk, previously you would lose track of the Skulk when you gained a Gold and covered it up, but now you won't, you will put the Skulk onto your deck.

I'm pretty sure using Replace as the example here doesn't work, since it top-decks the Skulk.

[Donald X.]

The cards that were untouched: Acting Troupe, Farmers' Market, Feast, Tragic Hero, Wine Merchant, Encampment, Experiment, Island. These are all super-good with BoM/Overlord/Inheritance now (except Island) - in addition to with Necromancer/Captain.

The idea was to only change as much as I had to. Pillage and Embargo are attacky; Death Cart gets absurd and is in the same set as Band of Misfits.

Some cards used to be normal with Bom/Overlord/Inheritance, and useless with Necro/Captain, but are now useless with all: Mining Village, Pixie, Treasure Map, Urchin, Knights, Page, Peasant, Distant Lands, Prince (only gimped: Raze, Small Castle)
(Obv. Distant Lands and Small Castle can't be played with Inheritance, and Prince requires a lot of cost reduction)

Obv. some of those "useless" things have use, e.g. Mining Village when what you want is a village; and Knights are now scary with former shapeshifters, not useless at all.

[Donald X.]

The main change here is that previously you'd lose track of something if it were covered up in your discard pile, and now you don't. So for example if you Replace an Estate into Skulk, previously you would lose track of the Skulk when you gained a Gold and covered it up, but now you won't, you will put the Skulk onto your deck.

I'm pretty sure using Replace as the example here doesn't work, since it top-decks the Skulk.

This is a real example. Replace first gains the card to your discard pile; you stop and gain a Gold for Skulk. Then Replace tries to topdeck Skulk. Previously it couldn't, now it can.

[Donald X.]

"You can gain non-Supply cards when called out"

I'm not a fan of this change, because it creates an extra rule that doesn't seem to be needed. Before you had no know that "gain" meant from Supply except if statet otherwise. "From its pile" is stating it otherwise, so to me it's sufficient. We still need that rule because of cards like e.g. Noble Brigand, Exorcist and Tournament. But now we need this other rule too.

I felt like "from its pile" wasn't a great way to communicate that it actually worked, and no-one is going to think that "gain an Imp" somehow doesn't get you one. "From its pile" needed to be explained somewhere, and I can as easily explain not saying it.

Yes Exorcist and Tournament gain multiple cards and still need something. Noble Brigand gains from the trash and says so, that's fine already.

[Jeebus]

Obv. some of those "useless" things have use, e.g. Mining Village when what you want is a village; and Knights are now scary with former shapeshifters, not useless at all.

Knights were in the wrong list! I meant to include them with the cards that are now super-good, like Tragic Hero.
Yeah, those other cards are not useless, it was just a shorthand, maybe not the best term to use. But an important use of them is not available.

I'm pretty sure using Replace as the example here doesn't work, since it top-decks the Skulk.

This is a real example. Replace first gains the card to your discard pile; you stop and gain a Gold for Skulk. Then Replace tries to topdeck Skulk. Previously it couldn't, now it can.

Whoops. Forgot that Replace doesn't gain to your deck.

[Jeebus]

2. Tracking for the former shapeshifters

These rules apply to all of the cards that play cards without putting them into play: currently, Band of Misfits, Overlord, Inheritance, Necromancer, and Captain.

Other cards do that too, like Throne Room (with Mining Village for instance). Of course you are listing the cards, but since there can be more in the future, I think it would be better to be more specific so that Throne Room etc (or future similar cards) can't be included. So it's not just cards that play cards without putting them into play, but cards that tell you to play a card without moving it into play (or something like that).

[Gubump]

Oh boy, huge changes in rules.

As others have noted, Death Cart, Embargo and Pillage are changed, but there are many others that were untouched. Previously those three cards worked normally with BoM/Overlord/Inheritance, and were super-good with Necromancer/Captain. To avoid too much super-goodness, Donald changed them, so now they are useless with BoM/Overlord/Inheritance AND with Necromancer/Captain (except Death Cart is gimped but not useless).

The cards that were untouched: Acting Troupe, Farmers' Market, Feast, Knights, Tragic Hero, Wine Merchant, Encampment, Experiment, Island. These are all super-good with BoM/Overlord/Inheritance now (except Island) - in addition to with Necromancer/Captain.

Some cards used to be normal with Bom/Overlord/Inheritance, and useless with Necro/Captain, but are now useless with all: Mining Village, Pixie, Treasure Map, Urchin, Page, Peasant, Distant Lands, Prince (only gimped: Raze, Small Castle)
(Obv. Distant Lands and Small Castle can't be played with Inheritance, and Prince requires a lot of cost reduction)

EDIT: Knights were in the wrong list!

Distant Lands was also useless with BoM and Overlord previously, because you would have put your BoM/Overlord on your Tavern mat, removing it from play and changing it back to BoM/Overlord, thus meaning that you remove a BoM/Overlord from circulation for no benefit whatsoever.

[Jeebus]

Lastly, I'm not a fan of the new rule for tracking these cards. It seems to be a regression to the confusion of former rules for tracking TR + Duration and TR + TR + Duration.

Now we have very different rules for TR + Duration and BoM + Duration. TR is simple and clean, it stays as long as the Duration stays. But with BoM, we have to look at when the Duration or TR would have been discarded.

Also, this rule only applies to BoM, Overlord and Inheritance. Captain and Necromancer already don't work with Durations. So it's a special rule for only 3 cards. I think it would be better to add "non-Duration" to those cards, or just live with the lack of tracking.

[Jeebus]

Distant Lands was also useless with BoM and Overlord previously, because you would have put your BoM/Overlord on your Tavern mat, removing it from play and changing it back to BoM/Overlord, thus meaning that you remove a BoM/Overlord from circulation for no benefit whatsoever.

You're right, I was confusing BoM with Inheritance ("yours" vs. "in play"). Also, there are many more cards that are now gimped a lot of course, namely all the ones that say "while this is in play". Also Herbalist.

[Donald X.]

Lastly, I'm not a fan of the new rule for tracking these cards. It seems to be a regression to the confusion of former rules for tracking TR + Duration and TR + TR + Duration.

Now we have very different rules for TR + Duration and BoM + Duration. TR is simple and clean, it stays as long as the Duration stays. But with BoM, we have to look at when the the Duration or TR would have been discarded.

Also, this rule only applies to BoM, Overlord and Inheritance. Captain and Necromancer already don't work with Durations. So it's a special rule for only 3 cards. I think it would be better to add "non-Duration" to those cards, or just live with the lack of tracking.

I made a card, Band of Misfits. It was a mistake but there it is in Dark Ages. The rules have to support it somehow; even if I someday replace it, the rules have to support it.

I have supported it. My options for BoM plus Duration was to either say non-Duration on BoM, or provide tracking. I talked with other people about these changes, and they were against adding non-Duration there. And I didn't have to so I didn't.

The rule for BoM is not a rule to learn in general; it's specific to the former shapeshifters. BoM will have a long FAQ; again the card was a mistake but I have to handle it.

[Jeebus]

The rule for BoM is not a rule to learn in general; it's specific to the former shapeshifters. BoM will have a long FAQ; again the card was a mistake but I have to handle it.

Right, hopefully the specific rules for BoM will be much less than before, and I'm pretty sure that will be the case. (Although in my rules document I have to somehow include all the rules for the former versions too. )

[popsofctown]

I don't think Band of Misfits was a mistake.  Well that sentence is wrong, I didn't have bacon for breakfast today, and that was a mistake, and I'd be very mad at DXV if he proffered an opinion on whether it was.  But what I mean to say is even if it's a mistake for DXV's goals, the card was really exciting for me when I first saw it, and fun to play with in the games I played, Dark Ages being one of very few paper sets I own.  "This is that card" was such silly fun.  "This plays some of other card" wouldn't have given me the absurd abstract art joy and may have required more explaining to my family. 

[LibraryAdventurer]

I don't think Band of Misfits was a mistake. [snipped semantics] ...even if it's a mistake for DXV's goals, the card was really exciting for me when I first saw it, and fun to play with in the games I played, Dark Ages being one of very few paper sets I own.  "This is that card" was such silly fun.  "This plays some of other card" wouldn't have given me the absurd abstract art joy and may have required more explaining to my family. 

I second this.
BOM/Overlord/Inheritance are some of my top favorite cards (& card-shaped thing).

[Donald X.]

I don't think Band of Misfits was a mistake.  Well that sentence is wrong, I didn't have bacon for breakfast today, and that was a mistake, and I'd be very mad at DXV if he proffered an opinion on whether it was.  But what I mean to say is even if it's a mistake for DXV's goals, the card was really exciting for me when I first saw it, and fun to play with in the games I played, Dark Ages being one of very few paper sets I own.  "This is that card" was such silly fun.  "This plays some of other card" wouldn't have given me the absurd abstract art joy and may have required more explaining to my family. 

We can't run the experiment to see what joy the errata'd version would have brought, but I wasn't saying it was a mistake to not already have the errata in the first version (though I sure bet it would have produced about the same amount of joy; it's still the card that can do all those other things the cards on the table can do). The mistake was doing the card. I could have waited years on it, made a version of the concept when I had one that worked. That slot could have just been some other card. As always, it's not "Band of Misfits vs. nothing," it's "Band of Misfits vs. whatever else." Whatever else might have been great.

Band of Misfits left Dark Ages for having rules problems. I put it back in thinking, what, it's fun, how many more expansions will there be. A bunch more, it turns out. The rules problems cause endless questions and confusing situations. It's great if people like the card; the move was to not do it. Just before Dark Ages came out, there was no Band of Misfits, and people didn't say, man why do I even play this game, not enough excitement, where's my shapeshifting card.

I continually make cards that try to break the rules in whatever new way, risking problems. I do this because maybe you get something cool. And it can work out to just having good times; I don't regret all those cards. But shapeshifters make the game rules not work, create undefinable behavior. There are different approaches possible to fixing them (e.g., not letting you play a card if you can't put it into play kills majiponi's problem situation, though it also kills e.g. throning one-shots), but with piles of expansions, the move was to change as little as possible.

[Gubump]

Since Estates are now actions in the supply it opens up the inifnite Captain combos:

1. Reduce the cost of Captain
2. Inherit Captain
3. Play Estate as Captain
4. Play Captain as Estate
5. Goto 3.

It's not too rare, you only need Inheritance, Captain, and one of { Bridge, Highway, Quarry, Tournament, Ferry, Bridge Troll, or Inventor }. Previously you need four cards as it required Ferry + another cost reducer.

You can also do it with BoM, but it's not as good.

Another infinite combo:
1. Inherit BoM
2. Play BoM or Estate (which plays BoM)
3. Play Estate from the Supply with BoM
4. Repeat

[crj]

That's not interesting, though, because each time round the loop leaves you in the same state as the previous. The Captain loops accumulate an unbounded amount of benefit.

You might as well just keep reacting to the same Attack with the same Moat, for all the good it does you.

[Jeebus]

Yeah, only with the extreme corner case of getting unlimited $ with a combination of Champion and Diadem.

[Gubump]

That's not interesting, though, because each time round the loop leaves you in the same state as the previous. The Captain loops accumulate an unbounded amount of benefit.

You might as well just keep reacting to the same Attack with the same Moat, for all the good it does you.

Unless you have one of your Adventures tokens on the BoM pile.

[Commodore Chuckles]

About the new "stop-moving" rules. Read literally, since it doesn't mention keeping or losing track, it now seems that a card that is moved and then put back, CAN be moved. This would be a change from the old lose-track rule. For instance Prince a Duplicate; start of turn it goes to the Tavern, then call it that same turn, Prince sets it aside.

I don't think Prince-Duplicate is an example of that though. A called Duplicate is not actually in play, so it hasn't really returned to its previous state.

[hhelibebcnofnena]

About the new "stop-moving" rules. Read literally, since it doesn't mention keeping or losing track, it now seems that a card that is moved and then put back, CAN be moved. This would be a change from the old lose-track rule. For instance Prince a Duplicate; start of turn it goes to the Tavern, then call it that same turn, Prince sets it aside.

I don't think Prince-Duplicate is an example of that though. A called Duplicate is not actually in play, so it hasn't really returned to its previous state.

From the Official Rules wiki section on Reserve cards (therefore also probably from the Adventures rulebook):

Cards on Tavern mats are not in play, but Reserve cards that have been called this turn are in play.
So, for example, Pilgrimage cannot gain copies of cards on the Tavern mat, but can gain copies of Reserve cards called into play the same turn.

[grrgrrgrr]

I know this may not be appropriate to say it here, but I really want an errata to Haunted Woods. I don't like how it utterly screws Night Cards, and it also doesn't really fits flavour wise. A possible change would be: "Untill your next turn, when any player buys a card, they reveal their hand and put their non-Night cards onto their deck in any order"

[spineflu]

I know this may not be appropriate to say it here, but I really want an errata to Haunted Woods. I don't like how it utterly screws Night Cards, and it also doesn't really fits flavour wise. A possible change would be: "Untill your next turn, when any player buys a card, they reveal their hand and put their non-Night cards onto their deck in any order"

i thought that was the whole point of haunted woods

[hhelibebcnofnena]

I know this may not be appropriate to say it here, but I really want an errata to Haunted Woods. I don't like how it utterly screws Night Cards, and it also doesn't really fits flavour wise. A possible change would be: "Untill your next turn, when any player buys a card, they reveal their hand and put their non-Night cards onto their deck in any order"

i thought that was the whole point of haunted woods

It's not the point, because Haunted Woods (Adventures) was around before Night cards were (Nocturne). I think the point was that most of the cards left in hand on your buy are usually useless, like Estates and such. Night cards were not in mind.

Although I personally think that it's fine if Night cards are affected, because there are very few cards which are useful all the time. This is just one of the situations when Night cards aren't that great, and if you recognize that at the beginning of the game, you probably won't buy them.

[Jeebus]

i thought that was the whole point of haunted woods

It must have been completely pointless before Nocturne then.

(Not saying that there are any reasons to change it.)

[GendoIkari]

About the new "stop-moving" rules. Read literally, since it doesn't mention keeping or losing track, it now seems that a card that is moved and then put back, CAN be moved. This would be a change from the old lose-track rule. For instance Prince a Duplicate; start of turn it goes to the Tavern, then call it that same turn, Prince sets it aside.

I don't think Prince-Duplicate is an example of that though. A called Duplicate is not actually in play, so it hasn't really returned to its previous state.

A called card is definitely in play exactly the same as a regular card you played this turn. This matters for Peddler’s cost among other things.

[Commodore Chuckles]

I know this may not be appropriate to say it here, but I really want an errata to Haunted Woods. I don't like how it utterly screws Night Cards, and it also doesn't really fits flavour wise. A possible change would be: "Untill your next turn, when any player buys a card, they reveal their hand and put their non-Night cards onto their deck in any order"

i thought that was the whole point of haunted woods

It's not the point, because Haunted Woods (Adventures) was around before Night cards were (Nocturne). I think the point was that most of the cards left in hand on your buy are usually useless, like Estates and such. Night cards were not in mind.

Although I personally think that it's fine if Night cards are affected, because there are very few cards which are useful all the time. This is just one of the situations when Night cards aren't that great, and if you recognize that at the beginning of the game, you probably won't buy them.

Yes, the point is that it's like Bureaucrat, forcing you to top deck dead cards. The fact that it affects Night cards is just something you have to deal with, and there aren't that many of them anyway. Mentioning Night cards on the card itself would not make any sense as Adventures does not have them and came out before they even existed for that matter.

[popsofctown]

Another infinite combo:
1. Inherit BoM
2. Play BoM or Estate (which plays BoM)
3. Play Estate from the Supply with BoM
4. Repeat

This doesn't work?  Estate is a 2$ Action Victory that reads "play an action card from the supply that costs less than this, leaving it there", so you play a Poor House from the supply, then you are done.

If there is secret magic ways the Estate is both 2$ and 5$ and you can loop Estate and BoM as two men who are each taller than the other then these errata have not gone nearly far enough to clarify these cards for me.

[AJD]

Another infinite combo:
1. Inherit BoM
2. Play BoM or Estate (which plays BoM)
3. Play Estate from the Supply with BoM
4. Repeat

This doesn't work?  Estate is a 2$ Action Victory that reads "play an action card from the supply that costs less than this, leaving it there", so you play a Poor House from the supply, then you are done.

Nope—Estate now causes the set-aside BoM to be played, which has its normal cost.

[popsofctown]

Another infinite combo:
1. Inherit BoM
2. Play BoM or Estate (which plays BoM)
3. Play Estate from the Supply with BoM
4. Repeat

This doesn't work?  Estate is a 2$ Action Victory that reads "play an action card from the supply that costs less than this, leaving it there", so you play a Poor House from the supply, then you are done.

Nope—Estate now causes the set-aside BoM to be played, which has its normal cost.

I see now, there are two erratas to take into account.

These errata seem to violate the idea that a 3 card combo that locks out the gamestate isn't acceptable (KC-Goons-Masquerade), then?
Ferry, BoM, Inheritance.
Opponent is on the play and connects Treasure Maps immediately or gets some other insurmountable lead.
Ferry BoM, Inherit BoM, there are no 2's (pretty common), play an Estate, the game cannot ever end, no impact on my win-loss-draw record.

[GendoIkari]

Another infinite combo:
1. Inherit BoM
2. Play BoM or Estate (which plays BoM)
3. Play Estate from the Supply with BoM
4. Repeat

This doesn't work?  Estate is a 2$ Action Victory that reads "play an action card from the supply that costs less than this, leaving it there", so you play a Poor House from the supply, then you are done.

Nope—Estate now causes the set-aside BoM to be played, which has its normal cost.

I see now, there are two erratas to take into account.

These errata seem to violate the idea that a 3 card combo that locks out the gamestate isn't acceptable (KC-Goons-Masquerade), then?
Ferry, BoM, Inheritance.
Opponent is on the play and connects Treasure Maps immediately or gets some other insurmountable lead.
Ferry BoM, Inherit BoM, there are no 2's (pretty common), play an Estate, the game cannot ever end, no impact on my win-loss-draw record.

Doing this by itself is no different than simply revealing a Moat infinitely when an opponent plays an attack. If you also have some sort of Adventures token on a pile, then you can use this to get an infinite amount of resources and buy out the game in a win.... which is no different than any other infinite loop that exists using Villa, etc.

The KC-Goons-Masq thing wasn't an issue of locking the gamestate.... using it wasn't just a way of infinitely delaying taking an actual turn. It made it so that one player could continue to play as normal; slowing building towards a win, while the other player could no longer take any turns.

[mad4math]

This is different than revealing a moat infinitely. With the moat example, at each point you make the decision "do i want to reveal moat?", and as soon as you stop, the game continues. The game never really locks because you could just choose no at any point to continue.

With this case, once you play your BoM, the game, not the player, generates an infinite sequence of events playing BoM. Neither player can choose to stop it. If you did this in dominion online, if it is implemented correctly, the game should immediately crash for reaching a truly infinite loop.

MtG explicitly distinguishes these cases in the rules. In the first case, if either player can make a decision to break the loop, they must do so. In the second case, MtG declares the game a draw.

[AJD]

With this case, once you play your BoM, the game, not the player, generates an infinite sequence of events playing BoM. Neither player can choose to stop it. If you did this in dominion online, if it is implemented correctly, the game should immediately crash for reaching a truly infinite loop.

I don't follow. Each time you play Band of Misfits, you have to choose what card in the supply it plays. If you keep picking Estate that's your own fault.

[mad4math]

In the world described, you don't have a choice. The only Action card in the supply costing less than BoM is Estate, so you have to play BoM as Estate.

[Gubump]

In the world described, you don't have a choice. The only Action card in the supply costing less than BoM is Estate, so you have to play BoM as Estate.

Somehow, I didn't think of that scenario even though I recently had to give one of my fan cards a convoluted wording in order to avoid a very similar scenario.

[GendoIkari]

In the world described, you don't have a choice. The only Action card in the supply costing less than BoM is Estate, so you have to play BoM as Estate.

Ah, that's quite different then... this is nothing like KC+Goons+Masq either.

A simple fix would be for new BoM to say "you may".

[AJD]

In the world described, you don't have a choice. The only Action card in the supply costing less than BoM is Estate, so you have to play BoM as Estate.

I guess it's fortunate that in an Actual Game, people are very unlikely to buy either Band of Misfits or Inheritance if there are no actions costing less than $5.

[scolapasta]

In the world described, you don't have a choice. The only Action card in the supply costing less than BoM is Estate, so you have to play BoM as Estate.

I guess it's fortunate that in an Actual Game, people are very unlikely to buy either Band of Misfits or Inheritance if there are no actions costing less than $5.

True, but this could also happen in a game where there are actions costing less then than 5, but their piles have been emptied (as BoM requires the card it plays to be in the Supply).

Still it would at most be two piles (or three for a 5-6 player game), reducing the utility of buying BoM.

[popsofctown]

In the world described, you don't have a choice. The only Action card in the supply costing less than BoM is Estate, so you have to play BoM as Estate.

I guess it's fortunate that in an Actual Game, people are very unlikely to buy either Band of Misfits or Inheritance if there are no actions costing less than $5.

Once a player is incentivized to perform this combo because they're losing, it's irrelevant that Band of Misfits doesn't seem very useful "the way God intended"; you want to perform the combo.  In an old school KC-Goons-Steward-Black Market kingdom, a thinned player who sees Masquerade in the Black Market is not going to be "unlikely to buy Masquerade".
You might not have either BoM or Inheritance at the time you realize you're losing enough that you should force a draw, but that's 12$ of purchases you need to make before your opponent makes 64$ of purchases.  You have plenty of time.

[Chris is me]

In the world described, you don't have a choice. The only Action card in the supply costing less than BoM is Estate, so you have to play BoM as Estate.

I guess it's fortunate that in an Actual Game, people are very unlikely to buy either Band of Misfits or Inheritance if there are no actions costing less than $5.

Once a player is incentivized to perform this combo because they're losing, it's irrelevant that Band of Misfits doesn't seem very useful "the way God intended"; you want to perform the combo.  In an old school KC-Goons-Steward-Black Market kingdom, a thinned player who sees Masquerade in the Black Market is not going to be "unlikely to buy Masquerade".
You might not have either BoM or Inheritance at the time you realize you're losing enough that you should force a draw, but that's 12$ of purchases you need to make before your opponent makes 64$ of purchases.  You have plenty of time.

Offline, the other guy can just go "okay, get to the point", the same reason you can't reveal Moat an infinite number of times to stop the game from advancing.

Online, most tournaments have a stalemate rule that could be modified to basically say "don't give yourself an unbounded number of decisions to prevent the gamestate from meaningfully advancing". On the ladder, I guess it works for now.

What I'm saying is, you don't have to fix this issue in the cards, you can just make this kind of extension illegal manually for tournaments, and in the ladder, well, it's gonna happen no more than once or twice ever.

[Commodore Chuckles]

Online, most tournaments have a stalemate rule that could be modified to basically say "don't give yourself an unbounded number of decisions to prevent the gamestate from meaningfully advancing". On the ladder, I guess it works for now.

What I'm saying is, you don't have to fix this issue in the cards, you can just make this kind of extension illegal manually for tournaments, and in the ladder, well, it's gonna happen no more than once or twice ever.

How exactly would you make such a rule, though? Inheriting Band of Misfits and playing Band of Misfits are totally legal options in and of themselves.

In some chess tournaments, I think it's possible to force a draw if you're losing by making your opponent to repeat a certain number of moves. The same principle could apply here; it's a trick you could pull out to save yourself from a loss.

[Donald X.]

Online the program could just not allow the combos to come up randomly. For a tournament IRL, if that's too taxing, you can just not play with those cards. They have errata, maybe some people won't know it, hey a good reason to leave out Possession too.

[Gubump]

Online against a bot, I created a Kingdom specifically designed so that I could quickly and easily get the game into an infinite loop state where Captain and Band of Misfits can only play each other. Playing BoM or Captain causes the game to freeze.

[mxdata]

Online, most tournaments have a stalemate rule that could be modified to basically say "don't give yourself an unbounded number of decisions to prevent the gamestate from meaningfully advancing". On the ladder, I guess it works for now.

What I'm saying is, you don't have to fix this issue in the cards, you can just make this kind of extension illegal manually for tournaments, and in the ladder, well, it's gonna happen no more than once or twice ever.

How exactly would you make such a rule, though? Inheriting Band of Misfits and playing Band of Misfits are totally legal options in and of themselves.

In some chess tournaments, I think it's possible to force a draw if you're losing by making your opponent to repeat a certain number of moves. The same principle could apply here; it's a trick you could pull out to save yourself from a loss.

It's not a tournament rule, it's actually part of the official rules of chess, but also, it's based on positions rather than moves.  The rule is called draw by repetition, and basically means that either player has the option (not required) to claim a draw if the same *position* has occurred or is about to occur at least three times in the game (they do not have to be on consecutive moves either), with the same player having the move and the same set of legal moves available.  The moves that reached those positions, however, can be different, and you can repeat the same move any number of times in a game, as long as other pieces are in different positions each time.  I'm not really sure what the equivalent of "position" would be in Dominion though

But more to the point, Dominion is a point-based game.  Chess doesn't have points, it just has a single victory condition (checkmate your opponent) that one works towards, and which it is possible (and in high-level play actually quite common - the top players generally draw around half their games) to end up in a situation where it's impossible for either player to achieve.  Because of that, rules such as draw by repetition make sense - situations like that generally indicate that neither player has a reasonable chance of actually checkmating their opponent, since otherwise the player in the stronger position would simply make different moves to avoid the repetition.  The same applies to other draw rules in Chess, such as the 50-move rule which states that either player may claim a draw if 50 moves have passed without any captures or pawn moves.  In almost all cases, if that situation occurs it indicates that neither player has a chance of winning.  So, those draw rules boil down to "call it a draw if no one can actually win". A situation like this in Dominion, on the other hand, would be quite different, since it means that a player who has fewer points would be able to force a draw that their opponent would have no hope of blocking.  It would be a cheap trick to avoid a genuine loss

[mxdata]

Online the program could just not allow the combos to come up randomly. For a tournament IRL, if that's too taxing, you can just not play with those cards. They have errata, maybe some people won't know it, hey a good reason to leave out Possession too.

Something that occurred to me - a rule that says something like "when a card is played from the Supply, set it aside and return it to its pile at the end of your action phase" could work very well for avoiding infinite loops.  Each time you play the BoM or Captain, you set one card aside, and thus, eventually you'd hit the bottom of that pile and break the loop.  Since there's already the rule that you can't play a card from an empty pile, that would fit quite well there, and, in fact, turn that "can't play from an empty pile" rule into simply a natural consequence of the "set-aside" rule.  It's also similar in concept to how the Necromancer can only play a card from the trash a single time.

In most cases, the set-aside rule would work exactly the same as before (and might actually make it slightly easier to remember what a BoM is being played as), the only situations where it would make a difference are in infinite loops like this and occasionally in situations where one wants to play multiple BoM's, but there's fewer cards left in the pile that you want to play them as than BoM's

[mxdata]

Online the program could just not allow the combos to come up randomly. For a tournament IRL, if that's too taxing, you can just not play with those cards. They have errata, maybe some people won't know it, hey a good reason to leave out Possession too.

Something that occurred to me - a rule that says something like "when a card is played from the Supply, set it aside and return it to its pile at the end of your action phase" could work very well for avoiding infinite loops.  Each time you play the BoM or Captain, you set one card aside, and thus, eventually you'd hit the bottom of that pile and break the loop.  Since there's already the rule that you can't play a card from an empty pile, that would fit quite well there, and, in fact, turn that "can't play from an empty pile" rule into simply a natural consequence of the "set-aside" rule.  It's also similar in concept to how the Necromancer can only play a card from the trash a single time.

In most cases, the set-aside rule would work exactly the same as before (and might actually make it slightly easier to remember what a BoM is being played as), the only situations where it would make a difference are in infinite loops like this and occasionally in situations where one wants to play multiple BoM's, but there's fewer cards left in the pile that you want to play them as than BoM's

Wait ... no, I just realized that that would create a couple of other problems.  The first issue is split piles.  If setting aside the top card of a split pile reveals a different card, then a second BoM could play that, despite it not being on top of the pile originally.  Whether that's a serious problem or not (or even a plus) could be argued

But more seriously are knights (well, technically also ruins, but I doubt many people are using their BoM to play a ruin).  With Ferry, any of the knights can be played by BoM, and even without it, Sir Martin can be played if it's on top.  So, when you set a knight aside by this rule, do you then reveal the next knight?  If you do, then that would create a situation where players now know know the order of the top two (or potentially more if multiple BoMs is played) knights.  If you don't, then that would essentially create a restriction where knight can only be played once by BoM or similar cards.  Technically this issue can also arise if you use ambassador to return a knight to the supply, but A) I doubt that happens very often, and B) unless every other player uses a Moat or similar card, someone's going to get the knight that was returned, so in practice it would rarely result in the top two cards being known

[popsofctown]

Online the program could just not allow the combos to come up randomly. For a tournament IRL, if that's too taxing, you can just not play with those cards. They have errata, maybe some people won't know it, hey a good reason to leave out Possession too.

Is the excitement of Golem hitting Band of Misfits so important that this stuff is actually a superior option to tossing "may" onto the card?

[Donald X.]

Something that occurred to me - a rule that says something like "when a card is played from the Supply, set it aside and return it to its pile at the end of your action phase" could work very well for avoiding infinite loops.

It doesn't work; people don't remember to return the card. We tested it!

The simplest fix I have right now is for the Band of Misfits family to care about printed cost instead of cost. If Inheritance works on cards with a printed cost of up to $4, you can't Inherit Band of Misfits, and so on.

[Donald X.]

Online the program could just not allow the combos to come up randomly. For a tournament IRL, if that's too taxing, you can just not play with those cards. They have errata, maybe some people won't know it, hey a good reason to leave out Possession too.

Is the excitement of Golem hitting Band of Misfits so important that this stuff is actually a superior option to tossing "may" onto the card?

I don't follow. I don't see how Golem hitting BoM is relevant, and "may" only gets rid of the mandatory loop.

The mandatory loop will not happen unless someone wants it. You have to set up the board for it, then buy Inheritance with the idea that that's what it's getting you. Making it non-mandatory doesn't fix anything there; you set it up because you want to do it.

[GendoIkari]

Online the program could just not allow the combos to come up randomly. For a tournament IRL, if that's too taxing, you can just not play with those cards. They have errata, maybe some people won't know it, hey a good reason to leave out Possession too.

Is the excitement of Golem hitting Band of Misfits so important that this stuff is actually a superior option to tossing "may" onto the card?

I don't follow. I don't see how Golem hitting BoM is relevant, and "may" only gets rid of the mandatory loop.

The mandatory loop will not happen unless someone wants it. You have to set up the board for it, then buy Inheritance with the idea that that's what it's getting you. Making it non-mandatory doesn't fix anything there; you set it up because you want to do it.

Golem is one of the few situations where having “may” causes the card to act different. In most situations where you don’t want the effect, you just don’t play the card.

Making it optional makes it no different from revealing Moat infinitely. You can still choose to do an infinite loop; but you aren’t stuck in it forever once you start it.

[Commodore Chuckles]

Online the program could just not allow the combos to come up randomly. For a tournament IRL, if that's too taxing, you can just not play with those cards. They have errata, maybe some people won't know it, hey a good reason to leave out Possession too.

Is the excitement of Golem hitting Band of Misfits so important that this stuff is actually a superior option to tossing "may" onto the card?

I don't follow. I don't see how Golem hitting BoM is relevant, and "may" only gets rid of the mandatory loop.

The mandatory loop will not happen unless someone wants it. You have to set up the board for it, then buy Inheritance with the idea that that's what it's getting you. Making it non-mandatory doesn't fix anything there; you set it up because you want to do it.

I am curious about your general opinion on this, though. Did you notice it before announcing the errata? Do you have an opinion on how it should be handled if it actually comes up?

[popsofctown]

Online the program could just not allow the combos to come up randomly. For a tournament IRL, if that's too taxing, you can just not play with those cards. They have errata, maybe some people won't know it, hey a good reason to leave out Possession too.

Is the excitement of Golem hitting Band of Misfits so important that this stuff is actually a superior option to tossing "may" onto the card?

I don't follow. I don't see how Golem hitting BoM is relevant, and "may" only gets rid of the mandatory loop.

The mandatory loop will not happen unless someone wants it. You have to set up the board for it, then buy Inheritance with the idea that that's what it's getting you. Making it non-mandatory doesn't fix anything there; you set it up because you want to do it.

The rule in Magic tournament play is that if you create an infinite loop like this, and you have the option to stop the loop, you must designate how many times you would like to perform the loop, then start describing your next steps in playing the game.  This is intuitive, because you are being required to play as if you at least -ostensibly- want to win or want to draw-by-score, and players who lock the game must at least pretend they did so by mistake.  If you say "I want to win and my path to victory is to do this 1,455,207 times", you are offered a shortcut to perform the action by saying "I do this loop 1,455,207 times", and using the faster method of describing it is obligatory, the same way playing your copper without describing the history of copper's usage across civilizations every time you play one in hopes of a timed draw is obligatory.  It is actually a regular occurence in Modern, although the decks that put themselves in a position of needing to do this are like 10%, mostly Devoted Druid. 

Because Moat is already in Dominion, Dominion tournaments already require this rule.  A player who reveals Moat many times needs to specify "I reveal a Moat from my hand, and I'm still not saying whether I have several or it's the same one, 4,000,000 times."  And then things keep going.

If Band of Misfits said "may", it would be no different from Moat, and would require neither kingdom generation software changes nor changes to tournament rules beyond those already required by Moat.  (I -think- the online client already uses a commensense rule of "look man, I know you aren't getting thing out of this" and forces you to reveal each moat in your hand just 1 time, so that same commonsense rule could be evenly applied to Band of Misfits or Captain Inheritance loops, even though it's not strictly canonical).


Magic has locks that truly lock the game in an obligatory manner too.  Let's not be unfair.  I am definitely not saying, no prominent designer is ever allowing these things.  About five years ago it started to become problematic that the card Oblivion Ring (https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=397760) could be used to go after a draw from a losing position, if you drew two.  A professional player did it in a youtube video on the online client and it crashed the online client and people went, haha, the people who design this game are not perfect. 

They have switched to releasing variants of Oblivion Ring with wording that cannot cause the infinite loop.  And as they design new cards, they are showing signs of making sure it's not ever possible to play to a draw like it was with Oblivion Ring, because no one likes that.  Including this infamous bad boy: https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=423686 who has the conspicuous word "may" in his text so he can't lock up the game.  He actually got banned for reliably creating loops that -win- the game for the user.  But hey, he did not lock up and draw the game - the only thing people hate more than losing is drawing.  Usually.

[Donald X.]

I am curious about your general opinion on this, though. Did you notice it before announcing the errata? Do you have an opinion on how it should be handled if it actually comes up?

I didn't notice it. If the mandatory loop comes up in a game, I recommend berating the player who intentionally set up the board to get that interaction. I recommend not setting up those boards. If one of the non-mandatory loops comes up randomly, well I mean, are they your friend? They still need a 4th thing e.g. Training token to make a profit from it; if the board has such a thing, do the loop and have a story to tell. If there's no token there's no point.

There is another loop that can come up, where a player just sits there pretending to think. You can get multiple players involved - everyone just passes without playing or buying cards. The game never ends. You need solutions for this for many games, separate from me and Dominion. I'm not here to solve social problems for you.

The reason the errata went up when it did, instead of when at least one of those cards got a new printing, is because someone is making another online Dominion program (a downloadable app for phones and computers, that will exist simultaneously with the current web-based program; they have not announced it and that's up to them, and I don't know when it will come out or anything, but it can't possibly come out before January as their contract starts then). I didn't want them to have to program the other versions of Band of Misfits etc. ever. I don't know if I was fast enough there but I did what I could.

When the cards do get new printings, I'll have the opportunity to tweak them, and for this issue, which I think does not affect games irl at all but which I could still fix, the easiest fix is to care about printed cost rather than current cost, on Band of Misfits and Inheritance. That would also kill the BoM / Captain / Ferry loop, that survived this round because people clung to using BoM as a duration.

[GendoIkari]

I am curious about your general opinion on this, though. Did you notice it before announcing the errata? Do you have an opinion on how it should be handled if it actually comes up?

I didn't notice it. If the mandatory loop comes up in a game, I recommend berating the player who intentionally set up the board to get that interaction. I recommend not setting up those boards. If one of the non-mandatory loops comes up randomly, well I mean, are they your friend? They still need a 4th thing e.g. Training token to make a profit from it; if the board has such a thing, do the loop and have a story to tell. If there's no token there's no point.

There is another loop that can come up, where a player just sits there pretending to think. You can get multiple players involved - everyone just passes without playing or buying cards. The game never ends. You need solutions for this for many games, separate from me and Dominion. I'm not here to solve social problems for you.

These two paragraphs are missing the point. A Training token wouldn’t help you here because once this loop begins; you can’t choose to end it. You could have $1000 to spend and 50 buys; but you couldn’t win because you can’t ever get out of your action phase.

The problem people are talking about isn’t someone being a jerk by choosing the same pointless time wasting thing over and over. That always existed with Moat, and is easy to solve; tell the person to stop. Here; you can’t tell them to stop; the game rules don’t allow them to stop.

[pacovf]

Is there any philosophical objection to saying that you go through the loop an infinite number of times in a finite amount of time, and then it ends? I think if something like this happened IRL, that’s what I would rule.

[hhelibebcnofnena]

Is there any philosophical objection to saying that you go through the loop an infinite number of times in a finite amount of time, and then it ends? I think if something like this happened IRL, that’s what I would rule.

Sure, why not? Have the first step of the loop take one second, and then have each subsequent step take half the time of the previous step. You've now gone through the infinite loop in 2 seconds!

Of course, if the infinite loop involved something like the journey token (if that is possible to construct), then we would have a problem. My personal idea for that case is that the journey token becomes burnt out, and you will never be able to get a face-up bonus from any journey token card for the rest of the game.

[GendoIkari]

Is there any philosophical objection to saying that you go through the loop an infinite number of times in a finite amount of time, and then it ends? I think if something like this happened IRL, that’s what I would rule.

Sure, why not? Have the first step of the loop take one second, and then have each subsequent step take half the time of the previous step. You've now gone through the infinite loop in 2 seconds!

Of course, if the infinite loop involved something like the journey token (if that is possible to construct), then we would have a problem. My personal idea for that case is that the journey token becomes burnt out, and you will never be able to get a face-up bonus from any journey token card for the rest of the game.

[hhelibebcnofnena]

Is there any philosophical objection to saying that you go through the loop an infinite number of times in a finite amount of time, and then it ends? I think if something like this happened IRL, that’s what I would rule.

Sure, why not? Have the first step of the loop take one second, and then have each subsequent step take half the time of the previous step. You've now gone through the infinite loop in 2 seconds!

Of course, if the infinite loop involved something like the journey token (if that is possible to construct), then we would have a problem. My personal idea for that case is that the journey token becomes burnt out, and you will never be able to get a face-up bonus from any journey token card for the rest of the game.

I think that video was in my subconscious mind somewhere when I asked the question about the journey token. I hadn't actually remembered it consciously until I saw it again, though.

[Donald X.]

I am curious about your general opinion on this, though. Did you notice it before announcing the errata? Do you have an opinion on how it should be handled if it actually comes up?

I didn't notice it. If the mandatory loop comes up in a game, I recommend berating the player who intentionally set up the board to get that interaction. I recommend not setting up those boards. If one of the non-mandatory loops comes up randomly, well I mean, are they your friend? They still need a 4th thing e.g. Training token to make a profit from it; if the board has such a thing, do the loop and have a story to tell. If there's no token there's no point.

There is another loop that can come up, where a player just sits there pretending to think. You can get multiple players involved - everyone just passes without playing or buying cards. The game never ends. You need solutions for this for many games, separate from me and Dominion. I'm not here to solve social problems for you.

These two paragraphs are missing the point. A Training token wouldn’t help you here because once this loop begins; you can’t choose to end it. You could have $1000 to spend and 50 buys; but you couldn’t win because you can’t ever get out of your action phase.

The problem people are talking about isn’t someone being a jerk by choosing the same pointless time wasting thing over and over. That always existed with Moat, and is easy to solve; tell the person to stop. Here; you can’t tell them to stop; the game rules don’t allow them to stop.

I don't think I've missed anything. What you've missed is that the sentence about the Training token is specifically referring to non-mandatory loops, as I mention right ahead of it. I already covered the mandatory loop a few sentences earlier.

It's possible I will do something to "fix" the loops, but for me the entire point is getting rid of the non-mandatory loops, which could conceivably come up in real games, though the ones that accomplish something are pretty rare. Internet outrage at hypothetical mandatory loops is simply misplaced. You'd have to set it up to have the experience.

[GendoIkari]

I am curious about your general opinion on this, though. Did you notice it before announcing the errata? Do you have an opinion on how it should be handled if it actually comes up?

I didn't notice it. If the mandatory loop comes up in a game, I recommend berating the player who intentionally set up the board to get that interaction. I recommend not setting up those boards. If one of the non-mandatory loops comes up randomly, well I mean, are they your friend? They still need a 4th thing e.g. Training token to make a profit from it; if the board has such a thing, do the loop and have a story to tell. If there's no token there's no point.

There is another loop that can come up, where a player just sits there pretending to think. You can get multiple players involved - everyone just passes without playing or buying cards. The game never ends. You need solutions for this for many games, separate from me and Dominion. I'm not here to solve social problems for you.

These two paragraphs are missing the point. A Training token wouldn’t help you here because once this loop begins; you can’t choose to end it. You could have $1000 to spend and 50 buys; but you couldn’t win because you can’t ever get out of your action phase.

The problem people are talking about isn’t someone being a jerk by choosing the same pointless time wasting thing over and over. That always existed with Moat, and is easy to solve; tell the person to stop. Here; you can’t tell them to stop; the game rules don’t allow them to stop.

I don't think I've missed anything. What you've missed is that the sentence about the Training token is specifically referring to non-mandatory loops, as I mention right ahead of it. I already covered the mandatory loop a few sentences earlier.

It's possible I will do something to "fix" the loops, but for me the entire point is getting rid of the non-mandatory loops, which could conceivably come up in real games, though the ones that accomplish something are pretty rare. Internet outrage at hypothetical mandatory loops is simply misplaced. You'd have to set it up to have the experience.

You're right, I missed the switch from mandatory to non-mandatory between sentences.

I don't think anyone in this thread was having an issue with non-mandatory loops. Aside from things like Moat, ever since Villa, Dominion has had a few different ways to "go infinite". These are just interesting combos that get you a cool win if you manage to pull them off. Sure you don't want them to be really easy to do so that the game just becomes "first player to play BoM if in certain Kingdoms automatically wins", but generally these types of combos are no different than "first player to get a hand of KC+KC+Bridge+Bridge+Bridge wins" type games.

[spiralstaircase]

When the cards do get new printings, I'll have the opportunity to tweak them, and for this issue, which I think does not affect games irl at all but which I could still fix, the easiest fix is to care about printed cost rather than current cost, on Band of Misfits and Inheritance. That would also kill the BoM / Captain / Ferry loop, that survived this round because people clung to using BoM as a duration.

It feels like this would suck fun out of the game in a way that adding "may" wouldn't.  Ferry + Inheritance + Grand Market is fun; telling me I can't do it... isn't fun.  Telling me that I "may" play a card from the supply instead of just telling me to do it... sure, OK.

[scolapasta]

Something that occurred to me - a rule that says something like "when a card is played from the Supply, set it aside and return it to its pile at the end of your action phase" could work very well for avoiding infinite loops.

It doesn't work; people don't remember to return the card. We tested it!

The simplest fix I have right now is for the Band of Misfits family to care about printed cost instead of cost. If Inheritance works on cards with a printed cost of up to $4, you can't Inherit Band of Misfits, and so on.

Instead of leaving it there OR setting it aside, did you try putting them in play (with an additional clause to return to the Supply when discarding), i.e. something like this:

"Play an Action card from the Supply that costs less than this, returning it to the Supply when you would discard it."

I feel like people would be more likely to remember than when setting aside since it would be in your play area (and played on top of the BoM so you don't also just clean it up onto the discard pile).

It would change interactions of course with "trash this, if you do..." cards, but that might be ok. (and if not, that could be weakened with another clause like "If you trash that card this turn, also trash this")

Obviously there'd always be edge cases:
Scheme - I think this may be OK because "when you would discard" would happen before "when you discard"?
Fortress / Bonfire: you could use this to gain a Fortress (in the Overlord case), but with the extra trashing clause, only once.

I'm sure there are others.

[pacovf]

People just shuffle all those cards back into their deck then. It's even worse than just setting them aside.

[Jeebus]

People just shuffle all those cards back into their deck then. It's even worse than just setting them aside.

How is this different than for instance Travellers?

[Donald X.]

It feels like this would suck fun out of the game in a way that adding "may" wouldn't.  Ferry + Inheritance + Grand Market is fun; telling me I can't do it... isn't fun.  Telling me that I "may" play a card from the supply instead of just telling me to do it... sure, OK.

It would be like how awful the game was before Adventures came out. He said. No-one would have blinked if Inheritance had always dodged cost reduction, "oh that would be too strong" they'd think and so much for that.

But yes other people didn't like that either; people cling to bad things and also don't want the problems they cause. I have another direction that may work out though, to kill the loops with minimal other effects; I am turning it over in my head still and seeing if something weird turns up when Stef programs it.

[Donald X.]

Instead of leaving it there OR setting it aside, did you try putting them in play (with an additional clause to return to the Supply when discarding), i.e. something like this:

"Play an Action card from the Supply that costs less than this, returning it to the Supply when you would discard it."

That is what we tried. People did not remember often enough. It was no good. We actually tried it, that is what we tried, and we tried it.

[Donald X.]

How is this different than for instance Travellers?

The Travellers have that big arrow to desperately try to remind you to exchange them, which sometimes works. But, it's also legal to not return them.

And before someone asks, man we tried that too, back during work on Dark Ages. We tried Band of Misfits as, gain a cheaper card and play it and hey now it's yours. It doesn't have any of the same issues (its issues are in the direction of, how fast do you want the game to be anyway), and lives on as Cobbler.

[Commodore Chuckles]

Something that occurred to me - a rule that says something like "when a card is played from the Supply, set it aside and return it to its pile at the end of your action phase" could work very well for avoiding infinite loops.

It doesn't work; people don't remember to return the card. We tested it!

The simplest fix I have right now is for the Band of Misfits family to care about printed cost instead of cost. If Inheritance works on cards with a printed cost of up to $4, you can't Inherit Band of Misfits, and so on.

Instead of leaving it there OR setting it aside, did you try putting them in play (with an additional clause to return to the Supply when discarding), i.e. something like this:

"Play an Action card from the Supply that costs less than this, returning it to the Supply when you would discard it."

I feel like people would be more likely to remember than when setting aside since it would be in your play area (and played on top of the BoM so you don't also just clean it up onto the discard pile).

It would change interactions of course with "trash this, if you do..." cards, but that might be ok. (and if not, that could be weakened with another clause like "If you trash that card this turn, also trash this")

Obviously there'd always be edge cases:
Scheme - I think this may be OK because "when you would discard" would happen before "when you discard"?
Fortress / Bonfire: you could use this to gain a Fortress (in the Overlord case), but with the extra trashing clause, only once.

I'm sure there are others.

It would gain you free Islands, for starters.

Oh, and then there's the interaction with all of the Duration cards. You'd have to remember which cards you have to return across turns.

[Donald X.]

OP updated as follows:

*** Update! ***

Did I say that was the errata? There is more errata.

As a result of posting the errata, people have talked about it in forums and things, and the ShuffleiT version has gotten worked on. And this has resulted in two more desired changes. Well I'm counting it as two. And well the cards still won't be printed for months at least, but the online version is changing soon, so here they are.

The first is, when you are told to get a card from your discard pile, if it's not on top, or the card is chosen, you can look through your discard pile to get the card. You don't get to look through your discard pile to take the top card (again unless you're choosing a card from your discard pile). This change is because, well the idea to messing with when you could look in your discard pile was to fix some weird situations, not to add "look through your discard pile" to cards like Watchtower that never had it. In the rare situations where you gain a card and want to use Watchtower and the card is no longer on top, you get to look through your whole discard pile; when it's on top, just take the card like you used to.

The second is, further errata for four cards to prevent loops. You could do things like, play a Bridge and use Inheritance on Band of Misfits and then play Band of Misfits to play Estate to play Band of Misfits to play Estate and it's a loop. The fix here is a type on these cards, that they then don't work with. This affects very little other than getting rid of the loops; Courtier is better with these cards, and if you e.g. have an Adventures token on Band of Misfits and wanted to play Captain to play Band of Misfits (with a Bridge) to take advantage of that, well, now that doesn't work. This fix includes Overlord even though it wasn't part of the loops, just to be safe for the future and because it looks like the other cards and this seems less confusing. And hey it was already getting errata. To avoid "non-Victory non-Command" on Inheritance, I'm dropping non-Victory, which was just there for the old way Inheritance worked.

So:

Band of Misfits: Action - Command, $5
Play a non-Command Action card from the Supply that costs less than this, leaving it there.

Overlord: Action - Command, 8D
Play a non-Command Action card from the Supply costing up to $5, leaving it there.

Inheritance: Event, $7
Once per game: Set aside a non-Command Action card from the Supply costing up to $4. Move your Estate token to it. (During your turns, Estates are also Actions with "Play the card with your Estate token, leaving it there.")

Captain: Action - Duration - Command, $6
Now and at the start of your next turn: Play a non-Duration non-Command Action card from the Supply costing up to $4, leaving it there.

[Wizard_Amul]

So, are the only "Action - Command" cards in the game currently these ones you just listed? I.e., Band of Misfits, Overlord, and Captain can't play each other but can still play every other card that they used to be able to play before this change?

[Sheogorath]

Where does Necromancer fall in all of this? It's similar in functionality in that it plays cards from the trash rather than from the supply. Would it gain the Command type or will that be reserved for cards that play from the supply (and thus you don't have to bother errata-ing Necromancer too since there is no other reason for play)?

[GendoIkari]

It feels like Necromancer should be a Command card. Even though it’s not involved in the infinite loops, it just seems like it should be for consistency.

[michaeljb]

With Inheritance, should Estates gain the Command type as well as the Action type? I’m thinking that would make it more consistent with the other Commands.

One case I’ve thought of where it could matter (no clue if there might be more cases) is if the Inherited card’s pile—say, Conspirator—has emptied, but Estates have not. In that scenario, other Commands could still play a Conspirator by first playing an Estate from the Supply. For most Inherited cards there’s no real benefit, but this allows you to draw a starting hand of four Coppers and one BoM, and still get the +1 Card/+1 Action from Conspirator.

[popsofctown]

Necromancer is pretty safe from loops from the "turn it facedown" clause.

Guess the zombies it controls are more fully slaves than cards hired from supply piles!

[Donald X.]

So, are the only "Action - Command" cards in the game currently these ones you just listed? I.e., Band of Misfits, Overlord, and Captain can't play each other but can still play every other card that they used to be able to play before this change?

Yes those are the only ones, yes the three cards can't play each other but can play whatever else.

[Donald X.]

It feels like Necromancer should be a Command card. Even though it’s not involved in the infinite loops, it just seems like it should be for consistency.

Necromancer is one of these cards; I didn't give it the Command type because it actually costs something to do that: you might want to e.g. play Band of Misfits to play Necromancer, with no special combo needed. People don't like it when they lose that stuff and I didn't have to take it from them, Necromancer limits how many times you can play it via turning over cards in the trash.

I did make Overlord a Command card for consistency, though it wasn't part of the loops; that cost very little though (you can make it matter by putting e.g. a Training token on BoM).

[Donald X.]

With Inheritance, should Estates gain the Command type as well as the Action type? I’m thinking that would make it more consistent with the other Commands.

One case I’ve thought of where it could matter (no clue if there might be more cases) is if the Inherited card’s pile—say, Conspirator—has emptied, but Estates have not. In that scenario, other Commands could still play a Conspirator by first playing an Estate from the Supply. For most Inherited cards there’s no real benefit, but this allows you to draw a starting hand of four Coppers and one BoM, and still get the +1 Card/+1 Action from Conspirator.

For Inheritance I didn't need to put it on both pieces; not being able to set aside a Command card stops the combos. If you e.g. Inherit Village and play BoM to play Estate, well it's like you played BoM to play Village, which you're allowed to do. Making Estates also a Command card felt more complex and it wasn't essential.

For the online version next week, the loops are stopped; any aesthetic benefits I missed out on can be considered further for when the relevant expansions finally get reprinted. But, the message of the loud voices on the internet was, don't kill any card interaction you don't have to, so I didn't.

[majiponi]

So, now every card with the same name has the same ability AND COST, right?

Old rule: I played Quarry via Storyteller, played Necromancer to Zombie-Mason my inherited Estate (cost $0), couldn't gain an Estate (cost $2) from Supply.

[Donald X.]

So, now every card with the same name has the same ability AND COST, right?

Old rule: I played Quarry via Storyteller, played Necromancer to Zombie-Mason my inherited Estate (cost $0), couldn't gain an Estate (cost $2) from Supply.

Yes; at any given moment, all copies of a card have identical cost / abilities / types.

[mxdata]

To avoid "non-Victory non-Command" on Inheritance, I'm dropping non-Victory, which was just there for the old way Inheritance worked.

So, this means that it's now possible to Inherit an Estate as, for example, a Mill?  What was the reason for the old rule where you couldn't do that?  That's something I never understood and seemed weirdly arbitrary to me, but I'm sure there was probably a good reason that I'm not seeing

[scolapasta]

To avoid "non-Victory non-Command" on Inheritance, I'm dropping non-Victory, which was just there for the old way Inheritance worked.

So, this means that it's now possible to Inherit an Estate as, for example, a Mill?  What was the reason for the old rule where you couldn't do that?  That's something I never understood and seemed weirdly arbitrary to me, but I'm sure there was probably a good reason that I'm not seeing

Well, before this update, when it gained the abilities and types of the inherited card, it meant that it would also be worth the VP (e.g. an inherited Mill estate would have been worth 2 VP), and I'm assuming the idea was to not allow them to be worth more than their original 1 VP.

Now that it just plays the other card, it would not be worth the additional VP.

[mxdata]

To avoid "non-Victory non-Command" on Inheritance, I'm dropping non-Victory, which was just there for the old way Inheritance worked.

So, this means that it's now possible to Inherit an Estate as, for example, a Mill?  What was the reason for the old rule where you couldn't do that?  That's something I never understood and seemed weirdly arbitrary to me, but I'm sure there was probably a good reason that I'm not seeing

Well, before this update, when it gained the abilities and types of the inherited card, it meant that it would also be worth the VP (e.g. an inherited Mill estate would have been worth 2 VP), and I'm assuming the idea was to not allow them to be worth more than their original 1 VP.

Now that it just plays the other card, it would not be worth the additional VP.

But the official FAQ already included a note that an Inherited Estate was still worth 1 VP, so surely that would've guaranteed anyways that it wouldn't take the Inherited card's VP value?

[Jeebus]

But the official FAQ already included a note that an Inherited Estate was still worth 1 VP, so surely that would've guaranteed anyways that it wouldn't take the Inherited card's VP value?

The FAQ said that because of the "non-Victory card" clause on the card. Without that clause, the FAQ couldn't have said that without contradicting the actual card.

[mxdata]

But the official FAQ already included a note that an Inherited Estate was still worth 1 VP, so surely that would've guaranteed anyways that it wouldn't take the Inherited card's VP value?

The FAQ said that because of the "non-Victory card" clause on the card. Without that clause, the FAQ couldn't have said that without contradicting the actual card.

I just took that as a clarification that the victory points weren't part of what changed - it takes on the abilities and types of the chosen card, but not the point value, since it doesn't actually become that card - it's still an Estate, it's just an Estate that can do stuff now.  Is the argument here that the VP are an "ability" which would otherwise have been Inherited?

[Donald X.]

But the official FAQ already included a note that an Inherited Estate was still worth 1 VP, so surely that would've guaranteed anyways that it wouldn't take the Inherited card's VP value?

The FAQ said that because of the "non-Victory card" clause on the card. Without that clause, the FAQ couldn't have said that without contradicting the actual card.

I just took that as a clarification that the victory points weren't part of what changed - it takes on the abilities and types of the chosen card, but not the point value, since it doesn't actually become that card - it's still an Estate, it's just an Estate that can do stuff now.  Is the argument here that the VP are an "ability" which would otherwise have been Inherited?

scolapasta and Jeebus have it right. Inheritance said non-VP because otherwise it would have given you any VP that e.g. Mill and Island had. Whatever cards do is an ability; it's clearer when it's e.g. "1 VP per 10 cards you have," but also applies when it's "1 VP."

[crj]

I accept this is a digression, but why is Inheritance once per game? Just to deal with the ambiguity concerning what would happen to the previous set-aside card, or for some aspect of game balance I've never appreciated?

[GendoIkari]

I hate to say it; but the Command type is really reminding me of the Substance keyword from MTG. I’m not sure it seems good to just invent a new keyword in order to make certain cards work like this.

[Donald X.]

I accept this is a digression, but why is Inheritance once per game? Just to deal with the ambiguity concerning what would happen to the previous set-aside card, or for some aspect of game balance I've never appreciated?

When I first printed out Inheritance, it did not say once-per-game. After some games with it, LastFootnote pointed out that you could e.g. Inherit Dungeon, play an Estate, then that turn buy Inheritance again and Inherit a non-Duration card. What happens to the Estate? There were a few weird situations like that, and once-per-game got rid of them.

With the new wording, once-per-game protects us from you Inheriting something, then Inheriting Estate.

[Donald X.]

I hate to say it; but the Command type is really reminding me of the Substance keyword from MTG. I’m not sure it seems good to just invent a new keyword in order to make certain cards work like this.

I was hoping you'd post a better fix; I gave you a lot of time. You let me down, GendoIkari! And however silly I'm being, it's also true; you did have a chance to offer a solution.

My next best fix was to say "printed cost" on these cards; you could only Inherit something with a printed cost of up to $4. I like that fine, but some people screamed that they'd hate that. What fun is Inheritance if it isn't a combo with Bridge? That seems ridiculous to me but multiple people felt that way. Stef's favored approach was to say that a card can't play another card while the first card is already playing it, unless the card to be played has moved. You may be wondering why it refers to both cards and cares about moving and well, that's the only way it could work. It seemed like that was an awful rule to try to make people learn, and that no-one was ever possibly learning it.

The actual fix used minimized the number of interactions lost, and puts the answers right on the cards, once they're actually reprinted. So far the downsides are disappointing you personally, and some people saying, wait why not Necromancer too (it's to not have people sad about lost interactions guys).

I imagine no-one else felt like they had to devote as much time to this as I did, but a bunch of people had the chance, and some of them did chime in, on Stef's playtest discord and my playtesting discord. "You can't play a card you're already playing" was LastFootnote's suggestion. Ingix found lots of edge cases to spoil various approaches. As he noted, it was easy to fix the loops; the hard part was fixing them while not messing up other situations. You say e.g. "You can't play a card you're already playing" and then there's, now you can't Captain to play Throne to play another Captain to play Throne because it's the same Throne you're in the middle of playing, and no-one's ever catching that; or, but wait now I can do the Mandarin thing and lose a Crown in my deck and draw a Crown and not know if it's the same one and so not know if I can play it or not.

Feel free to just ban all of the relevant cards from your games, which fixes all of the issues with no errata needed.

[GendoIkari]

I hate to say it; but the Command type is really reminding me of the Substance keyword from MTG. I’m not sure it seems good to just invent a new keyword in order to make certain cards work like this.

I was hoping you'd post a better fix; I gave you a lot of time. You let me down, GendoIkari! And however silly I'm being, it's also true; you did have a chance to offer a solution.

You're a far better game designer than I (granted that's not saying much since I'm not in any way, shape, or form a game designer!), but I did suggest simply adding "may" to Band of Misfits, which to me would be a simpler and cleaner solution.

[Donald X.]

I did suggest simply adding "may" to Band of Misfits, which to me would be a simpler and cleaner solution.

That gets rid of "I hate this mandatory loop" but not "I hate this loop." For me it was never enough.

[hhelibebcnofnena]

I hate to say it; but the Command type is really reminding me of the Substance keyword from MTG. I’m not sure it seems good to just invent a new keyword in order to make certain cards work like this.

I was hoping you'd post a better fix; I gave you a lot of time. You let me down, GendoIkari! And however silly I'm being, it's also true; you did have a chance to offer a solution.

You're a far better game designer than I (granted that's not saying much since I'm not in any way, shape, or form a game designer!), but I did suggest simply adding "may" to Band of Misfits, which to me would be a simpler and cleaner solution.

I believe the intention wasn't just to avoid the mandatory infinite loops, but to avoid all possible infinite loops involving these cards. Of course, there's still other infinite loops, but they are way more complicated and involve enough cards that they will virtually never be possible in a random game.

Edit: I typed this before I saw DXV's response. It confirmed my suspicions.

[mxdata]

But the official FAQ already included a note that an Inherited Estate was still worth 1 VP, so surely that would've guaranteed anyways that it wouldn't take the Inherited card's VP value?

The FAQ said that because of the "non-Victory card" clause on the card. Without that clause, the FAQ couldn't have said that without contradicting the actual card.

I just took that as a clarification that the victory points weren't part of what changed - it takes on the abilities and types of the chosen card, but not the point value, since it doesn't actually become that card - it's still an Estate, it's just an Estate that can do stuff now.  Is the argument here that the VP are an "ability" which would otherwise have been Inherited?

scolapasta and Jeebus have it right. Inheritance said non-VP because otherwise it would have given you any VP that e.g. Mill and Island had. Whatever cards do is an ability; it's clearer when it's e.g. "1 VP per 10 cards you have," but also applies when it's "1 VP."

Hunh, interesting.  I'd always thought of that as simply what the card is worth rather than something the card "does".  Ironic that I discover my understanding was wrong just when it ceases to be relevant!

I doubt it'll ever be relevant, but would that mean that, e.g., gold being worth 3 coins also counts as an ability?

[GendoIkari]

I did suggest simply adding "may" to Band of Misfits, which to me would be a simpler and cleaner solution.

That gets rid of "I hate this mandatory loop" but not "I hate this loop." For me it was never enough.

I may have missed it, but I didn't see people complaining about the loop; only about the mandatory loop due to the fact that it created a hole in the rules where there was no correct defined behavior. Did people complain about this one more than they do about infinite Moat, or the various infinite Villa shenanigans?

[Wizard_Amul]

Hunh, interesting.  I'd always thought of that as simply what the card is worth rather than something the card "does".  Ironic that I discover my understanding was wrong just when it ceases to be relevant!

I doubt it'll ever be relevant, but would that mean that, e.g., gold being worth 3 coins also counts as an ability?

Yeah, of course it does. Gold could also validly be printed as a treasure card that said "3" in a circle below a picture instead of the way the card looks now (e.g., it would look like Cache without the below-the-line text). Wouldn't you say Cache's ability is that it generates 3 coins when you play it? Gold is the same thing.

[Jeebus]

So now that there is a new type, I have a suggestion for all five cards, because I think it would be better and cleaner if they worked the same way.

As I said earlier in this thread, I think they should all say non-Duration, or we can just live with the lack of tracking for these cards. But since Donald is obviously going to stick to the special tracking rules for these cards, I think it would be better to make them all consistent.

The new rule ("2. Tracking for the former shapeshifters") mentions all cards - Band of Misfits, Overlord, Inheritance, Necromancer and Captain - but actually doesn't currently apply to the last two, since they already say "non-Duration" and so cause no tracking problem. This rule also presents the challenge (mentioned earlier) of defining which cards it applies to without including cards like Throne Room. This can be fixed with awkward wordings.

My suggestion is to add the Command type to Necromancer, and change Inheritance so that Estates also get the Command type; and then drop "non-Duration" from Captain and Necromancer. Now all five cards work the same way, they can play Durations with the exact same tracking, and they can't play each other. And the tracking rule can simply refer to "Command cards".

[markusin]

I had mentioned this in the discord, but does Scepter qualify as a Command type? The only reason it doesn't loop is because it can't play itself due to being a treasure and no other command cards can play it. Effectively, Scepter treats the play area as an "infinite supply". If ever a card was released that can replay a treasure in play or that can put Scepter's abilities on an action, a loop would be created.

Maybe it's better to cross that bridge if it ever gets there, but I do want Scepter to get recognition as a potential problem card that in its current form limits (albeit narrow) design space.

Edit: in a sense, Scepter presents precedence for protecting against unwanted loops through use of types. There are no simple "Command" loops with Scepter because none of the other "Command" cards can play a treasure, and Scepter is only a treasure. So, Scepter fails to make the "whitelist" of any Command cards by virtue of its type. The "Command" type also allows type to protect from loops, except does so by allowing cards to "Blacklist" Command cards rather than somehow excluding them from another Command card's whitelist.

[Jeebus]

I had mentioned this in the discord, but does Scepter qualify as a Command type? The only reason it doesn't loop is because it can't play itself due to being a treasure and no other command cards can play it. Effectively, Scepter treats the play area as an "infinite supply". If ever a card was released that can replay a treasure in play or that can put Scepter's abilities on an action, a loop would be created.

Maybe it's better to cross that bridge if it ever gets there, but I do want Scepter to get recognition as a potential problem card that in its current form limits (albeit narrow) design space.

Command cards seem to be cards that override the default rule of moving the played card into play. If Scepter is a Command card, then all kinds of cards should be, like Royal Carriage and even Throne Room and Vassal.

[markusin]

I had mentioned this in the discord, but does Scepter qualify as a Command type? The only reason it doesn't loop is because it can't play itself due to being a treasure and no other command cards can play it. Effectively, Scepter treats the play area as an "infinite supply". If ever a card was released that can replay a treasure in play or that can put Scepter's abilities on an action, a loop would be created.

Maybe it's better to cross that bridge if it ever gets there, but I do want Scepter to get recognition as a potential problem card that in its current form limits (albeit narrow) design space.

Command cards seem to be cards that override the default rule of moving the played card into play. If Scepter is a Command card, then all kinds of cards should be, like Royal Carriage and even Throne Room and Vassal.

Throne room and vassal both move a card into play, and can't go off without moving a physical card. Royal Carriage is a special case because it's "replay a card" is not an on-play ability of its own at all, and instead a call effect, which requires the Royal Carriage to move.

Edit: genuinely curious as an aside, can Scepter play a Royal Carriage that was played and called on the same turn?

[mxdata]

Hunh, interesting.  I'd always thought of that as simply what the card is worth rather than something the card "does".  Ironic that I discover my understanding was wrong just when it ceases to be relevant!

I doubt it'll ever be relevant, but would that mean that, e.g., gold being worth 3 coins also counts as an ability?

Yeah, of course it does. Gold could also validly be printed as a treasure card that said "3" in a circle below a picture instead of the way the card looks now (e.g., it would look like Cache without the below-the-line text). Wouldn't you say Cache's ability is that it generates 3 coins when you play it? Gold is the same thing.

Well, I would've considered Cache the same thing - a treasure card that's worth 3 coins.  But, I get it now.  So, basically, it's not "worth" 3 coins, it "generates" 3 coins in the buy phase, and estates likewise aren't "worth" 1 VP, they "generate" 1 VP at the end of the game.  So, basically, treasure cards are functionally the same as action cards with +$3 (or whatever) except that they're played in the buy phase, and victory cards are "played" at the end of the game.  I get it now, that just didn't seem intuitive to me.  But it is logical also

[markusin]

Hunh, interesting.  I'd always thought of that as simply what the card is worth rather than something the card "does".  Ironic that I discover my understanding was wrong just when it ceases to be relevant!

I doubt it'll ever be relevant, but would that mean that, e.g., gold being worth 3 coins also counts as an ability?

Yeah, of course it does. Gold could also validly be printed as a treasure card that said "3" in a circle below a picture instead of the way the card looks now (e.g., it would look like Cache without the below-the-line text). Wouldn't you say Cache's ability is that it generates 3 coins when you play it? Gold is the same thing.

Well, I would've considered Cache the same thing - a treasure card that's worth 3 coins.  But, I get it now.  So, basically, it's not "worth" 3 coins, it "generates" 3 coins in the buy phase, and estates likewise aren't "worth" 1 VP, they "generate" 1 VP at the end of the game.  So, basically, treasure cards are functionally the same as action cards with +$3 (or whatever) except that they're played in the buy phase, and victory cards are "played" at the end of the game.  I get it now, that just didn't seem intuitive to me.  But it is logical also

No one can blame you for this, considering that Fool's Gold literally uses the word "worth" when referencing it's coin generation, even though it could have just said "+$1...+$4".

[markusin]

I had mentioned this in the discord, but does Scepter qualify as a Command type? The only reason it doesn't loop is because it can't play itself due to being a treasure and no other command cards can play it. Effectively, Scepter treats the play area as an "infinite supply". If ever a card was released that can replay a treasure in play or that can put Scepter's abilities on an action, a loop would be created.

Maybe it's better to cross that bridge if it ever gets there, but I do want Scepter to get recognition as a potential problem card that in its current form limits (albeit narrow) design space.

Command cards seem to be cards that override the default rule of moving the played card into play. If Scepter is a Command card, then all kinds of cards should be, like Royal Carriage and even Throne Room and Vassal.

So, I think it's not enough to decide what a Command card is based on if it overrides the default of moving a played card into play. We can be specific and say:

Command cards are cards that, when played, can play another card without moving that other card at all.

This exempts Throne Room, Vassal, etc. from being called a Command card, because they all need another card to move in order to work. Even Necromancer moves the card it plays; it moves it from face up to face down, and that specific movement is a requirement for playing the card. Royal Carriage gets exempted because, while it doesn't move the card it plays, it's "throne" effect is not an on-play ability of Royal Carriage itself, and is instead a Call ability (which requires RC move a certain way).

Scepter is the card that, under the definition I gave above, would not be exempted from being called a "Command" card. It doesn't move the card it plays, and that effect can be invoked without moving Scepter. It's just that no card currently exists that can invoke Scepter's effect without moving Scepter, and this all thanks to Scepter being exclusively a Treasure.

[Jeebus]

TR can play a card from the trash (a trashed Mining Village), so it works without moving the card. Necromancer flipping a card does not constitute movement; the card is still in trash.

I get why you say that Scepter could end up needing something to limit it, but I think calling it a Command card is not the way to go.

In answer to your question, Donald has ruled that Scepter can't play a Royal Carriage that was played and called on the same turn. Same with Duplicate.

[markusin]

TR can play a card from the trash (a trashed Mining Village), so it works without moving the card. Necromancer flipping a card does not constitute movement; the card is still in trash.

I get why you say that Scepter could end up needing something to limit it, but I think calling it a Command card is not the way to go.

In answer to your question, Donald has ruled that Scepter can't play a Royal Carriage that was played and called on the same turn. Same with Duplicate.

I was thinking, Throne room can play a card that enterered the trash in the middle of its resolution, but the initial target you pick for Throne Room has to be in hand, and so at least one thing will move from your hand to the play area every time you play Throne Room.

Necromancer flipping cards is not movement in the Dominion sense, but it's a state change that is required to happen, and it's there to prevent loops. It moved from being face up in the trash to face down in the trash.

[Donald X.]

I doubt it'll ever be relevant, but would that mean that, e.g., gold being worth 3 coins also counts as an ability?

Yes, it's just like +$3.

[Donald X.]

I may have missed it, but I didn't see people complaining about the loop; only about the mandatory loop due to the fact that it created a hole in the rules where there was no correct defined behavior. Did people complain about this one more than they do about infinite Moat, or the various infinite Villa shenanigans?

Most of the online Dominion traffic that I know about is on the discord these days, followed by reddit, then f.ds, then BGG. Well not counting variants stuff, I don't read that stuff and so don't know how much of it there is. Anyway if you want to spend more time talking about Dominion, start by checking out the discord.

People do not complain about Moat. I don't have a good mental picture for how much they've complained about Villa; what I chose to store there was memories of people loving Villa. They certainly complained about Captain / BoM.

[Donald X.]

So now that there is a new type, I have a suggestion for all five cards, because I think it would be better and cleaner if they worked the same way.

As I said earlier in this thread, I think they should all say non-Duration, or we can just live with the lack of tracking for these cards. But since Donald is obviously going to stick to the special tracking rules for these cards, I think it would be better to make them all consistent.

The new rule ("2. Tracking for the former shapeshifters") mentions all cards - Band of Misfits, Overlord, Inheritance, Necromancer and Captain - but actually doesn't currently apply to the last two, since they already say "non-Duration" and so cause no tracking problem. This rule also presents the challenge (mentioned earlier) of defining which cards it applies to without including cards like Throne Room. This can be fixed with awkward wordings.

My suggestion is to add the Command type to Necromancer, and change Inheritance so that Estates also get the Command type; and then drop "non-Duration" from Captain and Necromancer. Now all five cards work the same way, they can play Durations with the exact same tracking, and they can't play each other. And the tracking rule can simply refer to "Command cards".

Rule 2 is there to tell people about the changes; the actual rulebook location for rule 2 would be in each relevant card's FAQ. It wouldn't have a special section in a rulebook because it's not something I want anyone to see unless they are specifically looking up a relevant card. There's no challenge of which cards it applies to, it would apply to the cards that explained it. It's not challenging to me either, it's cards that play cards that aren't put into play. Throne Room for example does not do that; it can fail to put the card into play e.g. when playing a one-shot the second time, but it always tries to put the card into play. I guess we can say, do we count Scepter and Royal Carriage, which only play cards already in play; their tracking is already covered and I wasn't defining new behavior for them.

The problem with consistency here is loud voices on the internet complaining about cards losing functionality. If I were making the cards all from scratch, new cards for new expansions, then I mean I would fix them up every way I could, I would avoid having a phrase like "non-duration, non-command Action" (even though Magic has done that on commons from the beginning, I am just mentioning that due to the injustice of having this be compared to substance) and so on. The direction of "give them a type and exclude it" is not an unreasonable approach, again for the situation of making these cards for the first time ever; it makes sure you don't have a problem. If I get to go further back and do e.g. duration cards and one-shots differently, well in addition to probably doing something like saying, duration cards don't function if they aren't in play (and notating that well), odds are I wouldn't do Band of Misfits, because I would want effects to be tracked better than it can manage.

But, the actual situation is, I made some cards, and have to live with them; even if a future version of Dark Ages replaces Band of Misfits, the card exists and needs rules. And again there are those loud voices. It's no surprise that people don't like to see combos go away, even if they'd never miss them if they'd never had them. The ideal fixes are ones that change as little as possible.

Thus, not adding Command to Necromancer, which didn't need it. For Estate, that's more borderline, and I can reconsider it when actually reprinting Adventures. Putting the type on Estate is cumbersome on the card text, but adds extra protection, as demonstrated by, if we drop "once per game" then you can Inherit something and then Inherit Estate, which is bad.

Similarly I initially thought Band of Misfits would get non-Duration. People were happier with that not happening. We have tracking for that situation and so it doesn't say non-Duration. In the best of all possible worlds, I just don't do the card; in the weird nightmare world where I have to do Band of Misfits but get to change it before it goes to print, and can't just make it e.g. "choose one: village or smithy or something," well, I would consider non-Duration. I'm not in that world, I'm in this one, where people are used to Band of Misfits working on Duration cards and would be sad if I took that away.

I do agree that it would be nice if the rules could just mention Command cards.

To sum up! It would be nice if the cards all fell into line more; they don't because I care more about the players being happy than about the cards being their prettiest.

[Donald X.]

I had mentioned this in the discord, but does Scepter qualify as a Command type? The only reason it doesn't loop is because it can't play itself due to being a treasure and no other command cards can play it. Effectively, Scepter treats the play area as an "infinite supply". If ever a card was released that can replay a treasure in play or that can put Scepter's abilities on an action, a loop would be created.

Maybe it's better to cross that bridge if it ever gets there, but I do want Scepter to get recognition as a potential problem card that in its current form limits (albeit narrow) design space.

Edit: in a sense, Scepter presents precedence for protecting against unwanted loops through use of types. There are no simple "Command" loops with Scepter because none of the other "Command" cards can play a treasure, and Scepter is only a treasure. So, Scepter fails to make the "whitelist" of any Command cards by virtue of its type. The "Command" type also allows type to protect from loops, except does so by allowing cards to "Blacklist" Command cards rather than somehow excluding them from another Command card's whitelist.

Scepter is a potential problem, for sure. If I made an Action that replayed a Treasure in play, they'd be a loop. That sounds like a weird card, but it also doesn't make you immediately think, "oh that will cause trouble."

As I've said, each expansion is trying to somehow still have new things. So at some point I tried each of these problematic things that made it out (and of course other things that didn't, e.g. modifying numbers in text). Replaying a card in play is trouble; moving a card from play (Mandarin, Procession, Bonfire) is trouble; playing a card without putting something into play is trouble. At the root of these all, there's this idea that a card in play represents a thing that happened; some situations get a lot safer and saner if I address that at the root... but it's too significant of a change at this point.

It's hard to commit to just not making cards again in any of the problem categories; what will happen is, I've got the idea and everyone loves it and it seems like, some clause is protecting us. And then maybe it is and maybe it isn't. But, a good rule of thumb is, really try not to make any more cards in the problem categories.

[Donald X.]

So, I think it's not enough to decide what a Command card is based on if it overrides the default of moving a played card into play. We can be specific and say:

Command cards are cards that, when played, can play another card without moving that other card at all.

The definition is: Command cards are cards with the Command type. It's a word on the bottom of the card, or maybe someday granted by Inheritance. That's what Command cards are. And you can't Moat an Ill-Gotten Gains, if you see what I mean.

The idea is to use this type on the cards that create loops due to not actually putting a card into play when they play something. It's a new thing of course; only recently the only example was Necromancer. But then the idea is to also not have shapeshifters as they are super-confusing and have their own problems. Anyway your definition is nice, it's a good guide to, what will I actually put the word on. But like, the actual rulebook text is just the part of e.g. the BoM FAQ that says, what's that weird word Command mean, and the answer is, some cards like BoM have that word, and can't play each other to avoid loops. I don't need to say there what precisely gets the word; that's not information that does anything.

And my hope is that, just looking at the card, it will at least not seem like a complete non sequitur due to the card being a Command card. It's a Command card, it can't play Command cards, if it could play itself that would be a loop, maybe there's some sense to this. [Yes so far on Inheritance it's just a non sequitur.]

[spineflu]

is this errata coming out because the rumored early 2020 dominion expansion set has cards this is pertinent to?

or is it more bc you're tired of our kvetching about it?

[Jeebus]

Command cards are cards that, when played, can play another card without moving that other card at all.

I was thinking, Throne room can play a card that enterered the trash in the middle of its resolution, but the initial target you pick for Throne Room has to be in hand, and so at least one thing will move from your hand to the play area every time you play Throne Room.

Necromancer flipping cards is not movement in the Dominion sense, but it's a state change that is required to happen, and it's there to prevent loops. It moved from being face up in the trash to face down in the trash.

The definition is not clear from the wording. You mean that the other card won't move at all during the resolution, but literally it just says that the other card is played without moving at all. That can happen with Throne Room. It can also happen with Vassal + Faithful Hound (but it's like TR in that the Vassal does move the Hound during its resolution).

Your definition in any case does include Necromancer.

[Jeebus]

To sum up! It would be nice if the cards all fell into line more; they don't because I care more about the players being happy than about the cards being their prettiest.

Thanks for your long explanation. However, I'm not convinced! (I know, I'm not the one that needs to be convinced.)

Making it consistent in the way I suggested would only remove a few interactions (Command cards being able to play Necromancer and Inherited Estate), but would add many more interactions (Captain and Necromancer being able to play any Duration). How can these loud voices complain about that, they should be deliriously happy instead!

As you know, you get a more cumbersome Inheritance, but a less cumbersome Captain (and slightly less cumbersome Necromancer).

[markusin]

Command cards are cards that, when played, can play another card without moving that other card at all.

I was thinking, Throne room can play a card that enterered the trash in the middle of its resolution, but the initial target you pick for Throne Room has to be in hand, and so at least one thing will move from your hand to the play area every time you play Throne Room.

Necromancer flipping cards is not movement in the Dominion sense, but it's a state change that is required to happen, and it's there to prevent loops. It moved from being face up in the trash to face down in the trash.

The definition is not clear from the wording. You mean that the other card won't move at all during the resolution, but literally it just says that the other card is played without moving at all. That can happen with Throne Room. It can also happen with Vassal + Faithful Hound (but it's like TR in that the Vassal does move the Hound during its resolution).

Your definition in any case does include Necromancer.

I mean, when you consider every point of the card's resolution (e.g. Throne Room), there was never a point where one of the cards it plays wasn't first moved to the play area earlier in the resolution. So, the second time Throne Room plays a card, it doesn't move, but the first time it plays a card, the card had to have moved to the play area from hand, and that second play of the card could not have happened otherwise.

Necromancer doesn't change a card's zone, but it changes its state within that zone (the trash pile) in a meaningful way (face down, cannot be played by Necromancer). To me that's counts as moving by a Non-Dominion definition.

I guess you raise a point about Faithful Hound, but at least it's trying to move the card into play. Overlord for example never tried to move the cards it commands into play.

[Jeebus]

I mean, when you consider every point of the card's resolution (e.g. Throne Room), there was never a point where one of the cards it plays wasn't first moved to the play area earlier in the resolution. So, the second time Throne Room plays a card, it doesn't move, but the first time it plays a card, the card had to have moved to the play area from hand, and that second play of the card could not have happened otherwise.

Necromancer doesn't change a card's zone, but it changes its state within that zone (the trash pile) in a meaningful way (face down, cannot be played by Necromancer). To me that's counts as moving by a Non-Dominion definition.

I guess you raise a point about Faithful Hound, but at least it's trying to move the card into play. Overlord for example never tried to move the cards it commands into play.

My point from the start was that these five cards never try to move the card they play, and that is their distinguishing characteristic. They override that rule. No other card does that. Like Vassal, Throne Room tries to move the card into play when it plays it from the trash, so if "not trying" is enough for you, you don't need to say anything about "moving the other card". You need instead to say that the card plays another card without trying to put it into play - or that the card tells you to play a card without putting it into play - or something like that. That will include Necromancer, but so does your definition - according to Dominion's rules.

You could find a definition that includes these 5 cards (including Necromancer and Inherited Estates) plus Scepter, but I think it would need a very awkward wording, and I'm not sure it wouldn't break with some future card.

[Donald X.]

is this errata coming out because the rumored early 2020 dominion expansion set has cards this is pertinent to?

or is it more bc you're tired of our kvetching about it?

Normally errata would wait for the relevant expansions. Since the cards aren't all in one expansion, I would have said something whenever the first expansion came out. Let's say it was Dark Ages. So, okay Band of Misfits is different, and hey Overlord will match. I would have said.

But, there are people programming a Dominion app. I didn't want them to have to program the old Band of Misfits and then the new one. So they had to have the errata in a timely fashion. And while I don't have a release date for their version, the contract lets them put it out as early as January. So the errata wanted to be out by January, which would be ahead of e.g. Dark Ages being reprinted. So there was no perfect time for it and it might as well happen as soon as I had it. At the same time there's an existing online version (that isn't going away, I mean yes maybe someday but not in January), and it would have the errata.

So, I posted the errata. Then that led to enough online discussion of it that I errata'd the errata.

[Donald X.]

Making it consistent in the way I suggested would only remove a few interactions (Command cards being able to play Necromancer and Inherited Estate), but would add many more interactions (Captain and Necromancer being able to play any Duration). How can these loud voices complain about that, they should be deliriously happy instead!

As you know, you get a more cumbersome Inheritance, but a less cumbersome Captain (and slightly less cumbersome Necromancer).

I like Captain saying non-Duration. It's not a feature of Band of Misfits that it can play Duration cards; it's something I'm sucking up because I want to be friendly to players. I don't need to be so friendly as to add functionality to Captain.

Inherited Estate being a Command card is not bad, the downside is just having to say that on Inheritance. Again I can keep thinking about that for when Adventures actually gets reprinted. It doesn't feel urgent. Necromancer being a Command card merely stops you from using e.g. Band of Misfits on it; but that's not some exotic combo that will never happen, it's useful just with those two cards on the board.

Originally the changes were going to include this great rule that you couldn't play a card if you'd lost track of it. This was a different fix for majiponi's "I play Estate and don't know what it does" scenario. It seemed like a nice rule all-around. But it meant that e.g. Throning a one-shot would no longer work. At first I thought that was a positive. Throne / Feast was the number one rules question in the early days of Dominion. Surely it was more intuitive if you couldn't do it. But I asked people who wouldn't know, and more thought you could than that you couldn't; it wasn't intuitive either way, but if anything was more intuitive as it is. Further, people learn "do as much as you can" and then those people are much more likely to think you can Throne a Feast. So the change didn't seem so great after all.

But in the meantime, LastFootnote told someone he knew about it, that probably Throne / one-shot would stop working, and that person said, that's it, I'm quitting Dominion. I don't think that's a rational response! And if someone's going to be crazy, it's not like I can hope to appease them. But, maybe this gives you an idea of how strongly people can feel about changes. I changed as little as I could.

[Jeebus]

Necromancer being a Command card merely stops you from using e.g. Band of Misfits on it; but that's not some exotic combo that will never happen, it's useful just with those two cards on the board.

Right, in my suggestion it was mainly for cleanness and consistency (including opening up for playing Durations). However, it would stop you from playing BoM, Necro from supply, BoM from trash, and then the same Necro from supply. Not that that would be a problem, but it's kind of a loophole in that it's now the only way to play the same card from supply twice.

But if you were to change Inheritance, which you are considering, then that would also stop a two-card combo, BoM playing Inherited Estate. But I guess your reasoning is that it's more acceptable than changing Necromancer because it would have more potential benefits in terms of stopping loops.

[Donald X.]

Necromancer being a Command card merely stops you from using e.g. Band of Misfits on it; but that's not some exotic combo that will never happen, it's useful just with those two cards on the board.

Right, in my suggestion it was mainly for cleanness and consistency (including opening up for playing Durations). However, it would stop you from playing BoM, Necro from supply, BoM from trash, and then the same Necro from supply. Not that that would be a problem, but it's kind of a loophole in that it's now the only way to play the same card from supply twice.

No they all do that, e.g. Band of Misfits to play Supply Throne Room to play another Band of Misfits from hand to play the same Supply Throne Room.

But if you were to change Inheritance, which you are considering, then that would also stop a two-card combo, BoM playing Inherited Estate. But I guess your reasoning is that it's more acceptable than changing Necromancer because it would have more potential benefits in terms of stopping loops.

It conceivably has a benefit, plus published Band of Misfits could never play inherited Estate.

[grrgrrgrr]

I like most of the tweaks a lot, but there are some gripes I have with some of them:
a) The change to Inheritance. I dislike it. I think it's unelegant, and also makes it incompatible with Reserves, something that was never a problem to begin with. Personally, I'd say something like "During your turns, Estates gain the types and abilities of the inherited card", and perhaps also forbid Reaction cards. (I suppose this alternative is also imperfect)
b) You had clear reasons for not enabling Captain and Necromancer with Durations. Personally, I think BoM and Overlord should be restricted from those as well. It'd also prevents Captain from being part of any socalled "loop" and honestly, a throned Overlord could definitely cause tracking issues as well.
c) I'm not too keen on the whole Command thing. It just feels so... deceptive.
d) Why no Prince errata?

Also, the Inheritance interaction from http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=18598.0 is Mandarin's doing. Isn't it better to just tweek Mandarin itself, or not consider that card anymore?

Not to badmouth anything, Donald's work is beyond amazing and I understand that these decisions are very hard.

EDIT: I see b has been considered, but ultimately been declined, and that c has very obvious reasons to be done. Probably should spend more time reading a tread before replying on it lol. My opinions still stand though.

[grrgrrgrr]

Just curious, but have you considered making Command a widespread type for all cards that make you play another card? Command cards would be: Throne Room, King's Court, Vassal, Herald, and so on. Then there could be a set of rules for Command cards just like there is one for Duration cards.

[grrgrrgrr]

I accept this is a digression, but why is Inheritance once per game? Just to deal with the ambiguity concerning what would happen to the previous set-aside card, or for some aspect of game balance I've never appreciated?

When I first printed out Inheritance, it did not say once-per-game. After some games with it, LastFootnote pointed out that you could e.g. Inherit Dungeon, play an Estate, then that turn buy Inheritance gain and Inherit a non-Duration card. What happens to the Estate? There were a few weird situations like that, and once-per-game got rid of them.

With the new wording, once-per-game protects us from you Inheriting something, then Inheriting Estate.

Mmm, really surprised that that is the reason. I though it was for balance purposes. I mean, turning one set of actions into another is incredibly powerful.

[Donald X.]

a) The change to Inheritance. I dislike it. I think it's unelegant, and also makes it incompatible with Reserves, something that was never a problem to begin with. Personally, I'd say something like "During your turns, Estates gain the types and abilities of the inherited card", and perhaps also forbid Reaction cards. (I suppose this alternative is also imperfect)

Work went into that wording. It's not just some random thing; other stuff was considered, found fault with, and rejected. For example if Inheritance changes all cards on your turn, then your opponent could Inherit Amulet, and you Inherit Caravan Guard, and on your turn you play an Attack and they play an Estate as a Caravan Guard, and now on their turn the Estate is in play and it's an Amulet and uh what's going on here? Or, your opponent could Inherit Ratcatcher, you Inherit Duplicate, and on your turn you buy Messenger for Magpies and your opponent calls their Estate as a Duplicate.

Possibly Inheritance could have changed all copies of the card, if it also limited you to Action cards with no other types.

b) You had clear reasons for not enabling Captain and Necromancer with Durations. Personally, I think BoM and Overlord should be restricted from those as well. It'd also prevents Captain from being part of any socalled "loop" and honestly, a throned Overlord could definitely cause tracking issues as well.
d) Why no Prince errata?

Look back some posts and there will be a story about someone ready to quit the game over throne / one-shot changing. I didn't have to change Prince so I didn't change it. I didn't have to add non-Duration to those cards so I didn't add it. Something being aesthetically displeasing was better than having interactions go away.

Also, the Inheritance interaction from http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=18598.0 is Mandarin's doing. Isn't it better to just tweek Mandarin itself, or not consider that card anymore?

It's bad to have Mandarin / Bonfire / Procession exist; they remove a card from play that might have been tracking something important, and in exotic cases can let you replay a card which causes trouble too. That family of cards is a problem; the shapeshifter family was also a problem. The shapeshifter family endlessly produces rules questions, so it was good to fix anyway. It still might be worth fixing the Mandarin family, and there are things you can for Mandarin and Bonfire provided I don't make new cards that seem innocent but break the fixes. Those fixes of course would have unhappy players too. Procession is trickier, trashing an action from play is a basic part of what it does. You could delay the trashing until clean-up, do it like Improve, but there would be some sad players, it's a significant feature of Procession now that it gains a card you might play the same turn.

The thing to be unhappy about is the original mistakes, that I actually put Band of Misfits etc. into sets as printed. The best fix is not having the cards, but we have an obligation to support them; even if new versions of Dark Ages just replaced Band of Misfits with a new card (which would have to be available in an update pack), the rules would still need to handle Band of Misfits. So I was stuck somehow picking errata for it. I didn't have the option of saying, "that's not elegant so I won't do it."

[Donald X.]

Just curious, but have you considered making Command a widespread type for all cards that make you play another card? Command cards would be: Throne Room, King's Court, Vassal, Herald, and so on. Then there could be a set of rules for Command cards just like there is one for Duration cards.

No, same thing as before, I'm trying to avoid changing things I don't have to. I'll still allow myself small beneficial changes like the one on Moneylender, which happened to no fanfare and which of course people didn't mind.

[grrgrrgrr]

a) The change to Inheritance. I dislike it. I think it's unelegant, and also makes it incompatible with Reserves, something that was never a problem to begin with. Personally, I'd say something like "During your turns, Estates gain the types and abilities of the inherited card", and perhaps also forbid Reaction cards. (I suppose this alternative is also imperfect)

Work went into that wording. It's not just some random thing; other stuff was considered, found fault with, and rejected. For example if Inheritance changes all cards on your turn, then your opponent could Inherit Amulet, and you Inherit Caravan Guard, and on your turn you play an Attack and they play an Estate as a Caravan Guard, and now on their turn the Estate is in play and it's an Amulet and uh what's going on here? Or, your opponent could Inherit Ratcatcher, you Inherit Duplicate, and on your turn you buy Messenger for Magpies and your opponent calls their Estate as a Duplicate.

Possibly Inheritance could have changed all copies of the card, if it also limited you to Action cards with no other types.

b) You had clear reasons for not enabling Captain and Necromancer with Durations. Personally, I think BoM and Overlord should be restricted from those as well. It'd also prevents Captain from being part of any socalled "loop" and honestly, a throned Overlord could definitely cause tracking issues as well.
d) Why no Prince errata?

Look back some posts and there will be a story about someone ready to quit the game over throne / one-shot changing. I didn't have to change Prince so I didn't change it. I didn't have to add non-Duration to those cards so I didn't add it. Something being aesthetically displeasing was better than having interactions go away.

Also, the Inheritance interaction from http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=18598.0 is Mandarin's doing. Isn't it better to just tweek Mandarin itself, or not consider that card anymore?

It's bad to have Mandarin / Bonfire / Procession exist; they remove a card from play that might have been tracking something important, and in exotic cases can let you replay a card which causes trouble too. That family of cards is a problem; the shapeshifter family was also a problem. The shapeshifter family endlessly produces rules questions, so it was good to fix anyway. It still might be worth fixing the Mandarin family, and there are things you can for Mandarin and Bonfire provided I don't make new cards that seem innocent but break the fixes. Those fixes of course would have unhappy players too. Procession is trickier, trashing an action from play is a basic part of what it does. You could delay the trashing until clean-up, do it like Improve, but there would be some sad players, it's a significant feature of Procession now that it gains a card you might play the same turn.

The thing to be unhappy about is the original mistakes, that I actually put Band of Misfits etc. into sets as printed. The best fix is not having the cards, but we have an obligation to support them; even if new versions of Dark Ages just replaced Band of Misfits with a new card (which would have to be available in an update pack), the rules would still need to handle Band of Misfits. So I was stuck somehow picking errata for it. I didn't have the option of saying, "that's not elegant so I won't do it."

Thanks for the reply and on a second thought really like the changes as they are!

[King Leon]

It feels like Necromancer should be a Command card. Even though it’s not involved in the infinite loops, it just seems like it should be for consistency.

Necromancer can still cause endless loops in combination with Procession and Lurker. I guess, this can be fixed when we either Necromancer sets the cards aside before playing them and returning them at the end of the player's turn, so that a Lurker or a Graverobber cannot be used to recycle a face-down card or itself. Extra turns like from Outpost or Mission are limited and won't cause any further issues here.

[popsofctown]

I'm not vexed by this since I'm ok with the loops a player can optionally stop.  Others might care though

[Jeebus]

It feels like Necromancer should be a Command card. Even though it’s not involved in the infinite loops, it just seems like it should be for consistency.

Necromancer can still cause endless loops in combination with Procession and Lurker. I guess, this can be fixed when we either Necromancer sets the cards aside before playing them and returning them at the end of the player's turn, so that a Lurker or a Graverobber cannot be used to recycle a face-down card or itself. Extra turns like from Outpost or Mission are limited and won't cause any further issues here.

Can you describe this loop?

[Jeebus]

The difference now is that it doesn't matter if Tunnel gets covered up, it still works. You are allowed to look through your discard pile for it.

So when you discard one Tunnel, you don't get to look through your discard pile, but when you discard more than one, you do. Correct?

Before, when Warrior discarded your Tunnel and you gained a Gold, the Warrior would lose track of the Tunnel. I take it that this is no longer the case? Warrior will trash the Tunnel?

[Donald X.]

So when you discard one Tunnel, you don't get to look through your discard pile, but when you discard more than one, you do. Correct?

Yes.

Before, when Warrior discarded your Tunnel and you gained a Gold, the Warrior would lose track of the Tunnel. I take it that this is no longer the case? Warrior will trash the Tunnel?

Yes, this is the same case as Summoning a Death Cart etc.

[J Reggie]

I skimmed the thread and I don't think I saw this question do sorry if it's already been asked. I don't suppose it's possible we'll see the erratad cards as promos a la the Pathfinding art fix? I know it's unlikely but it would be nice to have them in card form so I don't have to explain the errata to people before a game.

I also love how this is a game where the designer listens to feedback from the community, and while he's not making changes based on every random suggestion, he legitimately cares what people think even when it's probably not going to affect sales in any way. Thanks for being awesome, Donald!

[Donald X.]

I skimmed the thread and I don't think I saw this question do sorry if it's already been asked. I don't suppose it's possible we'll see the erratad cards as promos a la the Pathfinding art fix? I know it's unlikely but it would be nice to have them in card form so I don't have to explain the errata to people before a game.

I also love how this is a game where the designer listens to feedback from the community, and while he's not making changes based on every random suggestion, he legitimately cares what people think even when it's probably not going to affect sales in any way. Thanks for being awesome, Donald!

I'm there for you! Errata promos seem unlikely so far though.

[Jeebus]

Lantern: Artifact
Border Guards you play reveal 3 cards and discard 2. (It takes all 3 being Actions to take the Horn.)

So is Border Guard no longer a shapeshifter now? It kinda sounds like it still is. It doesn't say, "when you play Border Guard, do this instead of doing this", à la Enchantress. But I guess it could be interpreted both ways.

In practice I don't think it matters, currently (but I'm not 100% sure). Whether it changes or not, it works with new Inheritance, Necromancer, Captain, and both old and new BoM/Overlord. It doesn't work with old Inheritance. (If my thinking is correct.)

[Donald X.]

Lantern: Artifact
Border Guards you play reveal 3 cards and discard 2. (It takes all 3 being Actions to take the Horn.)

So is Border Guard no longer a shapeshifter now? It kinda sounds like it still is. It doesn't say, "when you play Border Guard, do this instead of doing this", à la Enchantress. But I guess it could be interpreted both ways.

The intention is that Border Guard is no longer a shapeshifter. That wording was labored over and that was as good as it got.

[Jeebus]

2. Tracking for the former shapeshifters

Some cards, like the new Band of Misfits, can play a card that isn't put into play. When you play Band of Misfits, leave it in play as long as you would have left the card it plays in play. Normally that will be the same turn's Clean-up. For a Band of Misfits playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the last turn the Duration card has any effects. For a Band of Misfits playing a Throne Room playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the turn the Duration card leaves play. For a Band of Misfits playing a card that can move itself from play, like Mining Village, the Mining Village can't move itself, so Band of Misfits doesn't leave play any earlier than normal. If a Band of Misfits plays multiple Duration cards (e.g., you used Throne Room on it), leave it out until the Clean-up of the last turn that one of them still had effects.

I think this rule is not consistent. It says to leave the BoM as long as you would have left the card in play (if it had entered play). This is accurate for Durations, and for TR playing Durations. But it's not accurate for Mining Village. If Mining Village had entered play, you actually would have trashed it. So then there seems to be an exception to the rule for cards that would have moved from play during the Action phase(?), which is hardly the intention.

So the rule has to be specifically for playing a Duration: If BoM plays a Duration, leave BoM as long as the Duration would have stayed in play. From this it doesn't follow that BoM+TR+Duration makes BoM stay. If you want that, you need an additional rule: If BoM plays a TR playing a Duration, leave BoM as long as the Duration stays in play.

Alternatively it can be a Duration-like rule specifically about Clean-up: BoM stays in play instead of being discarded in Clean-up if it played a card that would have stayed in play at that point. This covers both BoM+Duration and BoM+TR+Duration.

[Donald X.]

2. Tracking for the former shapeshifters

Some cards, like the new Band of Misfits, can play a card that isn't put into play. When you play Band of Misfits, leave it in play as long as you would have left the card it plays in play. Normally that will be the same turn's Clean-up. For a Band of Misfits playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the last turn the Duration card has any effects. For a Band of Misfits playing a Throne Room playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the turn the Duration card leaves play. For a Band of Misfits playing a card that can move itself from play, like Mining Village, the Mining Village can't move itself, so Band of Misfits doesn't leave play any earlier than normal. If a Band of Misfits plays multiple Duration cards (e.g., you used Throne Room on it), leave it out until the Clean-up of the last turn that one of them still had effects.

I think this rule is not consistent. It says to leave the BoM as long as you would have left the card in play (if it had entered play). This is accurate for Durations, and for TR playing Durations. But it's not accurate for Mining Village. If Mining Village had entered play, you actually would have trashed it. So then there seems to be an exception to the rule for cards that would have moved from play during the Action phase(?), which is hardly the intention.

I think I'm okay. Obv. "would have" is hand-wavy. The rule is trying to be clear to people without being super-technical. You can say, "if I'd actually put that card into play I would have made whatever decisions and things would be different" and you know it's not what "would have" is talking about there and I bet that's not messing people up.

One thing is to consider the rule as just saying, under what circumstances we leave Band of Misfits out extra-long; it doesn't cause us to discard or trash the Band of Misfits ever. If we're not leaving it in play due to that rule, we're leaving it in play until Clean-up because of the normal rule that stuff stays in play until Clean-up.

[Jeebus]

Right, with the extra clause about Mining Village, nobody's confused. Without it there could be questions, especially about cards like Experiment, since it literally says that BoM leaves when Experiment would leave. (Rephrasing it along the lines I suggested you wouldn't need that extra clause.)

One thing to consider is just making it a rule about BoM playing a Duration directly. This would be the simplest to state and the easiest to understand and we'd avoid tracking situations like in this thread. I understand that with BoM+TR+Duration, you want to have a card to track that "something" was used to play the Duration. But it's similar to TR+TR+Duration; and your original reasoning there was exactly the same, and yet you abandoned that for the sake of simplicity. Maybe I'm missing something but this seems to be the same situation?

Actually now I have a question about that other thread, I'll post it there.

[hhelibebcnofnena]

Right, with the extra clause about Mining Village, nobody's confused. Without it there could be questions, especially about cards like Experiment, since it literally says that BoM leaves when Experiment would leave. (Rephrasing it along the lines I suggested you wouldn't need that extra clause.)

One thing to consider is just making it a rule about BoM playing a Duration directly. This would be the simplest to state and the easiest to understand and we'd avoid tracking situations like in this thread. I understand that with BoM+TR+Duration, you want to have a card to track that "something" was used to play the Duration. But it's similar to TR+TR+Duration; and your original reasoning there was exactly the same, and yet you abandoned that for the sake of simplicity. Maybe I'm missing something but this seems to be the same situation?

Actually now I have a question about that other thread, I'll post it there.

The rule says "leave it in play as long as you would leave the other card it plays in play." It doesn't say "take it out of play as soon as you would take the other card out of play." So, you leave the BoM in play as long as you would leave Experiment or Mining Village in play, and then the rule stops affecting it. But that doesn't mean you discard it then, because there's no rule telling you to do that. Then cleanup comes around, and you discard it, because there is a rule telling you to do that.

[Jeebus]

The rule says "leave it in play as long as you would leave the other card it plays in play." It doesn't say "take it out of play as soon as you would take the other card out of play." So, you leave the BoM in play as long as you would leave Experiment or Mining Village in play, and then the rule stops affecting it. But that doesn't mean you discard it then, because there's no rule telling you to do that. Then cleanup comes around, and you discard it, because there is a rule telling you to do that.

It could be interpreted both ways. Ironically the clause about Mining Village expresses that it's the other way than what you say: The clause says that the reason BoM "doesn't leave play earlier than normal" is that the Mining Village can't move itself, implying that otherwise it would leave play. (Of course it's unclear how exactly it would leave play.)

It's pretty evident that that clause should just be taken out, and instead the rule should focus on what you are saying, along the lines of my second suggestion, which is also was Donald was saying: when do we discard it in Clean-up?

(I still think the best option is what I wrote in my previous post.)

[Donald X.]

(I still think the best option is what I wrote in my previous post.)

I don't want to make it specific to Durations. I changed the Mining Village part.

Some cards, like the new Band of Misfits, can play a card that isn't put into play. When you play Band of Misfits, leave it in play as long as you would have left the card it plays in play. Normally that will be the same turn's Clean-up. For a Band of Misfits playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the last turn the Duration card has any effects. For a Band of Misfits playing a Throne Room playing a Duration card, it will be the Clean-up of the turn the Duration card leaves play. For a Band of Misfits playing a card that can move itself from play, like Mining Village, the Mining Village can't move itself, and Band of Misfits would still stay out until Clean-up anyway, due to the normal rule for leaving cards out until Clean-up. If a Band of Misfits plays multiple Duration cards (e.g., you used Throne Room on it), leave it out until the Clean-up of the last turn that one of them still had effects.

[markusin]

It seems to me like the intention was to have Band of Misfits stay out at least until the clean-up phase of the turn it was played. Why not just make that the rule? The whole thing about Mining Village not being able to move itself when played by BoM as justification for not discarding BoM mid-turn seems iffy, because Mining Village would have left play if it was actually in play, just like the duration cards would have stayed in play for a turn if they were actually brought into play.

Edit: No, it actually seems like the intention is to have BoM check to see if it should be discarded only during a cleanup phase. Like, during cleanup, it checks if the card it played would have been discarded during this cleanup or if it would have already been discarded.

[Jeebus]

I don't want to make it specific to Durations. I changed the Mining Village part.

How do you see it as different to the TR+TR+Duration rule in this respect?

[Donald X.]

I don't want to make it specific to Durations. I changed the Mining Village part.

How do you see it as different to the TR+TR+Duration rule in this respect?

I don't understand the question. There is no TR+TR+Duration rule; just a FAQ since people will ask rather than work it out.

[Jeebus]

I don't want to make it specific to Durations. I changed the Mining Village part.

How do you see it as different to the TR+TR+Duration rule in this respect?

I don't understand the question. There is no TR+TR+Duration rule; just a FAQ since people will ask rather than work it out.

I meant TR+TR+Duration+Duration.

The rule for TR+TR+Duration+Duration was that you leave both TR's. Then you dropped it, simplifying but also losing some tracking. This seems to be the exact same situation as BoM+TR+Duration. Without a special rule, only the Duration stays out; the BOM is to signify that some card affected the Duration. Dropping this rule would also be gaining simplicity and losing some tracking. So I mean only keep the tracking when BOM plays Duration directly, just like we're only tracking when TR plays Duration directly.

As I said, this would be the simplest to state and the easiest to understand and we'd avoid tracking situations like in that other thread. It would also mean the rule is only needed for BoM, Overlord and Inheritance.