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[Dgamer777]

I am not sure why cards like Haggler got this errata recently : This turn , when you gain a card , if you bought it , gain a cheaper non-Victory card.

Why does this card need to say " when you gain a card , if you bought it"?

When you buy a card , by default it means you "gained" it as well.

It would make me assume that some dominion players and/or the community are forgetting that buy also means gaining it as well.

If this is the case , I think it would be easier to just change the definition of "Buy" to no longer mean "gain" as well.

Changing "Buy" to exactly mean just "Buy" and leaving "Gain" to exactly mean just "Gain"

I know this would change how a lot of certain cards would work , but i think it would be easier for players to not have to remember that "Buy" also means you "gained" it as well.


Thoughts regarding this change?

[Imrahil3]

Bad idea for two reasons:

First, a major change was just made. Entire sets have been re-worded based on this change. Better to just deal with it as-is - or at least wait a few years - before redoing it again.

Second, the majority of “When you gain this” abilities are very specifically supposed to apply to both buying AND gaining. There are a many cards that just break or become 90% useless by separating the two.

I agree the change that just happened is confusing and wordy. I’m not sure exactly what all of Donald’s reasons were for the change; to my mind new players will always confuse buys with gains (i.e. “can I still buy a card even though I just played Workshop?”) so I would’ve though making buys a subset of gains would have fixed the timing issues without requiring such weird wording for the on-buy-but-not-on-gain cards.

However, Donald admitted he’s not super jazzed about that “When you gain this, if you bought it” wording either but still went with it, so we know he has good reasons for going that route even if some of us don’t see them right away.

[Jack Rudd]

The big issue here is Possession, where one player buys a card and a different player gains it.

[Awaclus]

I think the biggest issue here is that if buying does not result in the card getting gained, it remains in the supply, which makes buying cards completely useless and causes most games to end in players starving to death since there is no way they can add any cards into their decks or make any progress towards triggering any of the end conditions for the game.

[LastFootnote]

I've thought about this. It would require a lot of cards that currently say "gain" to instead say "buy or gain", which I think is potentially the biggest issue.

[GendoIkari]

I've thought about this. It would require a lot of cards that currently say "gain" to instead say "buy or gain", which I think is potentially the biggest issue.

Another possibility that would have required a different design from the start; don’t make make buying a card cause a gain. Make “gain” effectively mean “take without buying”. All cards that now say “when you gain” would have to be “when you buy or gain” instead. But then again I’m not a game designer so I wouldn’t trust my opinions here.

[segura]

I am not sure why cards like Haggler got this errata recently : This turn , when you gain a card , if you bought it , gain a cheaper non-Victory card.

Why does this card need to say " when you gain a card , if you bought it"?

When you buy a card , by default it means you "gained" it as well.

It would make me assume that some dominion players and/or the community are forgetting that buy also means gaining it as well.

If this is the case , I think it would be easier to just change the definition of "Buy" to no longer mean "gain" as well.

Changing "Buy" to exactly mean just "Buy" and leaving "Gain" to exactly mean just "Gain"

I know this would change how a lot of certain cards would work , but i think it would be easier for players to not have to remember that "Buy" also means you "gained" it as well.


Thoughts regarding this change?

You can read about the change of Buy triggers in the secret history.
I am not a fan of this very change as the issue of forgetting that buy implies gain does not occur in my gaming group, as the wording is messy and as it makes some strong cards like Port even stronger.

But there are also good reasons for the change and it simply is as it is.

[chipperMDW]

The thing is, "When you buy" was weird from the start. "Buying" a card is a process that ultimately (usually) includes gaining it. But "When you buy" never meant "When you've completed the buying process"; it really meant "[At this certain specific point during the buying process]." It was more like a "When you pay" or "When you choose to buy." Or maybe a "When you buy, first."

Now that these triggers are supposed to happen after the gain (after the entire buying process), continuing to say "When you buy" but changing that to mean "When you've completed the buying process [and actually gained the card]" seems like it would make the most sense. It doesn't use a goofy wording, it makes "When you buy" mean what I would have expected it to mean, and it makes cards behave as currently desired.

The only weird thing I can think of would be: is the "When you gain" trigger window the same as the "When you buy" trigger window? Like, right now, there's just a single trigger window, so you wouldn't want to add another one that happens basically at the same time for people to wonder if it came first or last or if you could reorder triggered effects between them. Is it a problem to have a single trigger window handling things specified with two different wordings? I dunno.

Of course, using "When you buy" would mean using the same words but having them mean something different from what they used to mean, which isn't ideal. So maybe it could be "When you've bought" or "When you buy... afterwards."

"When you gain... due to buying it"? That's not much better than the current way, I guess.

[Donald X.]

I should have never done "when buy" (it confuses casual players); I realized that and eventually went through and weeded it out of old sets, and stopped doing new ones. But for cards not getting replaced, e.g. Haggler, I still had to let the cards function. Haggler loops if it just triggers on gains. So.

Changing the definition of "when buy" does not seem remotely as simple as not having "when buy" at all.