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Funny you should mention this. It's been discussed by the elders a few times in the past and came up again on our call last week. It's on the list of things to review for the late summer REG update.

I second the motion!

I also am in favor of this change- in Type 2 it can be quite hard to remember what I have in my discard pile vs deck for a card like Music Leader or A Soldier's Prayer. It would be really nice to be able to check the discard pile first! 

I would be in favour. I don't mind the current state, but I think it would be nice. Any cards that day "search discard" would still count as searches, right?

While I'm not completely opposed to the idea, it should be considered that allowing a player to view his discard pile at any time could also lead to more opportunities for cheating. Obviously cheating is always a potential issue but if a player is going back and forth quickly from his hand to his discard pile, it would make it that much easier.

Quote from: The Guardian on May 17, 2016, 10:25:58 AM

While I'm not completely opposed to the idea, it should be considered that allowing a player to view his discard pile at any time could also lead to more opportunities for cheating. Obviously cheating is always a potential issue but if a player is going back and forth quickly from his hand to his discard pile, it would make it that much easier.

If I wanted to cheat in this game it would already be so hilariously easy, and moving stuff between my hand and discard pile would be more obvious than other ways I could already cheat.  Other games allow you to look at your discard and yet cheaters tend to do things more like stacking their decks than cheat with discard.

I guess I'm looking at it more from a T2 perspective where I'm going to have 3 or 4 copies of a card and my opponent would have no idea if I managed to slip one from my discard pile to my hand. In T1 that's far less likely to happen since the opponent can say "Wait, didn't you play that card already?"

And yet in other games where you are allowed multiple copies of cards in all formats, this is still not a popular form of cheating.  I suspect because this is still a fairly obvious thing to do because you can pay attention to card totals in hand, and since discard piles are available to all you can easily notice if cards start disappearing from them.

We trust people not to cheat in easier ways in this game, I think we have to be able to trust them here.

well, I would think that it is a much harder way to cheat, and a simple way to make it harder is that people need to put their hand down before they look at the discard. that would make it where a player is less likely to take something, and it would be more obvious if they did.

Quote from: wyatt_marcum on May 17, 2016, 11:24:40 AM

well, I would think that it is a much harder way to cheat, and a simple way to make it harder is that people need to put their hand down before they look at the discard. that would make it where a player is less likely to take something, and it would be more obvious if they did.

That's what I was thinking would need to be the guideline for viewing your discard pile if we ended up going that direction. Something like "A player may view his discard pile but must first place his hand face down on the table" (i.e. you cannot view your hand and discard pile together).

I like this Idea! In other games when they cheat it is when they are a able to view the discard and had at same time. Making the rule to put the hand face down on the table is a great idea.

Maybe it's not necessary, but a more general rule could also be that you cannot view two "unknown" locations simultaneously. For example, if I use Urim and Thummim to look at my opponent's hand I cannot look back and forth between his hand and mine--I would put my hand down until I was finished looking at his.

and "because cheating" is a really weak argument against making this change.

Maybe in this particular case it shouldn't carry much weight (though that is really a matter of opinion, not fact), but personally I think that whenever a rule change is made (no matter how minor it seems) that involves what a player can/cannot do outside of special abilities then the potential for unfair play should be considered.

I only said cheating is something that should be considered in the discussion, not that it should end the discussion, which is why I furthered the idea that wyatt had. 

FTR, I see "because other card games" as a weak argument, but that's just me

Maybe it's not necessary, but a more general rule could also be that you cannot view two "unknown" locations simultaneously. For example, if I use Urim and Thummim to look at my opponent's hand I cannot look back and forth between his hand and mine--I would put my hand down until I was finished looking at his.

I am very much against this idea.  You may not think other card games is a good argument, but other card games have done this for years without needing these special rules to prevent cheating.  And that's not to say they haven't needed rules to prevent cheating.  But Redemption doesn't have rules to try to stop the easiest ways to cheat like other games do.  Deck stacking would be very easy in Redemption, we don't even have rules on how you have to shuffle your deck.  People pile shuffle at major events, and this a) doesn't randomize your deck and b) can easily be used to stack your deck, but we have no actual rules (at least not in the REG) that prevent people from shuffling this way.  Other games do, and in fact one such game recently had a DQ  for a player who was 10-0 at an event for not shuffling in a way that would properly randomize his deck.   If I wanted to stack my deck in Redemption, I pretty easily could.

Another form of cheating I could easily do in Redemption would be to add and remove cards from my decks in between rounds.  Other games have had problems preventing people from doing this, yet in Redemption we aren't required to even submit decklists for any event below a top cut of nationals.  If a dominant configuration wasn't working out for me in a tournament I could easily just swap a couple out in a tournament, and I doubt anyone would ever be the wiser.  And none of this discussion has even touched on one of the easiest ways to cheat that other games don't have a problem with but Redemption does, hiding souls.  If I want to stick a soul in my artifact pile, I can probably get away with it a lot of the time.

What I'm saying is that, despite the fact that these other forms of cheating have been problematic for other games that have larger tournaments with bigger prize pools for decades, they haven't had a problem with people cheating off being able to view their discard pile, or by being able to view multiple things at once.  And yet, despite the fact that Redemption has obvious vulnerabilities to cheating, there is now apparently a focus on preventing cheating in an area that has demonstrably not been a problem for some reason.

I can't think of a reason to arbitrarily restrict players in the name of "preventing cheating" here when we are clearly willing to trust players to not cheat when given easier opportunities.