Cactus Game Design Message Boards

Quote from: Minister Polarius on June 22, 2015, 12:45:09 PM

Currently, Gam's Speech and Covenant of Noah would not be able to stop Abandonment on Herod Agrippa II against a lone Hero.

Actually, the recent update to how Special Initiative works means you can now negate Abandonment when played on HA II against lone heroes:

His point was that if those cards are already in play, and the interpretation is that an enhancement must come from hand (be played at that time), then they cannot negate Abandonment because they cannot be used during SI, and by the time it resolves, HA II makes it a CBN capture.

I was open to the idea and championed it for you. Upon looking into it further there were reasons it would get messy and was not a good move. Dayne can probably explain those better than I. We've had so many conversations on so many topics with the REG update (including 4 hour Skype calls) that I don't remember the specifics of this one, only that we chose not to make the change.

And to address your point, it couldn't add that much complexity since it only impacts 6 cards. You say the low rate of impact means that no change should be considered, but really doesn't a low impact just mean that any change, if agreed upon, would just be easier to implement?

I've addressed this point before, the complexity comes from a complete change to the way initiative works.  Initiative allows you to play an enhancement from hand, Special Initiative pauses the game to allow you to do so.  That's it.  To add additional caveats and conditions makes it more complex for no reason.

The 'no real impact' I speak of is the actual cases where this matters.  It only matters if the ability is insteaded into something CBN (like with HAII).  That's the only thing that would change, you could still use those cards after SI is passed in all other cases (so 99.9% of the time).  To add complexity and change the way we teach initiative just because a handful of cases can be found where these cards are a little less useful is not a good rules decision.

Lastly, regardless of whether we changed the rules, cards like Gam's Speech still could not be used for SI.  It says "discard to negate" and therefore it could not be used during SI anyway (by the definitions and precedent that we have for that type of wording at this point).  The only cards that would change would be the cov/curse negates and as stated above, there is no reason to change the rules just to benefit these cards (that's really what it comes down to, as it is not more simple).  That's not why we change rules, so at this point it is not actively being looked at for the new REG (and it was already discussed, as Gabe noted).

I guess I missed this whole conversation. Are you saying that Covenant of Noah can no longer stop my complete removal from battle?

No, not at all. Only that CoN cannot be used during SI. After SI passes and the removal takes effect, you use CoN. The caveat is that the removal card has to remain in play so CoN can target it (ex: Wrath of Stan can be negated but Joe in Prison cannot).