@Castanietzsche note that Bigby’s maxband, not his midband, lets him draw a card. Would you still have spent 2 gold to level Bigby and drawn a card with him not knowing you’ll draw into JD?
Oops sry
Yes I’d have done that ! I had another gameplan if I didn’t draw JD that was very card consuming and I needed to do that in any case : )
Alright then 
But wow, Judgment Day. That is a brutal topdeck, completely forgot about Bigby’s maxband. I’ve been looking at your card piles and had very much expected you to not be able to draw into it until at least the turn after. Kudos for pulling it off in the brief window during which zhavier has absolutely no units on his board as well.
Now I have no idea at all if I did the right thing on my turn. I had many targets, but I guess I’m stuck with the ones I picked.
Well, if you hadn’t attacked into Zane Red’ll have a 4/2 to play with right after Judgment Day in addition to whatever it can dish out from hand. And it’s hard to anticipate Casta drawing into it, would’ve been much more effective to attempt to kill Bigby the next round as it’s the most probable time Casta would get it, with a 4/5 chance depending on what Bigby drew, instead of having Bigby die and be guranteed to be summoned in time for JD. And if you thought about attacking Green or Black… 
So, I am apparently really good at playing factions that everoyne else wants to gang up on, even the person i convinced could be on my side 
So, yea, Don’t mind me, Ill just be over here flailing. I will also be making sure that you killing my stuff knocks your bases down.
Don’t forget Drakk’s Topband!
Being the player who needs help while everyone else is on 20 HP doesn’t sound like a bad position really. Since we don’t want to share our victory 4 ways, you know we won’t bother you for a while, so you can get away with doing some really slow plays going forward.
Again, like I explained to Casta earlier, there is no ‘sharing victory four ways’ in Codex FFA. When a base is destroyed the player with the highest base health wins, and if there are ties then the players tied for highest base health each take one more turn until the tie is broken. This is so that instead of players rushing to destroy a base at the earliest opportunity in order to snag a win when they can even at the risk of sharing the victory with some, a careful balancing act is crafted with each player jockeying for highest base health, ganging up on the leader, and protecting the player with the most vulnerable base when they’re behind (thus the lending patrollers rule).
The rest of the post hit it pretty much on the head, I think. My theory for the winning strategy in FFA is that attempting to generate game advantage and board position aggressively from the get-go isn’t actually constructive - quite the opposite, as the public flaunting marks you for group retaliation which can be hard to recover from. Rather the best thing to do is to lay low in the early game, make peace with all or simply go unnoticed, build up economically and aim for a well-timed explosive late game that steals the win quickly.
Steering the topic back onto propaganda, I think thus that the players who go unnoticed or seem weak at the moment are very much worth bothering, at least until their bases are low enough to not be competitive. At present, though, Blue is sitting pretty with a nice patrol zone and a maxband Bigby surplus having very likely teched a second copy of JD…
Man remember how you can get competitive again by repairing your base
That’s a great rule
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@feathers, there was no nullcraft for you to destroy, as Bloodburn had already killed it. @Shadowfury333 nullcraft should have been in your discard at the end of your turn. You didn’t reshuffle so its not really a big deal. The main point is, @feathers didn’t have the gold for the tech lab.
Ah, in that case I’ll just not build the Tech Lab since it’s the easiest fix. However am I allowed to change my techs based on how I would’ve played my turn without having built a tech lab and without having seen Casta’s turn (though it was fairly predictable)?
…Which is a question I would’ve asked if EricF didn’t call into question the ability for Abomination to generate gold bounty at all. @zhavier could you refrain from posting a turn until this issue is sorted out? I might have to redo my turn, either slightly or in major ways.
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No money for stuff that dies when not taking damage by losing buffs or runes or gaining debuffs or runes. (This annoying phrasing is so that Orpal and friends still “kill things” in combat).
Abomination is a debuff, so it does kill things.
I am not overly concerned with you changing your tech choice.
You mis-parsed that awkward rule.
A better phrasing is:
You are considered to “kill” an opposing unit only under these conditions:
- You deal damage to it equal to its remaining hit points with a spell or ability
- Your spell or ability says to “destroy” the unit
- You attack, and the unit dies from combat damage (regular damage or -1/-1 runes)
You are not considered to “kill” things if:
- You use a spell or ability to place -1/-1 runes on a unit
- You force a unit to be sacrificed, trashed, or returned to hand (even if a token)
- You remove something from play that was granting a HP buff, and units die because they lost that buff
- You give a unit -1/-1
- You remove the last time rune from something with Fading
@sharpobject - is that correct?
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@zhavier are you agreeing or disagreeing with the ruling here (and consequently do I change my turn merely to account for the tech lab I can’t build or for the 2 other gold I don’t have as well), since you organized the FFA?
I feel that there can be many ambiguous ways the 'kill a unit" bounty rule can be interpreted. Does a unit with damage on it that dies to polymorph give a gold? A unit that dies to Vandy’s maxband on my turn? A Gilded Glaxx with 5 runes on it that then had its controller’s gold stolen? Would I gain one gold or two from destroying an opponent’s Blackhand Dozer? Am I correct in thinking that the answer to these questions are no, no, no, and two according to the newest ruling?
Out of curiosity (and with no disrespect), can I ask the rationale behind this ruling @sharpobject? It feels strange, for example, to have Death Rites generate bounty but not Death and Decay. Since ‘destroy’ spell effects do give bounty I assumed that debuffs are just an extension of that.
That sounds good to me.
This is correct except that Vandy’s maxband should award a gold. (I mean, if something is being killed by Vandy’s maxband, that happens during Vandy’s owner’s turn, and that seems like the player who is doing the killing.)
Sure I agree with that. I don’t have a good framework for figuring out “what killed a thing” in the general case. For things that die when they are killed directly by a card effect or the rule that kills illusions it’s pretty easy, but the rest of the time things are dying because we calculated the derived state and saw that they had more damage on them than they had HP. Within my concept of the game so far, it’s hard for the game to attribute that to a specific thing! For example, a unit might die because it lost +1/+1 from Midori when it gained haste from Bloodlust, or because 2 different Abominations controlled by different players stopped being squirrels simultaneously. It’s hard to know what we should do with this stuff.
Maybe any time something dies during the resolution of a spell or ability we could attribute the death to the spell or ability, and any time something dies from gaining multiple debuffs we could attribute the death to all players involved or something? What about buffs? If we try to do this sort of attribution for loss of buffs too, we might end up with questions like “Why is it that when I kill my opponent’s two-stepped unit, I get credit for the dance partner dying, but when I kill my opponent’s River Montoya, and Two Step is later sacrificed because of its triggered ability which is owned by the Finesse player, I do not get credit?” This sort of possibility seems really bad!
Alternately we could just let people have credit for all the death that happens during their turn, but Sirlin has already let us know that this is incorrect at least for stuff that instructs players to sacrifice things.
So I’ve restricted myself to cases where it’s easy to attribute the death to a certain player.
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Is he adamant on that? If no, seems simpler to just say “you get gold for anything that dies (but you don’t control) on your turn, up to 3.”
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This game is a tough enough teach already, especially with the extra rules for multiplayer. I find it downright dismaying that anyone is even considering a “clarifaction” which consists of multiple lists of bullet points instead of your suggested 17 word alternative.
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I think the current thing is not that high-entropy when you can say it like “You get gold for enemy units dying when they die because a card effect you control directly destroyed them, or because you targeted an illusion, or because you dealt damage to them.”
I am generally in favor of reducing the complexity of the game though. Two other places where I’d like to see changes are in Mind Control vs all other change of control effects and in Sentry vs. Hotter Fire regarding sparkshot.
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I dont see much of a difference between abomination or deteriorate and sickness or wither. Which ones do grant bounties and which ones don’t?