I don’t believe so. I think the tower only uses its detect ability if it has to actually detect something.
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If you attack twice with something that has stealth or invisible, like Rampaging Elephant with Unphase
I guess I’m also having trouble imagining what situation this applies to, can you give an example?
I suppose maybe something that has Haste, attacks, and then is flickered by Geiger? So like:
- Opponent has tower
- Cala on the board, Behind the Ferns up
- Nimble Fencer comes down, attacks, tower detects it
- Geiger flickers fencer, now it’s fresh and stealthy and hasty
- Fencer attacks again
The question is then, does the tower detect the second fencer attack? My guess would be no, as it’s a “fresh” unit and “hasn’t been detected” (even though it sort-of has?), but I have no idea.
I would think in @JesusBeard’s example of Elephant + Invis, it would be detected on the second attack, as it’s the “same unit” that’s “already been detected”.
Rampaging elephant and Ready or Not are the only ways I can think of where the same entity attacks twice in a turn. Geiger’s maxband and bouncing effects temporarily remove the unit from the board and completely refresh its state. Using Geiger to flicker a disguised monkey will get past the tower since it is essentially the same as playing two different monkeys.
I’d say the answer is no. Even though the unit can attack again, nothing has changed its “detected” status for the turn. The real question is if you can make a unit invisible AGAIN after it has been detected with something like unphasing. Still very niche since it’s only useful in the above situation where the unit can attack twice.
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I could swear I brought this issue up just recently.
The answer was no. Even if you attack with stealth unit, ready it, give it invisible and attack again. The tower still sees it
This is a good example of the situation I am asking about. I don’t know if the tower will ‘waste’ its reveal on something already revealed or not.
This example gets the closest to what I think Coiser is asking. The question has a lot going on, though.
My impression is that tower only detects things if they are not otherwise detected. There is exactly 1 permanent detector, Eyes of the Chancellor. On an opponent’s turn, do both the Tower and Eyes reveal the first attacker, or does Eyes reveal it, and the tower doesn’t see anything with stealth to reveal?
Addendum: Does removing Eyes of the Chancellor actually let things that were in play then behave as though they have stealth?
Previous rulings on Tower say that once a tower has detected something, it stays detected for the remainder of the turn. So the Unphased Rampaging Elephant would definitely stay detected for its second attack against a tower. To extend the example a bit, what if the Unphased Elephant was detected during an attack, and then the tower was destroyed by a second stealthy attacker, would the Unphased Elephant stay detected or be able to walk past the patrol for its second attack? Previous rulings seem to indicate the tower destruction is irrelevant once it has detected something, THEREFORE, destroying Eyes of the Chancellor would similarly not undetect anything. HOWEVER, Eyes of the Chancellor is a Detector, while the Tower has a one time detect ability, and they could be functionally different.
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My impression is that towers reveal the first unit with Stealth or Invisible that attacks each turn. It doesn’t matter whether that target is trying to bypass patrollers or whether it also has another evasion ability (e.g. Unstoppable) which allows it to ignore patrollers even when detected. The first time each turn a unit with Stealth or Invisible attacks each turn, Tower detects it. The clarifications are pretty clear that once a Tower has detected something, it remains revealed for the rest of the turn, and there doesn’t seem to be any indication that destroying the tower removes this effect.
If it is as simple as ‘Tower always reveals the first attacking unit with Stealth or Invisible’, then it also doesn’t matter whether the unit is already detected due to some other effect. I would say the only reason to believe this might not be the case is that the ruling about revealing e.g. Unstoppable units is that the Tower does that ‘so that it can deal 1 damage to the attacker’. If the rule instead is ‘Tower reveals the first attacking unit it can’t deal damage to’, then another detector will mean that it won’t use up it’s ability until the detector is removed, as it can deal damage to all units.
I think @sharpobject is probably the only one who can answer this one…
Tower’s full ability is something like:
The first time something with Stealth or Invisible attacks you while you do not have a Detector, it gets “detected” and cannot benefit from Stealth/Invisible that turn.
So, if you have Eyes out, the Tower will never attempt to detect anything, and the first S/I attacker after Eyes gets destroyed will be detected by the tower
The Detector keyword doesn’t continuously reveal things, it’s just a flag that the Stealth/Invisible keywords look for to see if they do anything. It is only checked at the moment an attack is declared (and when deciding if the tower does damage).
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If the Detector keyword does not reveal things for the remainder of the turn in which they have been detected in, then you can end up with:
A unit with S/I attacks; the game sees that the opponent has a card with the ability Detector, so it makes it attack following that rule. The opponent also has a tower, but it doesn’t use its reveal ability.
After the attack, they (somehow) make it so that all the opponents detectors are gone. They also destroy their opponents tower.
Next they (somehow) attack with the same unit again.
The game sees that the opponent does not have any cards with the Detector ability, and that the attacker has not been ‘revealed this turn’, therefore it can now use S/I during the attack as normal to sneak past patrolling defenders, etc
This outcome seems strange to me because it implies that the tower ‘reveals ability’ reveals something for the duration of the turn, but the Detector ability does not. i.e. a Tower reveal is ‘better’ than a Detector reveal is.
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Source? I don’t doubt it, but it would be nice to know where all this ‘full ability’ text comes from.
I’m pretty sure this is true - why do you think it’s strange?
Tower is a ‘first-time-per-turn’ ability which creates an effect which lasts until end of turn. Detectors are a constant effect, and so cease as soon as their source disappears. These are both fairly common constructs in both this game and others like it.
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That is how I understand it to work as well.
I don’t think its strange for an ability to be once per turn, and another to be a constant effect. I’m generally fine with that.
I think its strange because of how I imagine this transpiring on a battlefield, something like:
Tower example:
Tower guard: We found a stealth unit.
Commander: Good, watch him.
Guard: We see him, and will continue to watch him this turn.
Other guard: Commander, our tower has been destroyed, the guard watching the stealth unit is dead.
Commander: No problem, we (somehow) know who the revealed thing is until this turn is over.
Detector example:
EotC: I found a stealth unit.
Commander: Good, watch him.
Eotc: I see him, and will continue to watch him.
Guard: Commander, our EotC is gone, we lost track of the stealth unit.
Commander: Big problem, we (somehow) don’t know who the revealed thing is anymore.
In the tower example, if I assume another guard watches the revealed thing in the towers absence, then I can reasonably expect it to happen in the EotC case as well. I can’t find any “imaginative” reason why you would know the revealed thing for the rest of the turn in the tower case, but not the EotC case.
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Well, yeah I guess I put it in the same place in my brain as the reason why Midori somehow loses the ability to fly during my opponent’s turn, or the reason why when Drakk falls in battle the units around him are no longer Frenzied, but remain Hasted…
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This example highly amuses me, if only because the (to me) most correct response is: “A wizard did it.”
edit: please note, I actually agree, and would prefer the tower and Eyes function the same regarding detection lasting the whole turn.
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If it helps, you can think of the Tower as actively placing “detected” on something, compared to the “aura of detection” that Eyes of the Chancellor or Grave emit.
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I think of it as the Tower piercing the enemy veil with its arrow, while EoTC and Grave raises your side’s awareness for veiled units which ‘goes over’ the veil. A pierced veil stays pierced, but a heightened awareness is lost when the thing boosting it is gone.
But then again, trying to apply appropriate flavor to game mechanics only goes so far. My personal favourite examples are Bigby learning to do a Hadoken for all of two minutes using Jurisdiction to cast Reversal, a strangely pacifist Blackhand Dozed pleading for the opponent’s base when it starts to crumble, or Grave doing carpenter work on your base with a strangely diverse martial arts style.
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I’m with @Coiser and @zhavier: I think they should work the same.
But props for coming up with a fantasy-logical explanation as to why they’d be different!
When the first stealth/invisible thing attacks, the guard in the Tower hits it with an exploding bag of glowing radioactive dye. They only keep one bag of dye on hand though, and the delivery of the new one doesn’t come until after the turn.
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