I don’t have a useful reply to your post for now, but I think the proposed rule change makes A illegal and makes B1 legal. I also think the 2 concrete scenarios in the post are very similar to B1 and to A.
Hey, I’d like to follow up to say that we don’t plan to change this.
As a player, I am surprised by the blue readiness + manufactured truth play, even though it is pretty much the same thing I said was legal a long time ago.
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If I use Max Geiger’s max band ability on an illusion, will it die (from being an illusion), then be trashed and returned to play? Or will it just die and therefore not be returned to play?
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I believe the unit dies before it has time for the ability to even resolve.
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Illusions die instantly simply from being targeted, the exact moment that they are targeted, so there would be nothing to trash and return to play in this circumstance. This is related to why Firehouse cannot be used to clear a board of illusions (because it only re-readies when it destroys something with damage, rather than by targeting).
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You are right that the question matches scenarios A and B1 - I read then awhile back and didn’t reread them carefully. I guess to me gaining readiness the attacking (readiness is a good thing that you want!) makes more sense than losing readiness and then attacking (readiness is bad! Get rid of it if you can!) but I understand you’ve made this ruling for a reason. Thanks for the answer.
Okay, if this is the case, how do attachment spells interact with illusions? (@sharpobject)
Say you cast Spirit of the Panda on your illusion, and the illusion gets destroyed from being targeted.
The Rulebook says:
“Some are Ongoing Spells though, which means they stay in play until something says they don’t. Sometimes ongoing spells have “channeling” which means they’ll be destroyed if the hero who cast them leaves play. Other times they say they “attach” to something, and if that something is destroyed the ongoing spell gets discarded too. But if they don’t attach to anything and don’t have channeling, they’ll stick around until something specifically destroys them.”
By your reading, the illusion is never around long enough for the attachment to actually attach, right? So “that something it’s attached to” is never destroyed. So the ongoing spell should just sit around forever attached to nothing, right?
My reading is that if you target an illusion with SotP, the thing you targeted is destroyed, and the attachment is discarded, because it still knows what it was trying to attach to, and it still sees that that unit has left play.
But Geiger’s ability just says you can trash it, then return it to play. Does Geiger really “forget” which unit it targeted just because it left play from dying? Then wouldn’t Geiger’s ability also “forget” which (non-illusion) unit it targeted when the unit leaves play from being trashed? It seems like if the ability can keep track of a card when it leaves the game entirely (trashed), then it can keep track of it when it’s still in the game (albeit the discard pile).
Firehouse is a completely different case, because it specifically says, “If you destroy it this way…” meaning it cares whether the target was killed with fire or just popped from being looked at funny. It’s not that the illusion targeted died too early to be registered: it’s that it didn’t die “in this way.”
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I’m not sure about SotP, so I’ll leave that one to sharpo, but abilities can only find cards when they are where they expect them to be. If they move to another zone, the ability ‘loses track’ of them, and fizzles. So, if you had a Graveyard and a Reteller of Truths in play, and the Reteller died, there are two abilities which trigger (one from each card). The active player chooses which order to resolve them in, but the second will always fizzle. This is because both abilities ‘look for’ Reteller in the discard pile, and when they find it’s no longer there (because it was moved somewhere else by the ability which resolved first), the ability fizzles.
In the same way, Geiger’s ability is ‘looking for’ its target in play, and if that card has moved to the discard pile (because it was an illusion), or to a player’s hand (because it’s a Smoker), it ‘loses track’ and fizzles. It doesn’t lose track of the target when it trashes it, because the card is where it expected it to be when it returns to play. If for some reason the card went somewhere else than the ‘trash zone’ (is that even a thing?) then it wouldn’t return it to play.
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For example, if you use it on a Token, the Token goes to the “does not exist” zone instead of being trashed, and does not return to play.
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I’d like there to be some thing where you have to attach the attachment successfully or it gets discarded, but I’m not totally sure.
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I definitely never want to see a game where a player have a spell in play attached to nothing
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You can’t keep hiding from the Truth forever
you can do this with Two Step if you want.
I meant a spell like spirit of the panda
Channeling is clearly different mechanic and is “tethered” to the hero even if you dont physically “attach” it to the card
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While this makes sense on may levels, I am inevitably and uncomfortably reminded of the “lose track rule” in Dominion (http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Lose_Track_rule), which (in the thankfully rare-ish cases where it is needed to resolve a rules question) always confuses people, and feels like a bit of a fudge that was hurriedly introduced to deal with some rare situations.
Although Codex is undoubtedly a more complicated game than Dominion, with situations where the rules are unclear much more prevalent (part of the reason the LT rule seems ugly in Dominion is that the rules governing card interactions are mostly so clear and intuitive once some simple basic principles are understood), so it’s probably inevitable here 
I have a weird question about Martial Mastery:
If you cast it while it’s the last card in your hand, what happens?
You have nothing you can discard, so you can’t do “discard a card”.
However, unlike a spell like Doom Grasp, Martial Mastery doesn’t have the “If you do,” pre-condition on drawing two cards and looking at your opponent’s hand.
So if I can’t discard a card, do I still get to draw 2 and check my opponent’s hand?
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Sounds like a legitimate loophole.
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I guess so!
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So it is a white version of Desperation. Nifty!
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Costs one more and draws one less card, but lets you peek at opponent’s hand and you don’t have to discard your entire hand at the end of the turn. Cool.
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