My intuition is that jail and graveyard being trashed causes the units there to go to discard, but yea, there is no ruling that I know of. If nothing else, it would vastly increase the power of trashing those cards, which just seems wrong.
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Thanks for the replies even though we didn’t find a definite answer.
I take it that all of you play with discarding the units in case the graveyard is destroyed in a normal way, like by combat damage, right? Because in my understanding this case is also not clearly stated in the rules as well, but that situation must have happpened to a lot of you plenty of times, right?
Yeah, you definitely discard them if the Graveyard is destroyed. Otherwise you could easily trash several your opponent’s dead units, which would quickly get silly.
My thinking was that this is just the huge disadvantage of the card, which otherwise just seems like a crazy card advantage engine on tech level 0, which seems absurdly powerful to my newbie eye… But obviously I’ll just take over your interpretation of the card.
For what it’s worth, Sirlin’s design philosophy has long been to not try to cover every edge case with the wording of card text, but rather make sure that the majority of cases are covered by reading the card and appealing to “come on” if needed. In this case, I’m fairly sure he would say that the intent of the card is for any buried units to be discarded if Graveyard ever leaves play.
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Got an interesting new question here fam:
Quince’s midband does not seem to target. However, it does seem to imply the unit to be copied must be “in play” (you can’t just decide it’s a copy of any tech 2 you can think of). So what about “visible” to Quince?
If I cast Unphase on, say, a Hyperion, it is invisible until my next upkeep. During an opposing Quince’s turn, can he copy my invisible Hyperion (assuming Quince doesn’t have a tower or Eyes of the Chancellor to detect said Hyperion)?
I can’t think of a written rule that says Quince couldn’t copy it, but it also just feels wrong to me. Like the idea is he can copy things that “exist” to him and the idea of invisible is “you don’t know about me, it’s like I’m not there”, kind of like forecast, yeah?
I guess for Chaos Mirror and Manufactured Truth I’d have a similar confusion.
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Quince’s midband doesn’t actually define any restrictions or scope on which units are eligible to copy. I think we all just kind of assumed that the copied unit must be in play, but other cards refer to unit cards not in play as units, so RaW, you could theoretically copy something buried in a Graveyard, something trashed, or even a unit that’s from a codex not represented in the current game. It’s hard to imagine that’s the intent, but it would make Quince more viable as a starting hero, and his midband less of a once-in-a-blue-moon ability.
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Yeah as written it doesn’t seem like anything stops you from saying “This mirror is Terras Q, The Shackled”, regardless of if you’re even playing with / against Demonology (much less if TerrasQ has hit the board at some point this game).
That definitely doesn’t seem like it was intended but there’s an argument to be made for it being legal
@sharpobject we might need you on the batsignal for this one
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I think appeal to “come on” has to apply to “can Quince make a copy of a unit that isn’t in play?” I’d also say, since Invisible only says that it can’t be targeted, and the ability doesn’t target, that it can copy an invisible unit. But I’ve certainly been wrong before. 
edit: Thinking about it more, I would answer “can you do stuff to units that aren’t in play?” with something like “if a spell or effect can do something to a unit that isn’t in play, it will explicitly say so.” So we can infer a general rule that you can only “do stuff” to things that are in play. And then whether a spell or effect has the target keyword or not, you still only get to affect things in play with it.
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Short answer is
- No, it cannot copy something that is not “in play”.
- Yes, it can copy an invisible thing.
To back up
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This is similar to the concept of “in queue” or interpretation of Graveyard and Jail. The community has assumed “in play” as a condition and it works with how they have been played in the forum. Otherwise, they will be broken, so this is an easy no.
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Invisible specifically grants untargetable to things and this will not affect spells or abilities that do not target so this is a yes. If we are talking about altering the mechanism because of balance issues, then it’s a different topic of discussion but I don’t think is the case.
Here is a thought experiment to help understand.
Let’s say we are putting a cat in a room. Think of the cat entering the room as a thing entering “in play” in Codex. We all know the cat is in the room. This is never a hidden information as we all know which things are “in play”. Now, we turn off the light switch and the room is dark. We don’t know where the cat is. We know it’s still in the room, but we don’t know where exactly it is. Think of this as an invisible thing in Codex. We can’t target the damn cat because it’s dark and we can’t see. Similarly, an invisible thing becomes untargetable without a detector because the exact location cannot be identified. Targeting spells or abilities care about the location and become useless to an invisible thing. Copying something works differently. There are two conditions that targeting checks. A. is it “in play”? B. is it “targetable”?. Copying something and other non targeting spells or abilities only care about the condition A. and not B. We know which cat is in the room regardless of the room being dark. We know the information about the cat and we can copy the printed version of it even if we don’t know the exact location of it.
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Seems legit, so yes he can copy invisible things. How about forecasted ones that are not in play yet?
I think you answered it directly there: they aren’t in play so you can’t interact with them except through cards that explicitly affect forecasted cards, eg Time Spiral.
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Having target be both a special keyword and ‘the word we use to describe the things selected by a spell or ability’ makes it a bit confusing.
Replace all instances of ‘target - the keyword’ with ‘Bullseye’ makes it a bit clearer what’s going on, maybe. “Quince’s mid-band doesn’t Bullseye. You can’t target Invisible units with Bullseye effects. So can I target an Invisible unit with Quince’s mid-band?”
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Alternatively, replace non-keyword instances of “target” with “select” and that also reduces the ambiguity. “Quince’s mid-band doesn’t target. You can’t select Invisible units with targeting effects. So can I select an Invisible unit with Quince’s mid-band?”
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I can respect this for a game the size of, say, Yomi or Flash Duel. I would also say that the length of this thread demonstrates that this philosophy doesn’t scale well to more complicated rulesets. Especially the “come on” aspect.
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Actually, it’s bordering on off-topic, but I’d like to expand on the “come on” aspect.
Most of the significant answers to rules questions in the thread fall into two categories:
- The text in the rulebook / on the cards is wrong. Here is what it should say, and what the consequences are.
- The text in the rulebook / on the cards is correct. Given this very careful reading of the given words, and comparing the phrases used to where they’re used elsewhere, here is exactly what it means, and what the consequences are.
Many questions arise in the first place because, frankly, some parts of the rulebook / card texts are just wrong, and it’s not always clear which of these two situations we’re in, especially for people not trawling the card database or the questions thread. Can you imagine working out some of these rulings yourself, if you’re not aware of the queue? Or that “you” usually refers to the controller, rather than the owner?
In this context, a “come on” argument takes the approach that one or the other situation is “just common sense”. This assumes that everyone will come in with the same idea of what the “common sense” case will be, which I doubt is true: not all of us have played games like this before, for example. It also implies, I’m sure unintentionally, that the question is either disingenuous or unnecessary, as it’s obvious whether the text is correct or not. It’s insulting. Please don’t use it.
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The controller/owner thing is actually spelled out in the rulebook. But yeah, whether chain triggers should be handled as a stack or a queue is not something that players should be expected to all automatically think the same way about, and there are games that use each approach.
The biggest danger with relying on common sense, IMO, is that it’s not easy to know whether something that seems obvious will reliably be perceived as such by other people.
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I agree, and I’ll avoid doing it again in the future.
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You make a good point. This game really is complicated enough that such an argument isn’t even going to be valid in a fair number of cases, and even if it was I hadn’t considered that the person on the other end might perceive it as insulting (this was never my intent at any point, and I’m sorry if it came across that way to anyone). I’ll also be making an effort to not do that in the future.
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Can someone confirm that this is really how the queue works? I thought that, since A and B happen at the same time, C and D would go on to occur at the same time as well, rather than entering the queue in the order you resolve the simultaneous A and B. So like this:
A | C
B | D
time →
rather than like this:
A | C | D
B |… |
time →