Actually, this captures the explanation better. I see Bansa was trying to understand why the word queue kept coming up from us. “you have to finish resolving something before you can do something else.” This phrase created the concept of the queue. Sharpo has elaborated what the queue concept means through rulings, but the community adopted the word queue to represent the complex idea.
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Ok, fine. I will accept the fact that the community has adopted the concept of “in the queue” for the flow of game due to insufficient official rules that clarify. Reason why I was arguing is because I saw the language in the Rulebook as clearly trying to deviate from MTG, so I didn’t like that Codex ended up sharing the similar stacking thing MTG uses for instance. It just feels messy. If death is a state effect that interrupts so it dies and goes to discard and when it goes to discard and die ability triggers but then all of a sudden it stops there and waits until the second part of spell to resolve first? I mean yes, I get it because they go to the queue and all that but still. The Rulebook makes it confusing if we go by the queue concept. Anyways, I will fold here.
MtG originally did not have anywhere near the specificity in its rules that it does now, but after many rules revisions (prompted by many, many arguments between players about how the rules should be interpreted), the highly detailed rule set it now uses evolved.
I think Codex was intended to avoid MtG’s complexity, but naturally this resulted in a similar process of uncertainty about how situations should be resolved leading to clarifications. Main difference is, Codex doesn’t have any new version with an official rules rewrite.
I agree that this level of rules complexity is undesirable, but I also think it’s an unavoidable consequence of having a sufficiently large variety of sufficiently interesting game content. That being the case, and hindsight being 20/20, I think it would have been a good idea to have published 2 rulebooks: a basic one that tries to keep the rules simple and easy to understand like the existing rulebook, and an advanced one that formally explains the underlying mechanics in detail. I’m not complaining, though, because I really appreciate how much time and effort Sirlin games has invested in examining and clarifying the various rules questions that have arisen over time. Not all developers are so accommodating.
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Proving the old axiom: whosoever lies down with [wizard-chess] will get up with [an extremely detailed set of rules for wizard-chess].
ed: missed a great opportunity for “maybe the real Codex was the rules we made along the way.” damnit.
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When you stare into the queue, the queue stares back at you.
When you stare into the stack, the stack stares at you first.
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Dear all, I’m new to the game and new to this forum.
I want to repeat this question: Rules Questions thread - #1178 by Kaelii
Are the buried creatures in a graveyard discarded or do they stay in their special graveyard-zone, once the graveyarrd is trashed by a Detonate?
The answer was someone stating it should be discarded, there should be something about it in http://codexcarddb.com/ but I can’t find anything about the issue. The same question obviously can be applied to jail and I’d just love to have a definite answer to the exact ruling.
Cheers
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I can’t point to an official statement that the buried units get discarded, and unfortunately the Graveyard card doesn’t mention anything. However, do note that the Jail card explicitly mentions that inmates are discarded whenever Jail is destroyed, and that includes it being trashed.
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I think that’s wrong… indestructible doesn’t prevent units from being trashed, so I don’t think trashing is a type of destroying.
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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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