Rules Questions thread

I’ve only played here, so I personally don’t understand where you’re coming from. I understood the rules outside of edge cases, but I certainly didn’t understand how to play well, and got happily pummelled for a few months. If someone needs more instant feedback, they’re probably not trying to play by forum.

?????

I’m legitimately baffled by this; it’s not “gatekeeping” for the person who created and maintains a website to have a life outside of doing that, and if that’s not what you mean I have no idea what you do mean. This seems like a really aggressive way of making whatever point you’re trying to make.

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In case it wasn’t clear, I’m pretty sure that none of the people responsible for the Codex Card DB site are Sirlin Games employees. Maintaining it is not their job.

In any case, it’s a great exaggeration to say that the site, or updating it, is required to figure out how the game works. If people have the rules and the cards, they can go ahead and play as they understand the rules. Yeah, they might find out about the rules clarifications later, and have to change how they play a bit. So what?

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I mean, my experience has been losing games and being pointed to something posted on this thread 5-7 years ago as the only explanation available. Often the thing I’m being pointed to doesn’t seem to directly address my misunderstanding, and I have to research what the initial context of the answer applied to and try to judge if it actually applies to my misunderstanding. Perhaps when you learned it was during the time when you could ask a question here and get a direct answer from someone directly responsible for the rules’ clarifications. That is clearly no longer the case.

This thread isn’t very easy to read to figure out what’s going on.

And the rulings are not obvious by any stretch. Prynn’s card is “poorly written” so we interpret it very different than how it’s written, but we bend over to extreme lengths to make an angry dancer flippable.

Maybe codex isn’t dead if codexcarddb isn’t being updated, but codexcarddb is dead then. It needs to be replaced if it can’t be updated.

I joined about 3 1/2 years ago, and the questions thread was already extremely long. I started off playing casual monocolour games, however, where most of the thread is not relevant, and I was losing simply because I didn’t know how to play well.

Again, I think you’re getting “learning how to play (well)” with “learning exactly how all the card interactions work”. The latter is not necessary for newcomers, but I can see it feeling like that if you jump straight into multicolour tournaments, which is most of the activity here these days.

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With Prynn, I believe fading is the only way for her to die during the upkeep step, so the wording “Dies during upkeep: Opponents skip their next draw step.” should work, correct?

What exactly is the issue with flipping dancers? I’m currently using the wording: “Sacrifice [This]: Your [Dancers] become 2/1 Unstoppable [Angry Dancers]”.

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There’s some weird stuff that happens if you have Dancers copy each other with Manufactured Truth, then flip them. It’ll come up if you search the topic for Dancers flipping. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it come up in a game.

I feel like my brain is melting trying to read this stuff. As far as I can tell, using Manufactured Truth on a dancer or angry dancer wouldn’t ever be useful, so I don’t think it matters very much if my rules diverge there. If there is any scenario I’m missing where doing so would win you the game and you can’t win without it, please correct me there.

The one thing I can’t figure out is, what happens to mirror tokens copying a dancer when you stop the music?

Also my current wording doesn’t account for the “limit: 3” applying to both dancers and angry dancers, I’ll have to adjust that.

They don’t have a second side to flip to, so nothing happens.

There are probably cases where having an extra 2 unstoppable damage lets you eke out a base kill for the win, but I wouldn’t worry about getting 100 % of the edge cases straight. Trying to correctly implement everything for multicolour has killed off a few fan attempts at rules-enforced digital versions.

Yes, but using manufactured truth to make a dancer copy another dancer and then flipping, which is what causes all the weird corner cases, doesn’t ever result in more unstoppable damage than you’d have without doing that, as far as I can tell.

And yeah, I agree, my priority is to make the game easy to play. I want to clarify these corner cases when possible because I know a lot of work has gone in to balancing the game for competitive play. I want to preserve that balancing, but I’m happy to leave minor things that aren’t relevant to competitive play. One of the issues is I don’t have much experience playing the game at a high level so I don’t necessarily know what is or isn’t relevant offhand.

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You might want to specify that it’s “during your upkeep”, since Banefire Golem can kill her on an opponent’s upkeep.

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good catch, thanks

OK, I think I’ve found an elegant solution in the wording for Harmony:

Whenever you play a spell, summon a 0/1 [Dancer] token and put a frenzy rune on it (limit: 3 [Dancers]).

Sacrifice [This]: Your [Dancers] with frenzy runes permanently become 2/1 unstoppable [Angry Dancers]. Remove all frenzy runes from them.

I can only think of one situation where this wording would diverge from Codex Classic: Player 1 and Player 2 both have a Dancer in play, P2 also has a Harmony in play. P1 polymorphs P2’s Dancer into a squirrel. P2 could win the game this turn, but they need an Angry Dancer. They get one by using Manufactured Truth to make their dancer a copy of the opponent’s dancer and then sacrifice Harmony. It still has the requisite rune and it is now a dancer turned into a squirrel turned into a dancer, so Harmony’s effect will permanently change it into an Angry Dancer.

I think this scenario should be unlikely enough to not be an issue, P2 would need to be in a situation where they can’t use Manufactured Truth to get the win any other way and they have no other spells they can play (thereby creating a new dancer, flipping it, and then copying it onto their squirrel in the same way that is possible in Codex Classic).

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Apologies for the triple post here, but I’ve been reading all the posts above about Gargoyle. What a mess of a card. I have several questions I haven’t seen discussed.

  1. Does Gargoyle effectively have haste? That doesn’t seem like the intent of the card, but if its ability can override Entangling Vines it seems like it should override arrival sickness too. “Can attack.” is strictly better than “Can attack the turn it arrives”.

  2. I assume that if it’s ability can override Entangling Vines it can also override Moment’s Peace, correct? Thematically this makes even less sense, but it seems pretty clear cut from the rules-as-written.

  3. If you activate its ability and then use Manufactured Truth on another Gargoyle, is it indestructible? I’m not sure if “it isn’t indestructible” should be interpreted as “it loses indestructible” or “it loses indestructible and can’t gain it for the duration”. Additionally, after Manufactured Truth could you activate its ability a second time for another +3 power?

Regarding #1 and #2, you make good points, however my personal interpretation is that we should treat “can’t attack at all” as different from “can’t attack the turn it comes under your control” as different from “can’t attack something with an unattackable ability”, in which case, “can attack” would overwrite “can’t attack at all” but not “can’t attack the turn it comes under your control” or “can’t attack something with an unattackable ability”, in which case the answer would be no. Not using this interpretation would seem to have various unintended consequences, such as Gargoyle’s ability allowing it to attack invisible things without the benefit of a detector. I’m not aware of an official ruling on these questions, however.

EDIT: I misunderstood question 3. I now realize you mean: if Gargoyle A uses its ability, then Manufactured Truth makes Gargoyle A a copy of Gargoyle B, does Gargoyle A have indestructible? The answer is yes, it does, but it also can’t attack or patrol, as the new “can’t attack” is more recently applied than the “can attack” effect from the ability. It retains flying and +3 ATK. What I’m not sure about is whether or not it can use the newly acquired activated ability to gain another +3 ATK and allow it to attack, however… it’s a question of whether or not the new activated ability is considered the same as the old one for purposes of the Once-per-turn.

  1. It doesn’t let the Gargoyle attack as if it has haste. The rulebook has some unfortunate wording, where arrival fatigue disallows a card exhausting itself for an ability and a card attacking, which would mean that a “can attack” effect would allow a unit to attack as if it had haste. This would have been less confusing if a card couldn’t exhaust itself for any reason (and couldn’t attack, you still need that because of readiness).

Awesome, I think I have a wording for Gargoyle I’m happy with:

Indestructible

Imprisoned (Can’t attack or patrol.)

1: Put a frenzy rune on this (limit 1), while it has this rune it gains flying, +3 ATK, and it loses any instances of indestructible or imprisoned it had when it gained the rune. Remove this rune at the start of your next turn.

Entangling Vines gives the attached unit imprisoned, so that interaction should be fairly explicit here. Tarras Q also has imprisoned, but just for flavor reasons, there shouldn’t be any potential interaction there. Given the jury is still out on whether Manufactured Truth could let it active its ability a second time I’ve decided to assume no, the wording to make it possible would be a nightmare.

Onto another problem card, Gilded Glaxx. I want to make him technically indestructible, so I can add “non-indestructible” clauses to obliterate and the various other cards that would ignore it, but it doesn’t actually work the same way as indestructible so it also needs a bunch of other effects that supersede it.

While you have gold in your gold pile, [Gilded Glaxx] has indestructible, +0/+9999, and it cannot be destroyed, trashed, or returned to your hand. When it is dealt combat damage it loses these effects until the end of that attack.

Barring some combo that can deal 10,003 non-combat damage I think this is mechanically identical to the printed version, just more explicit in how it works. The indestructible does get to stand in for “can’t be sacrificed” so that works. And getting to write “+0/+9999” on a card is very fun.

Don’t forget plague lab

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Haha, I did when I first started adding new runes to track stuff. Plague Lab now reads:

2, T: For any number of units, heroes, or upgrades with runes, add another rune of a kind already there. This effect cannot add temporary runes. (A temporary rune is any rune that will be removed at the start of a future turn).

I don’t love the wording here, it’s a little inelegant, but it works.

Let’s be honest, Entangling Vines should prevent Gargoyle from attacking. Sharpo ruled it the way he did because it’s ‘consistent’ with how Gargoyle itself works (it overrides its own effect, because later effects override earlier ones), but it just creates a whole mess of other issues that I’m sure he didn’t think through.

If I had it my way, I would rule that Entangling Vines supercedes all other effects. That might involve changing the wording of the card, but it would be much cleaner and simpler overall.
It also appeals to Sirlin’s general ethos of ‘come on’, as in ‘come on, it should totally work that way’. (I don’t always agree with that method of rulings, but I think it’s right in this instance.)

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