You can give Garth the levels, even though he will only gain 1 level. From the rulebook, page 11 (emphasis mine):
And speaking of heroes dying, whenever a hero dies, one (in-play) opposing hero levels up twice for free. The active player chooses which hero if there are multiple opposing heroes, and they can only choose a hero that actually can level up at least once.
So you could write:
If Gunpoint Taxman kills the patrolling unit in the SCAVENGER slot, it steals the 1 gold generated by Scavenger from the opposing player.
That doesn’t make sense. “whenever a hero dies, one (in-play) opposing hero levels up twice for free.”
Right, but the rules clearly state that you may pick any opposing hero that can level up at least once. If you pick a hero one level below max (explicitly allowed by the rules), you do as much as you can, so you’ll level them up once but not a second time.
Warning: Wall of Text about needlessly detailed stuff
Okay, now you guys have made me curious about the details of resolving attacks… Turns out it gets really confusing when you think about it too hard.
In particular: When does the check happen when something is dead? Is “dies” a triggered effect from having too much damage or does the “attack” event read: 1) Both Combatants deal combat damage 2) Check if anything died (like it is worded in the rulebook) and so has to instruct you specifically to look for dead things?
But that doesn’t say anything about other sources of damage like Shadow Blade - and Shadow Blade basically needs the target to die before resolving the second part of its ability, so in this case “dies” would need to be a triggered effect that can happen between the two effects on Shadow Blade.
I think it would make the most sense if “dies” is a triggered effect and the “attack” effect reads:
A deals its combat damage to B and B deals its combat damage to A. (one event, only after this single event is resolved do we check if something is triggered)
So to take the example from the game:
I have: Gunpoint Taxman [1 damage, Frenzy from Drakk]
Opponent has: Argagarg Lvl.5 [+1/+1 rune, 2 damage] patrolling in Scavenger. 0 gold.
This raises the question though, that if I choose that Gunpoint Taxman dies first, does the Gunpoint Taxman ability get triggered at all (regardless of whether the opponent has gold or not)? If Gunpoint Taxman is already dead then can something on it trigger?
Also how does the “dies” effect know, that Gunpoint Taxman was the killer so that information can be checked by the Gunpoint Taxman ability trigger? Is the Gunpoint Taxman ability not a trigger after all but something like “Attacks: Add this effect to the end of the queue: If the target of the attack died, steal 1 gold from that opponent.”?
Most of the things that you think are triggered abilities, actually are not, and so far fewer things end up on the queue. In particular, dying is not a triggered ability. The game is constantly checking units and heroes to see if they have as many or more points of damage than their health, and if that is the case they immediately die and go to discard. This overrides the queue, and always takes priority.
Gunpoint Taxman attacks Argagarg. Nothing is on the queue at this point
Gunpoint Taxman and Argagarg deal damage to each other simulaneously. They both have at least as much damage as health, and so they both die (again, simultaneously). Note that it has been specifically ruled that units/heroes can trigger on death abilities as they are dying (otherwise ‘Dies’ abilities would be pointless), and so the game checks to see if either of these deaths fires any triggered abilities. It finds 2, one from scavenger, and one from Gunpoint Taxman. These are both added to the queue in an order determined by the active player.
The active player can choose to have the scavenger bonus at the front of the queue, in which case he gets to steal the gold, or he can put the taxman ability at the front of the queue, in which case there is no gold to steal when it fires.
The Taxman ability only triggers if the Taxman was the killer, so the effect on the queue is ‘steal 1 gold’. It doesn’t need to check the killer at that point.
since when this thread has become: “let’s semantics”? :’(
Thanks a lot for this answer!
So dying is a special kind of effect and my silly rules don’t apply to it 
.
So if multiple units die simultaneously, all the deaths get resolved and only afterwards you check for triggers ALL of these deaths might have triggered simultaneously.
So it is not “Argagarg dies” and “Gunpoint Taxman dies” (two effects), but “Argagarg and Gunpoint Taxman die” (one effect).
Yes, that’s right
It’s important to understand the logic behind the rules. That allows you to understand not just one specific situation you don’t understand, but gives you a framework to understand other situations you may encounter in the future. This is why most games have “base rules” (how things work all of the time) and “exceptions” (this thing breaks the base rules) to allow you to more easily absorb and learn how to play.
This is why it’s very important to discuss that tokens go to the discard pile when they die, but then immediately remove themselves from the discard and trash themselves/move themselves to the Codex. Without that, you have a bunch of interactions that don’t make sense in a larger framework. It’s the same with the timing rules of abilities, but because timing rules have WAY more interactions than tokens and the nuts and bolts of the way they work aren’t clearly defined in the rulebook, there’s unfortunately a lot to discuss so that they’re well understood.
But Gunpoint Taxman’s ability isn’t an “on death” ability.
It seems weird that he can be seeing gold collected after a thing dies and steal that all before he dies.
I’m pretty sure kills means ‘deals damage to something causing it to die’ so it is an ‘on death’ ability (just an ‘on something else’s death’ ability).
All abilities can trigger as something dies, is the main point. “Dies:” abilities are just the most obvious case.
This relates to how bugblatter works too. If you judgment day my 2 captured bugblatters and whatever else, both bugblatters ability will trigger for all units that die, including each other.
If I kidnap mox with a tech II unit it play it just poofs right? Similarly, if I kidnap the mox without a tech II unit in play, but I then play a tech II unit the mox would poof, right?
Indeed it is thus.
Gunpoint Taxman has a triggered ability, so we are dealing with 2 triggered abilities to enqueue at the same time when you kill a Scavenger with Gunpoint Taxman.
Shadow Blade does not have any triggered ability. So (normally) when you kill a Technician with Shadow Blade, there’s only 1 trigger. Choosing the order of that 1 trigger is not a very powerful choice.
I’d like to have this better recorded sometime! We check for dead stuff “all the time.” That means when resolving a spell or ability that does multiple things sequentially, stuff will be checked for death and die after each part of the spell or ability. Stuff like 2 damage to your base when your tech 1 building dies, losing the game when your base dies, getting rid of 1 copy of a Legendary thing if you somehow end up with 2, or moving tokens and heroes out of your discard pile when they just died also happens “all the time.”
As an aside, this is one of the places where the low-level rules differ from MtG. In MtG if I kill my Raging Goblin with Lightning Bolt, my Lightning bolt will finish resolving and go to my graveyard before the game checks that Raging Goblin is supposed to die, so the Raging Goblin will be the top card of my graveyard. In a similar situation in Codex, my Lightning Bolt would be the top card of my discard pile.
Can you sacrifice Forecasted units while they’re in the future? Or can they literally only be interacted with by cards that specify that they work on Forecasted units?
The “forecasted” zone isn’t in play, so my impression is that nothing can touch those cards unless otherwise specified.
Am I reading you correctly?
It seems that you are saying that when you kill a Technician with Shadow Blade’s first ability, the triggered Technician bonus happens, then you move on sequentially to the second Shadow Blade ability (if Shadow Blade killed the unit that it hit, opponent discards).
So if the opponent had a 5-card hand, they would draw up to 6, then discard 1 of those 6 randomly?
So what makes Gunpoint Taxman’s ability triggered and Shadow Blade’s second ability not triggered?
Is it that Taxman uses “Whenever Gunpoint Taxman kills a patroller” while SB uses “If it dies” (i.e., “when” = triggered, “if”=sequential, non-triggered)?
Wouldn’t that make Scavenger and Technician non-triggered, since they also use the exact same phrase, “if it dies,” in their definitions in the rulebook (p. 5)?