Our group had a little bit of an ideological fight between the conservatives and the liberals. Specifically, those who would like to consider card effects as conservatively as possible when ambiguous, and those who would like to stretch until a rule confines them.
The card that hit our group and caused a few fights was the Brain Burn card. Its top text (using the current edition's wording): "Put the Villain Trash on the bottom of the Villain Deck."
Our liberal players seized on this, and combined this with the following from the Rules and Clarifications file for SotM: "When a player applies an effect that affects multiple cards, the player chooses what order the effects occur." Their conclusion is that this means that Brain Burn allows them to target each card in the Villain Trash, and thus, choose the order of the Trash before it goes on bottom of the Deck.
The conservative players in the group believe that the Brain Burn card targets the Villain Trash specifically, and does not individually target each card in the Villain Trash. This would then mean that the effect resolves instantly, with no race conditions--the Villain Trash is turned upside down in its current state, and placed immediately under the Villain Deck.
Given that a players deck, trash, and hand are define as individual entities in the game, I would say it targets the entire trash at one time. Thus, the entire trash as a single unit is moved to the bottom of the deck.
I go with this idea because it is the simpler of the two, and the idea of the design of the game is to be as simple as possible in such situations. It also makes other cards much simpler as well, such as NightMist's card which allows a deck to be switched with it's trash, (The deck becoems the trash, and the trash becomes the deck, as an atomic swap. It would be a nightmare (and potentially an undesireble time extension of the game) to move each pile from one to the other one card at a time.)
But maybe that's just the conservatie in me talking, heheheh.
There's a rule that says, as I recall, when something is ambiguous the players decide.
That could be used to say that the players decide the order of the cards or it could be used to say that the players decide whether or not the cards get ordered.
Generally, the rule is read the card as plainly as possible and do the thing it says. If it was meant to target each card in the trash individually, that's what it would say. It doesn't, though, it targets the trash itself.
Also, who wants that downtime while players optimize the order of a deck?
There's 9+ pages of rules questions here where we debate the semantics of things like the very definitions of words that would attempt to prove you wrong.
Is that actually in the rulebook somewhere? Or is that just the generally accepted policy for most games with possibly ambiguous rules?
Wow.. let me start off by saying that I've logged plenty of sotm games, and Brain Burn is very seldomly used. When it is used, it tends to be for the "getting things out of the trash" purpose. Changing the order on the cards of the deck really practically never matters, so it probably wasn't worth arguing about...
With that said, I'm inclined to agree with the Liberals here. None of Visionary's other cards that screw with the deck mention that you can choose the order, but you can. For example, Precognition you can choose the order of what goes on the bottom of the deck, as well as Prophetic Vision. So the fact that it does not specifically mention that you can choose the order does not bug me.
Also, if there are cards in the trash you don't want to bring back under any circumstances (cohorts, flagships, etc.) you could put them at the VERY bottom, so there is some tactical advantage there. Or if you wanted to put all the Darken the Skies at the top, with the mask at the bottom, so the MAtriarch is basically sitting around for a few rounds, you could do that.
Not sure what you mean exactly, it looks at a specific number of cards (3) as opposed to all the cards in the trash, which is a variable number. That is the only difference.
The specific situation was one in which the players had managed to get Matriarch down to 0 cards in deck, 0 cards in play, and all cards in trash. The Visionary player was choosing to go out with a bang, by doing Brain Burn as their final card (the damage would kill them).
The liberal view of it was that this would allow us to stack both Carrion Fields at the top of the deck, followed by 3 Darken The Skies, followed by both Horrid Cacophonies, followed by Huginn, Muginn, and finally all the Fowls and the Mask. This would give the remaining players 9 turns of peace before the 10th turn that brought out the mask and all Fowls. By this point, the group should have been able to easily burn away both Carrion Fields, and Tachyon should have the ability to cancel damage dealt by the Matriarch in response to the Fowls dying.
If it looked at individual cards in the Villain Trash, it would read " Put each card from the Villain Trash on the bottom of the Villain Deck." As is, it talks about the Villain Trash as a whole. I would prefer it if it had you shuffle, but that's neither here nor there.
I guess I kind of see what you're saying, but I still disagree. I say for something that deals herself 40 damage, let her stack the deck however she wants.
Addtiionally, there are times when players may encounter ambiguous situations, such as tied HP. In any ambiguous situation, the players choose the outcome.
There are ways to reduce that damage (Ra converts all Heroes' damage to Fire damage and then makes Hero character cards immune to it), but that is a good point. I'm just strongly averse to the downtime for ordering 20-25 cards. Nothing will bring the game to a grinding halt quite like a player reading and individually valuating every card in a Villain's deck. But honestly for all the times we've done this to 2-5 cards we've probably ordered them without even thinking about it. It feels right to the way the game normally works to be able to do that with a small number of cards, I guess it's better to reward players for taking one for the team in these crazy 0.0001% of all games type of circumstances. I'm still on the fence based on the wording, but I hereby switch to the liberal interpretation. This has the added bonus of letting you organize the Villain trash for certain villains where you constantly search for specific cards, such as The Organization.
In any case, this whole discussion was an avoidable situation. A simple addition of "in their current order," "or in any order" would clear it right up.
Also, for the record, Nightmist's Mists of Time reads: "Nightmist deals herself 2 Infernal damage. Switch your trash and hero deck. Shuffle your deck." So whatever the ruling here, it's not going to end up with Nightmist players with perfectly structured decks. Though under the liberal interpretation they would be able to order their trash, if they cared.
Except, you switched your trash with your deck, so what WAS your trash is now your deck. THEN you shuffle your deck. So no, you can't order your cards that way. Nice try though.
Slightly off topic, but... am I the only one who usually orders their Trash? I mean, with Tachyon I have two piles in my Trash Section. Burst Cards, and not Burst Cards. When we fight the Chairman, I keep three seperate trash piles - Thugs, Underbosses, and everything else. That way it's faster if a Jail Break comes up, or if you're looking for a specific thug, or if you need to remind yourself how many Underbossess are in the trash. Same with Dawn and Citizens, and Omnitron and Components/Devices. It's just faster and more convenient.
In the rare circumstance that you find it necessary to (usually) kill off Visionary to stack the entire villain deck in this way, I honestly imagine that everybody will be in agreement as to what cards to place on the bottom. The Matriarch's deck takes about one minute at most, even if there is a disagreement. That's because 15 of her cards are the same card! A further five cards don't mean anything if there aren't any fowl or masks nearby. That still leaves time for a 30 second fight about the order for the cohorts and the Cacaphonies - if the game even goes on that long.
