This forum's search function is WORTHLESS. (To be clear, I'm not just saying that to be a jerk; what I mean is that when I search for Brain Burn, I find every topic that has a post from Reckless in it because his signature has the word "brain" in it. It's NOT an intelligent search engine.) So from now on I pretty much have to create a new topic for every question I ask, since you don't want me doing them all in the one topic I created for the purpose.
Today's question: When you play Visionary's Brain Burn, do you put the cards from the villain trash on the bottom in any order you choose, or only the order that they happen to be in? It could make a huge difference whether you were able to essentially stack the villain deck.
Thanks for finding that. I was indeed fighting the Matriarch, so the probability of getting most of her deck into her trash and then stacking her deck with all the Darken the Skies at the top and the Mask at the bottom is very realistic. Fortunately, it didn't matter, as Visi had other cards she could play, and the heroes slaughtered the unlucky Lilian (who had just randomly drawn all her Darkens at the start of the game, only ever getting four Fowl out and one of those was Timeshifted into play by Omnitronks, just so the heroes could kill it). Still, it's annoying that rulings like this are hard to find in a hurry, as I never ever think of them until the situation appears in play (and strongly dislike the "just do whatever you feel like doing" approach).
Also that's a hilarious alternate definition of "conservatives and liberals".
You're not the only one who has wished for a better search function... Google is your friend (at least sometimes).
On this issue, I'm with the liberals. On every card other than this, the text is careful not to make the order of cards in a trash pile matter. For instance, Return with the Dawn (and similar cards) shuffle the trash before pulling out cards from it. You are told to shuffle your deck but not your trash after searching it. Etc. For the order of the cards in the trash to suddenly start mattering for Brain Burn would seem odd; without this one card, it wouldn't matter if you sorted the trash.
Actually there is at least one card which seems to assume an order to the trash. Silver Gultch's 'Lost in the Past' puts the top card of the environment trash on the bottom of the environment deck.
But it was explicit in the intention that order should matter correct? Brain Burn has no such explicit intent. To me, that leaves the door wide open for player choice in the order.
You would think that the cards that state explicitly that order should matter would be viewed as exceptions to the general rule instead of a confirmation of them (after all, isn't that the purpose of card text in the first place? To provide instructions to the player that are outside of the general game system?)