So one of the things we learned tonight in the Handelabra stream was that the App pulled the minions in the trash out in a set order, no hero choice was involved when Forced Deployment went off.
The Handelabra guys said it was 'legit' and I've no reason to doubt them but I wondered, how do the rest of you handle it?
I usually leave the Guards for last but beyond that...
For Forced Deployment, I honestly had always shuffled - for some reason I thought it called for that. Probably an assumption on my part from not actually reading many of the cards in so long…
I guess the question now is, does this also apply to other cards which bring things out of the trash without shuffling? e.g. Darken the Skies, Relic Spirit, Ruins of Malediction etc.
That being said, I will probably not do that in my games. Then we'll just start meta-gaming what order to kill things in to optimize what order they come out, and that isn't fun for anyone. It'll just be shuffle and deal for us.
For stuff like the Relic Spirit, though, it just says "move a relic from the trash into play" - it doesn't specify it has to be the topmost relic ;). But for stuff that brings out "all of the things", like Forced Deployment, I think I do just put them out in the order they're already in. In some cases with Darken the Sky I just move the whole pile of Fowl from the trash into the play area but leave it as-is if I know they're all about to get nuked again before having a chance to do anything :).
Is there an optimum order? One rarely has any long-term foreknowledge of when Forced Deployment will trigger. Without knowing what the board situation will be when FD triggers, how can you know what the "optimum" order will be?
I suppose there's the edge case of using some effect to put a large number of minions in Voss' Trash "at the same time" WHILE a Forced Deployment is in play that you plan to destroy this round AND you know exactly what the environment is going to do. But that doesn't seem like the sort of thing that will happen often enough to matter.
…OK, now I've challenged myself. Let's see if I can think of such a scenario.
For the order to matter, the order has to make a big swing in the outcome. Everyone's down to their last few HP, so things look desperate. The Environment deck is down to its last two cards and we know what they are, and their order (thanks to Visionary). The next one is innocuous, but the final one will kill us all. Sadly, we don't see a way to quite kill Voss this round. Haka has many minions under Savage Mana. The Savage Mana hit isn't enough to kill Voss, but would bring him low enough that we should be able to kill him next round – if we live that long. So we're going to Savage Mana even though FD is about to trigger. Legacy has Heroic Interception out and Next Evolution protecting him from several of the minions that do AoE. As long as that Heroic Interception stays up, the team doesn't die. But there's an AOE minion whom Legacy isn't immune to in the mix, that will kill Legacy when it triggers, so it has to go last, "hit" everyone but Legacy first, then kill Legacy as the last thing Voss does on the (hopefully penultimate) turn.
So, it's definitely possible for it to matter, but I still maintain that it's not worth worrying about the vast majority of the time.