So, PW Captain Cosmic's base power is Absorption: Until the start of your next turn, whenever a Construct card is destroyed, you may shuffle it into your deck instead and either draw a card or play a card. -- From reading past threads (Here and here) I understand that if the player chooses to use that power and shuffle a construct into his deck, on destruction effects don't apply.
I'm assuming that generally, if a villain card effect destroys a hero card, Absorption allows Captain Cosmic to effectively ignore the destroy effect, because he started to destroy his card, but then shuffled it into his deck instead. Just because the card didn't actually get destroyed, doesn't mean he can keep triggering the effect over and over again to keep milling his deck.
For example, "Explosion" in the Lab reads: At the end of the Villain turn, each Player with 3 or more cards in play must destroy 1 of their cards. -- Captain Cosmic gets to avoid that destruction by activating his power and destroying a construct, and then drawing/playing a card. Now because it wasn't actually destroyed, we don't go back to the text of "Explosion" and say "But it wasn't destroyed, pick another!" Because that would allow Cosmic to keep milling his deck until he runs out of cards in hand, or draw a bunch of cards, but what if there's a choice? A couple of Miss Information's cards have decisions based on whether you destroyed your cards or not, and I'd like to go through some of them and make sure I understand them.
1. "Threat" to the President: At the end of the Villain turn, the Player with the most cards in play must destroy 1 of their non-Character cards. At the start of the Villain turn, the Players may destroy (H) non-Character Hero cards. If they do, destroy this card. -- Cosmic could dodge the first effect with absorption, but because the 2nd effect is triggered by card destruction, he wouldn't be able to trigger it with absorption unless he actually let his cards go to the trash.
2. Another Reality's debt: Each Player must either discard their hand or destroy all their cards. -- So PW Captain Cosmic decided to destroy all his cards, he has 5 constructs in play and 5 cards in hand. He then decided to shuffle each of them into his deck, and played all cards in his hand (5 more constructs). But his 5 original constructs never got destroyed, so does he now have to discard all cards in his hand? (0) or destroy all his cards in play? (creating a loop, not quite infinite, since he probably won't only keep drawing more constructs, he has ongoings and oneshots too). Most likely in this case, neither of these options, because he chose the option to destroy all his cards, so he's done. Just making sure though.
3. Isolated Hero: When this card enters play, put it next to the Hero Character card with the most cards in play. That Hero and that Hero's cards cannot affect or be affected by any other Hero card or effect from another Hero deck. -- So Captain cosmic has played many constructs on his team, if Isolated hero targets him, I assume his constructs stay in play, and are still hero targets, but don't actually confer any benefit on his teammates. But, he can still use them himself, and or heal them with his cosmic crest. Or if one of his teammates that has a construct played on them gets Isolated hero, they lose the ability to gain benefit from them, but the constructs are hero targets that stay in play.
a. Say, if Wrest the Mind was played on Autonomous blade and Visionary gets isolated. Wrest the mind stays on Autonomous blade, but can't do anything until Isolated hero, or the Autonomous blade is destroyed.
Edit: Another questions just occured to me, if Isolated hero comes out, and the isolated hero destroys equipment to decrease the damage from suspicious malfunction, do they decrease the self damage done for the whole group? Since suspicious malfunction came from the villain deck, I would think this would still be possible.
