Smoke Bombs

Other Games SotM Game Engine
1

So I had a question arise during a discussion about the interaction between Smoke Bombs and Lead from the Front and Fortitude. Now, let’s say some villain card deals 2 damage to the target with the lowest HP. Assuming Legacy has the highest HP, life is dandy. Smoke Bombs redirects the damage to Legacy and reduces it by 1, Fortitude reduces it again, Legacy takes 0 damage, yay. The question arises when Legacy is in the middle. Can you, redirect the damage using smoke bombs to the target with the highest hp (reducing it by one), then use Lead from the Front, to redirect it to Legacy, so that Fortitude can reduce it again (to 0).

Overall, the 2 questions are:

  1. Can you redirect damage in this way multiple times?
  2. Does Smoke Bombs somehow change the source of the damage, thus making it no longer coming from a “villain card”? This question is also relevant if Smoke Bombs redirects damage onto the Nemesis of the original source.

P.S. Sorry if this has already been asked, but I did look through the forums and didn’t see it :slight_smile:

2

In redirection, the source never changes.
As far as the double redirection, something tells me order of cards played might come into order. If Lead from the Front was played prior to Smoke Bombs, it would cause redirection before Smoke Bombs would. If played after, then it would redirect after Smoke Bombs redirects. I would assume anyway.

3

Well, my only concern with the order of cards argument is that Lead from the Front says “may redirect”, implying that it’s optional. Now, Smoke Bombs isn’t, so it WILL happen, but seeing as Lead from the Front is optional… it seems like you could choose WHEN to activate it as well as WHETHER to activate it. Just my thoughts anyway.

Quick addendum: Originally when I read Smoke Bombs, I also thought it was optional. The fact that it isn’t leads me to y follow-up question: What happens if Smoke Bombs is out, and a villain card targets the hero with the lowest hp with a damage type that they are immune to? My guess is that redirection would not occur, because of the phrase “would damage”, which (after factoring in immunity) wouldn’t happen.

4

In that case, the fact it’s optional only means you can choose to have the action occur, but you are still limited by when you can have it occur. It would still have to occur in order; if Lead From the Front is played first, you can first choose to redirect before the Smoke Bombs has a chance to attempt redirection. That’s if order of cards played is in effect for this situation, which I assume it would be.

5

Agreed

6

I am also curious about the question of ‘would be dealt damage’. Do you decide if damage is going to be reduced to zero for the current target to decide if the trigger is going to occur?

There is also the question of multiple redirection and how to deal with these triggers.

One possibility is to think of it in the sense that when an event occurs, triggered effects get generated by all applicable cards and then get applied in the order their cards were played.

Smoke Bombs (SB)
Lead from the Front (LftF).

The card order is SB, LftF. Damage gets dealt to the lowest HP hero. Both cards create triggered effects. SB effect redirects to the highest HP hero. Now the question is what to do about LftF’s effect, does it still give the option to redirect to Legacy? Does the effect somehow disappear, and if so, how does the player know when and how to do it?

The card order is LftF, SB. Damage gets done to the lowest HP hero. Both triggers get generated. In this case, if the SB effect doesn’t get eliminated somehow, LftF can’t do anything because SB is still going to redirect to the highest HP hero.

The card order is back to SB, LftF. Legacy is the lowest HP hero and damage gets dealt to somebody else. LftF redirects to Legacy, does SB still go off?

Another way of looking at it is that triggers don’t actually create effects simultaneously, but in reality what the game is doing is checking each card in play in played order to see if it generates an effect. Once an effect redirects that damage, the original trigger of the effect is no longer valid (the hero in question is no longer ‘would be dealt damage’) so you stop that function and now look at the new situation and any triggers that might cause.

The card order is LftF, SB. The lowest HP hero has been dealt damage. You search the cards and find LftF and choose to redirect to Legacy. SB never gets triggered.

Yet another wrinkle comes with the issue of the same effect triggering multiple times as damage gets bounced around. If each time damage is redirected, triggers can occur and there is no exclusion for already triggered effects, then you could get a situation where heroes are tied for HP and SB triggers endlessly. If you don’t allow triggers on redirect then Superhuman Durability wouldn’t seem to trigger after LftF.

There are other ways of handling it and scenarios, but that should be enough to induce headaches.

7

In all cases, if the order is Smoke Bombs → Lead From the Front, if the lowest HP target (regardless of who that is) is targetted, Smoke Bombs redirect to the Highest HP, and if the highest HP is not Legacy, Legacy can then choose to redirect to him. If the someone other than the lowest HP who is not Legacy is targetted, Smoke Bombs do not go off, and Legacy can redirect to himself. If Legacy in this case is the lowest HP, Smoke Bombs already had it’s chance and does not further attempt to redirect. If Legacy is targetted and he is not the lowest HP, then nothing happens.

If the order is Lead From the Front → Smoke Bombs, then if Legacy is not targetted, Legacy can redirect to himself. If Legacy redirects to himself and he is the lowest HP, it gets then redirected to the highest HP, and Legacy can no longer redirect again (for that instance of damage). If Legacy does not redirect, and the target is the lowest HP, then it gets redirected to the highest HP, and Legacy does not get a chance to redirect, as he already had that chance previously.

8

I’ve come across a few situations where Smoke Bombs hurt the heroes more than it helped them, if it was not optional. This not in regards to Legacy in particular, but there’s times when that can kill or do a significant amount of damage to the high hp hero when it would have done nothing or next to nothing to the lowest hp hero, or some other effect comes into play (like Absolute Zero’s interaction with different damage types). There’s also the situation where all heroes are dealt damage by a single card, meaning that the highest hp hero will be taking near double damage. This can turn a nasty 5 point hit into a devastating 9 point hit. When this happens multiple times in the same turn from say, minions or citizens, it can easily put a good number of the supposed ‘tanks’ of the team near death’s door.

This is clearly not the intention of the card. Considering the theme of the card itself, one would imagine that Wraith would not waste a smoke bomb to redirect, for instance, damage away from a hero who would be able to reduce said damage to one or zero to a hero with only slightly higher hp who would take near the full brunt of the hit, especially when the higher hp hero is getting hit already.

9

I’ll admit that we hardly ever use these kinds of redirection cards for any of the heroes, for just the reasons savagegreywolf says. It’s great that Legacy or Fanatic or someone else can take hits intended for another hero, but if they drop that much faster and leave the other heroes on their own, that’s not much of a benefit for the fight. In just about every case, we’d rather distribute damage evenly across all the heroes rather than let a single tank soak it up too fast.

10

I think Smoke Bombs is a better than some of you are giving it credit for. Yeah, there are some times that the mandatory quality really hurts, but played in the right team or at the right time, it can drastically reduce damage dealt to all heroes. There are two key qualities at work here. First, over the long run, it really does distribute damage equally. If Haka or Legacy take the nine points of damage upfront, then they probably aren’t the highest anymore, and their next couple of hits will redirect to a hero who might be able to afford it. If Haka or Legacy have their damage reduction cards out, then they take even less damage, and that benefits the team too.

The real value, though, is that when damage is dealt to all heroes, you get to choose the order in which the damage happens. So, say you have 5 damage coming to each of a team consisting of Wraith and three other heroes. Because of the damage equalizing qualities of Smoke Bombs, they are all within a few hit points. Say Wraith at 19, the others at 20. Wraith takes the first hit, redirects it to Fanatic, who takes four. Then Fanatic takes her hit, but look, she’s the weakest. Redirect it to one of the others. Repeat. So basically everybody has taken four damage instead. Or think of a lower amount of damage, and a hero with damage reduction out. The attacks practically bounce off of Legacy’s Fortitude. I’ve also been able to use Smoke Bombs with Ra’s Flesh of the Sun God in order to pull off a poor man’s Lead from the Front/Next Evolution.

11

I will continue to play Wraith’s Smoke Bombs as optional (despite its wording) unless someone can sufficiently explain to me either that I am figuring things wrong or why it being optional would be overpowered. The reason I feel this way is that every other hero equipment or ongoing card that could possibly have an unwanted effect is either optional, like Lead from the Front, or has a caveat allowing the hero to destroy the card (‘or this card is destroyed’ or ‘Power: Destroy this card.’) instead of sitting through the bad effect. Wraith has no way to remove a played equipment card other than using inventory barrage, and in the right (wrong?) situation having smoke bombs out could easily make other players hate you if there’s no way to remove or block the effect. Generally smoke bombs is one of the last equipment cards I play even -while- playing it as optional, anyways.

12

You forget Combat Stance (and other similar cards). When The Wraith is dealt damage, she deals damage back to that target. Such action is mandetory. This can backfire in some situations (think Infection).

13

Wow, I hadn’t thought of Combat Stance. Her smacking herself in the face is actually kinda funny. As least Ra can become immune to his on Flame Barrier.

14

Yeah, the “Wraith, stop hitting yourself” gag gets really old, really fast… :frowning:

15

Combat Stance and Flame Barrier are also bad to play against Blade, because then he plays Backlash Field.

16

But, on your turn, when he does Backlash Field to you, you can then Combat Stance him back.

17

Yes, and that’s nice. But when all of his attacks do an additional 3 damage, and Combat Stance has a hard time getting past his armor, it gets painful fast. I’ve really wanted Flame Barrier and Combat Stance to be good, but I only seem to get a chance to play them against Baron Blade. I’ve learned not to do that.

18

Older thread but I wanted to add that I played vs Spite today, and Ra’s Flame Barrier was actually quite good. I didn’t even have Solar Flare wackiness going on (didnt draw the card, musta both been at the bottom of his deck). But just with his staff and imbue fire = 4 damage the first time Spite hit him of the villan turn (always, cause Spite has global damage) and another 4 damage on Ra’s own turn because Ra uses a power, Ra takes damage from Spite via Compound 11, Ra deals Spite damage via Flame Barrier.

I mean with Fire Blast(or similar card) + Blazing Tornado + flame barrier, Ra was belting out ~14 damage on his turn alone. Man I wish I would have drawn Solar Flare, could have put it up to ~20.