I will say, on reflection, the bigger issue isn’t the stones per se, it’s the ability to play them for free to get Leech. That’s the real unfun killer on the deck. Either playing Leech on 5, and getting a new card with on reveal instead, thanks to Lockjaw, or playing a bunch of 0 cost stones with good abilities, and turning 1 of them into Leech. Both feel super bad right now.
Because it doesn’t matter if you have the cards to address the Thanos deck of Leech can negate them on turn 4 or 5.
I’m not saying that the rules are “some immutable laws of nature”; I’m saying that they have to be understandable and consistent, or they aren’t “rules” at all. The current definition of 1-cost cards is easily understandable and consistent: If someone plays a bunch of 2-cost cards after playing Sera, they don’t expect those cards to be killed by Killmonger. A 1-cost card is defined by the base cost on the card itself, not what the cost has been modified to. And that’s why all of these suggestions are ludicrous and will never be implemented:
So you think the concept of “cost”—meaning the cost printed on a card—is confusing, so you want to call it “base cost” instead?? I don’t see how that’s simplifying anything. And in fact you’re making it more complicated, as seen below:
This is the perfect example of what I’m saying: In a game where cards grant exceptions to the rules, you have to make sure that the rules are well defined, so the card interactions can be understood. The N-cost is what’s printed on the card, which can get modified to the cost you actually pay (as shown in your hand). Modifying the N-cost itself is one step too far.
For cards where the power changes based on past events, they decided to show that power on the card itself so it’s apparent to the player. It doesn’t really mean anything until the card is played though, so ultimately it doesn’t matter whether it’s shown in your hand or not. It’s a visual convenience that doesn’t actually change how the card works. (And I don’t know why they didn’t do that with Devil Dinosaur too. Probably because the act of playing Devil Dinosaur changes its value, so they wouldn’t have to explain to people why their 11-power card always turns into a 9-power card when they play it.)
Yes, it’s pretty well-documented that a lot of people don’t understand the distinction between “cards that cost 1” and “1-cost cards”, because the game never explains it and it’s subtle. And that makes all kinds of interactions appear inconsistent. The problem is that they only have one term (“cost”) that gets shared between the concepts. Giving a proper name to one of the concepts will immediately simplify it. The moment you give it a name, you can then write more interesting effects with it, and they’ll be no harder to understand than the current rules of the game.
Why is “base cost” and absurd idea, but adding “base power” to a game where that concept didn’t use to exist just fine?
The rules in Snap are not well-defined. They’re prettty much the canonical example of implementation-defined: completely undocumented and frequently inconsistent. I’m happy to give a bunch more examples if you want.
But that is demonstrably not how it works! I have even provided a series of screenshots above to prove that it is not how it works! The screenshots also show it is not just a display convenience: the are cases where the current power of an unplayed card matters, and for those cases the current power of Morbius includes the effect of the card.
That even after all that you still insist that the game must obviously work in a different way than it actually works seems like pretty solid evidence that the game is not as well-defined and intuitive as you claim :)
Storm’ing (or Rhino’ing, or the risky Wanda’ing approach) a Limbo on turn six that someone created with Magik and winning because you caught them off guard and ended the game “early” has gotta be the most satisfying way to win. It’s not something you can exactly build a deck around and there’s still some risk even if you’ve got a pretty good read on their plan, but it just feels so good to pull off.
It always feels satisfying to disrupt a key play, but I think what makes this my favorite is that it’s game over. If you disrupt a big Shuri or Wong setup on turn five, Aero a Galactus into a crowded lane, all that fun stuff, it usually means a retreat. Which is great, but killing a Limbo they were counting on pulls the rug out from under them with no time to back out. Love it.
Removing Limbo is definitely my single favorite way to win with my ‘best’ win ever when I did it to my own Limbo. Early Magik with Rhino in hand and just set it up to look like it would be ok for them.
Yep, my opponent wanted the extra turn to setup some Wong/Mystique combo and since I wasn’t running Cosmo at the time, I went with Storm to stop the game.
Are there any cards that currently target “cards that cost 1” or “cards that cost N”? I don’t believe there are, so the interactions are already defined:
N-cost: The base cost printed on the card
cost: The current cost after modifications have been applied
You look at a card in your hand, and the cost to play it is displayed (in red if it’s been modified). Then once it’s on the board, the cost you paid doesn’t really matter; it just shows the N-cost, base cost, whatever you want to call it.
Of course they will! The concept of “base cost” or “N-cost” only makes sense relative to the modified cost. Once you start playing with that basic concept (like your examples above of “Creating effects that change the base cost of other cards in your hand”), the concept of “base cost” goes out the window and is impossible to understand. You can make effects that change the cost of other cards, but the N-cost always remains fixed.
Because “base power” is easily understood–it even says “original base power” just to make it clear that it’s the original power printed on the card. There is (currently) only one card that mentions “base power”, and it just resets that card to its base power. There are no cards that modify “base power”, and I believe there never will be.
That’s why “base power” works as a concept, and that’s why “N-cost” works as a concept: because those have fixed definitions that can not be changed. If you have “cards whose cost is always the base cost (but the base cost could still be changed by other effects)”, that makes things more complicated and impossible to understand.
Yes, you already showed how Morbius is a confusing case where the Mister Negative deck interaction is unclear. But the existence of confusing cases just proves that the game needs to be more consistent, not that the rules don’t matter and everything is arbitrary.
I’m saying that the game creators are striving to make a game that is consistent and understandable, and changing the Yondu text proves that they are trying to do exactly that. They’re not randomly changing rules on the fly just for fun.
Goose: “Ongoing: Nobody can play cards that cost 4, 5, or 6 at this location.”
Can be played around by She-Hulk and Death. Pre-nerf Zabu really messed with Goose.
Plunder Castle + Elysium or Sera says No cards for you!
Crimson Cosmos + Sera, Quinjet, Elysium, or Zabu means no 4 cost cards can play here for you
Zabu means you can play a White Queen under Goose.
Elysium means you can’t play a Daredevil on Hellfire club, but you could play Sunspot.
Etc. etc.
Kazar targets cards that normally cost 1, regardless of what you paid.
Hulk costs 6, but things can discount him to 5, or less even. If plunder Castle comes up a Wave turn 5 basically locks out the location. Since even though the normal cost is 6, you have set everything to 4 with Wave. But for purposes of Magneto it doesn’t mean that he costs 4, there already is a base cost used for abilities, and a paid cost used for others!
Thanks! And yes, that behavior is consistent with what I described above: She-Hulk is a 6-cost card, but on turn 6 you can play her on Goose, because at that point she costs 1. Now if Goose said “Nobody can play 4-cost, 5-cost, or 6-cost cards at this location”, then She-Hulk wouldn’t be playable there.
I believe those are all consistent with the difference between an “N-cost” card and a card that costs N.
Right: Ka-Zar targets 1-cost cards, which are not necessarily cards that cost 1 to play.
But there is a location! Quantum Realm sets the base power to two after playing. They introduced that concept with Shadow King, and within just weeks there was an effect in the game that changed the base power.
Does that change your opinion on what kind of additions the developers are willing to do?
I’m kind of lost at what point you’re trying to make here, or at least how it’s related to what you were replying to. Which was:
That the terminogy is confusing is not hypothetical: even in this thread we’ve had somebody who has played the game for months not realize the difference between these two almost identical phrasings, because the game never explains the distinction (or even that there is a distinction!).
To circle back to the where this discussion started: your suggestion that Stones are added to the game before the game starts would be hard to understand compared to what is already in the game. But it’s plain, unambigous language! I think it’d be way easier to correctly understand how that version of Thanos works than to understand the mess around costs, what playing a card actually means, the order of resolution (I guarantee that nobody in this thread - including me - knows the actual resolution order including all the exceptions), the inconsistencies with power, etc.
I’m saying that the game creators are striving to make a game that is consistent and understandable, and changing the Yondu text proves that they are trying to do exactly that. They’re not randomly changing rules on the fly just for fun.
I’d love for them to tighten this stuff up and actually document the rules; I honestly don’t think they are striving for that despite the wording improvements a few patches back. Their primary goal is to keep adding content and to keep the players happy.
To add exciting new content, they’ll keep adding new mechanisms to the game, and that will definitely take priority over making the game more understandable. And to keep players happy, they need to address Thanos-Lockjaw and Shuri-clone decks somehow. The proposed fix for the former would not be “randomly changing rules just for fun”, but be a change with very clear intent, and I find it very hard to believe that something happening “before the start of the game” would be a bridge too far given their past history.
Valkyrie also changes base power. Everyone’s base power goes to 3, but a Devil Dino or Morbius for example then still has their ongoing effect applied on top of that 3.
Wait now I’m convinced I may be agreeing with what Andy’s saying, just not how he said it, with regard specifically to the base power discussion.
Base power has always existed and been a useful distinction in contrast to ongoing modifiers. Base power generally doesn’t mean “the original power printed on the card”, it means the current static-at-this-moment-in-time power which may have already been modified by the result of previous one-time effects. It only changes when acted on directly and explicitly (whether increased, decreased, or set to a specific value, whatever), whereas the result of ongoing effects can continue to fluctuate in response to actions not specifically targeting the card in question (discards affecting morbius’s ongoing bonus).
Super-Skrull has a base power of 2 to start, plus all ongoing effects of other cards. Let’s say the only other ongoing card is Morbius, and there have been two cards discarded so Morbius has +4, and so will Super-Skrull once played.
Except you play Super-Skrull on Shuri’s lab. The base power of SS (2) is the only part that doubles, giving him a total of 8, not 12. In fact the same thing is clear if you simply play Morbius to Shuri’s lab—he gets no boost from that because his base power is 0, which is doubled to 0, and then his ongoing effect is added.
That meaning of base power has always existed in the game, and it’s the same thing being affected by Valkyrie and the Quantum Realm.
The original power “printed” on the card which I think Andy is calling base power would be better described as the original base power, which is exactly what Shadow King calls it when it reverts cards to their original base power. In that way Shadow King may be unique in being the only effect that references original base power, in this case by reverting current base power to original.
And in that way, I agree with Andy that it certainly seems unlikely a card or location will ever say something like “change the original base power of a card to N”, because that’s like saying “we’ve modified the unmodified value of this”, a bit of a contradiction.
Tldr: we’re using “base power” to refer to slightly different things.
No, afraid not :)
As a reminder, this is the text of Quantum Realm:
After you play a card here, set its base Power to 2.
Consider playing Carnage, with a base power of 2, on Quantum Realm with three cards on it. The sequence will be:
The same with Venom; you play a Venom, it first eats all the cards, gains their power, and then its power increases by 1. That’s because it keeps all the bonuses from eating other cards, but its base power increases by 1, so the sum of increases by 1.
Play a Shuri, followed by a Red Skull? The Red Skull initially has 30 power (2*15), but as soon as Quantum Realm resolves it turns to 4 (2*2), not 2.
And even with the above examples, there’s no way you’ll guess how it interacts with cards that have been inverted by Mr. Negative :)
Afraid not.
In the previous example, if you play Valkyrie on the 8 power Carnage, it becomes a 3. So will the Venom and the Red Skull.
And this is exactly why “base power” is a new concept that didn’t exist in the game - or at least wasn’t observable - until Shadow King and Quantum Realm.
Sure. I have been consistently talking about “base power” exactly as that term is used by the game.
Huh. Okay, so instead of Shadow King behaving differently from Quantum Realm and Valkyrie, Shadow King and Quantum Realm behave differently than Valkyrie. And I guess I’ve been calling them the wrong things too?
Color me surprised on how Quantum Realm works, I really didn’t think anything would change the “before all other effects” power of a card other than Shadow King, which felt appropriate because it was only reverting back to what it once was; not changing it to something new.
Quantum Realm really is confusing then, seemingly at odds with the guidance that On Reveal card effects happen before location effects, and only reconcilable with some sneaky wording.
If I designed Quantum Realm it would work like Valkyrie.
Shield deck feeling good still, 38-7 with average gain of 1.71 cubes so far.
Out of curiosity, what % of decks that you are facing are Thanos-Lockjaw, Galactus, or Shuri-Skull, and what rank are you?
Because I’m running a similar deck, and while it’s fun, the results aren’t nearly as spectacular. Granted my opponents are probably 75% Thanos Lockjaw, 10% Shuri and Galactus each, and 5% other, mostly discard.
Even switched in Cosmo, but it’s not that effective because by the time he flips, the damage is done usually. I’m positive with it, but not hugely.
