Animate Weapon, etc

[Seravy]

I've seen several problems with this card, including

-After using it, you cannot use the weapon's ability during that turn anymore, even if the weapon had its ability active before using it. So when you play animate weapon you lose your chance of using the ability of your weapon for a turn. This doesn't make sense whatsoever, as the weapon doesn't become a new card in play from animate weapon, it just changes its type.

-Animated weapons don't count as weapons anymore, so you can't destroy them with spells that destroy weapons, like Explosion. This again doesn't make sense, because even if a sword is flying, it's still a sword and should be vulnerable to cards that affect weapons/permanents. Changing card text to "Turn your weapon into a creature, and it no longer counts as a weapon" is recommended if this is intended behavior.

-Animated weapons with triggered abilities trigger their abilities multiple times if the weapon can attack more than once due to adrenaline. For example, a Druidic Staff attacking four times will heal for 20 life instead of 5. This doesn't make sense because even if the weapon attacks more than once, the healing ability is not connected to attacking (unlike Vampire stiletto, where it makes sense to gain more life from more attacks).

-To go even further...When animating a weapon, for example a Druidic staff, it will replace it's triggered ability with its attack.
I would expect it to be a 0/7 creature that still has the ability "weapon deals 2 damage at the end of turn", so dealing 2 damage. (or a 2/7 one dealing 4 damage)
I would also expect Adrenaline to work on the attack, but not on the triggered ability, whatever the triggered ability does (healing, damage, other effect).

If the intended behavior is for weapons to have an attack value (which I think it is), them make them so, and DON'T list the damage of the weapon's attack as a triggered ability.
It should look like Weapon, attack : 2. At end of turn, gain 5 life.

Other stuff :
-Weapon effects are not applied if the damage is prevented. This is in no way indicated in the card text. (Discord's or Arsenic's ability is ignored)
-Quintessence removes freezing from creatures, yet doesn't remove other status effects, and doesn't protect against freezing. I assume this is a bug.
-Immortal and Immaterial have two names, for the same ability.
-The Immaterial ability is inconsistent because it is does protect from any spells even if they don't target (firestorm, plague), yet it doesn't protect from shields (which don't target either)
-Eternity says to put the card back into the deck, yet it is always put at the top not at a random location. It should say "put the card on the TOP of the owner's deck" instead of just back into the deck.
-Deja Vu's ability should say "This creature loses this ability, and create a copy of this creature."
-Twin Universe should say "Create an exact copy of the target creature, including any effects and abilities on it. If it has a randomly generated ability, the copy's ability will be another randomly generated ability instead."
-Electrocutor should say "Remove ALL skills from target creature" instead of ANY. It doesn't remove one skill, it removes all of them.
-Lycanthrope should read " Lycanthrope gains +5/+5 permanently and loses this ability"

[ufcfan]

#1 - Just use the weapons ability before you turn it into a flying weapon.
#2 - Interesting about the druidic staff, I have never tried that and I agree that it should not heal 20 points of damage as you stated in that scenario.
#3 - Without going over all of the other points I think there may be too much text to fit into the card area on some of them.

[Seravy]

#3 - Without going over all of the other points I think there may be too much text to fit into the card area on some of them.

That's what smaller fonts are for.

In good real-life card games, you know EXACTLY how a card works by reading the card text, and knowing the game rules. Effects are 100% precisely defined by the rules and card text.
In bad real-life card games, you have to look up a several hundred pages long FAQ to know what a cards does or how it interacts with others for a lot of situations which the game rules forget to define properly, and you might realize the card doesn't even do what it is written on it after entering a tournament and an opponent calling a judge on you. I've won several tournament rounds by using cards according to their text in a few games, only to get told a few days later that the card cannot be used that way...
Now things aren't THAT bad because the computer won't allow you to use a card in the wrong way, but you can still lose matches to it, for example I lost a game when I played Quintessence on an important creature that had a gravity pull on it, after seeing that Quint removes freezing, I expected it to remove everything...or another when I copied a frozen creature, and the copy ended up frozen as well. Not too important against the AI, but if a tournament system gets implemented, losing a tournament to these would be beyond annoying.

By the way, I don't see "granting a creature an activated ability removes ALL other activated abilities from the creature, but leaves triggered and continuous abilities unaffected" in the game rules either and it is a quite important game rule.
...oh wait the game rules doesn't include
"You cannot have more than 23 creatures in play"
or
"You cannot draw a card if you have 8 cards in your hand"
nor
"effects applied to a card that is part of a cluster apply to all cards in the cluster"
or anything important...
basically the whole thing is, play the game and you'll see how it works. NOT the way to go.

Rules for poison are Extremely undefined, too...
-for creatures, poison damage is taken when the creature attacks, and is taken multiple times if it attacks more than once
-for players, they don't attack, but it is still applied to them (at the end of the turn, most likely, never really checked)
-some cards say "do 1 poison damage" others say "infect a creature" yet others say "do 1 poison damage to the target every turn", and ALL THREE just means "put a poison counter on the target". They don't do damage, they add poison counters. The damage is done by the rule for the poison counters (which doesn't even exist...)

Heck, even winning/losing is wrongly defined :

You win a game when your opponent's HP are reduced to zero or when he has no more cards to play.

Which is not true...

You win a game when your opponent's HP are reduced to zero or when he needs to draw a card and his deck is empty.

"Cards to play" means your hand or your hand+deck together, not just your deck...you can still play cards if you have 0 cards in your deck, if you have them in your hand...

And I didn't even touch the issue of using "shatter target permanent" instead of "Destroy target permanent"...
There is no card, game effect, or rule by the name "shatter".

[PuppyChow]

1) Animate Weapon essentially destroys the weapon and creates a creature. Can creatures use a skill the first turn they come into play? No. How it is now makes perfect sense.

2) This is intended. Notice that steal and explosion and destroy both say "Destroy targeted permanent". Permanent. The game is divided into two sections: Creatures and Permanents. Weapons are just a subset of a permanent. You can't have one card that's both a creature and a permanent, since it's basically that creatures are in the top 3 rows and permanents are in the bottom two (separated by a line). You can't have something that's exactly on the line. Since the weapon is in a creature spot, it's a creature. It isn't a permanent, and I see no need to change the wording; the fact that it is or isn't a weapon doesn't matter.

3) This is just something you're misunderstanding with adrenaline. Adrenaline adds more ACTIONS, not attacks. So passive abilities also activate. For instance, Rays of Light will generate four light quanta/turn if adrenalined. Infected creatures lose more than 1 life per turn, and freeze is accelerated, etc. Jmizzle explains it a little better:

You should be able to remove adrenaline with lobotomize, but for some reason it doesn't work. This is a bug that needs fixing. The Freeze/Adrenaline under Sundial issue you addressed is a symptom of a misunderstanding of the difference between an attack and an action.

When you end your turn, each of your creatures performs one action. An action causes the creature to attack if the absolute value of its attack is greater than or equal to 1, activates any triggered abilities local to that creature (e.g. Bioluminescence, Pest's ability), and activates any non-local effects triggered by creature actions (e.g. Empathetic Bond, Freeze, Infect). Thus, an attack is only part of an action. Since Sundial only prevents attacks, cards like Empathetic Bond* are still triggered, infections are still applied and the freeze counter is still decreased. Because Adrenaline adds actions and not just attacks, everything that is affected by an action is affected multiple times depending on the creature's attack power.

*Empathetic Bond is not affected by Adrenaline, because Zanz decided to make it that way.

EDIT: fixed the attack qualifier to greater than or equal to.

[Seravy]

Adrenaline adds more ACTIONS, not attacks.

What's an "ACTION"? I didn't know that term even existed in the game. I've never met it in the rules nor in the text of cards, or anything.
Anyway, the card text of Adrenaline :
"Target creature ATTACKS multiple times per turn. Smaller creatures gain more extra ATTACKS".
There is nothing about what you say in there. Don't assume your players are mind-readers and will know how the game works if you don't make a rulebook and don't write the correct effect on cards.

An action causes the creature to attack if the absolute value of its attack is greater than or equal to 1

Where is this written in the rules. Unless a rule says they don't attack I will assume they ARE attacking and do zero damage.

and activates any non-local effects triggered by creature actions (e.g. Empathetic Bond, Freeze, Infect).

So an adrenalined creature heals four times with empathic bond? I would have never guessed.
Then Empathic Bond should read :
"Whenever one of your creatures attack, you gain 1 life"
Not whatever nonsense is written on it now.
If you also want it to correspond to how you are explaining why this happens it should read :
"All of your creature's action includes "Gain 1 life" in addition to its normal action"

1) Animate Weapon essentially destroys the weapon and creates a creature. Can creatures use a skill the first turn they come into play? No. How it is now makes perfect sense.

The card says to turn the weapon into a creature. It doesn't say destroying the weapon and doesn't say creating a new creature. So it doesn't make sense according to the "official" card text. Again, the players are not mind readers. If I turn something into something else, I expect it to stay in play and just change its card type, not being destroyed and gaining a new card.
Wait, if it gets destroyed, do I get a skeleton token from graveyard and two more counters on my bonewall?
When I turn a pillar into a nymph with Nymph's Tears does that also count as destroying the pillar and getting a new creature?
When I mutate a creature into another one does that...oh wait I know it doesn't, I can use its newly gained ability.

You can't have one card that's both a creature and a permanent, since it's basically that creatures are in the top 3 rows and permanents are in the bottom two (separated by a line). You can't have something that's exactly on the line. Since the weapon is in a creature spot, it's a creature. It isn't a permanent, and I see no need to change the wording; the fact that it is or isn't a weapon doesn't matter.

Why isn't that in the game rules? Why isn't the number of "creature spots", "permanent spots" and "hand spots" included in the rules? Why isn't ANYTHING in the rules except that cheating is not allowed (which is common sense)?
Where a card is placed on the screen doesn't have any relevance to what its type is, unless the rules say so.
And certain other games allow cards to be of multiple types...

From how I see the game it pretty much is based on the
"The developer codes what he has in his mind, or what he is able to code, and then that becomes the rule of the game"
This is wrong. Rules must be defined first, and then a game must be built based on those rules. If the game is made first, and then we try to explain how it works by making up rules that match it, that'll lead to inconsistency, and confusion. And lots of it, especially if more cards get added. Even now, with like a 1/3 of what a single expansion of a normal card game is, there are as many problems, or even more, as there are cards. If the number of cards grow, the number of possible card interactions will grow exponentially, and without global rules, chaos will follow.

[teffy]

We need a game rule part with things like the following:

- Damage from weapon slots is not pulled by Gravity Pull.
- Nightfall does not cumulate
- How animate weapon works
- Adrenaline, Shields et cetera.

 I´ll perhaps make a post with that.

[taikanatur]

I agree with pretty much everything, except two things:

* The Parallel Universe issue: instead of changing its text, it should simply copy the card exactly as it is (instead of randomizing the skill, for example);
* I dont see why after animating a weapon it should still count as a weapon. The card does state it TURNS your weapon into a creature and it DOES leaves the weapon slot. So it seems quite clear that its not a weapon anymore.

[Seravy]

* I dont see why after animating a weapon it should still count as a weapon. The card does state it TURNS your weapon into a creature and it DOES leaves the weapon slot. So it seems quite clear that its not a weapon anymore.

Yes, the card text on that one is actually ok, "turn" does mean it is no longer the old type, but it still could use more clarification just to make sure.
The card names (Flying/Animate Weapon) kinda implies that the result is still a weapon, it just is able to work like a creature. This, and the fact that such cards do keep their old card types in certain other games (Yes, I'm talking about MTG) is enough reason to just include it for the sake of extra caution.
I'd expect if I can blow up a sword with an explosion, it'd still blow up from it even if it can fly/move on its own.
It all depends on how we interpret the magic. If the sword is still made of the same substance, has the same shape, etc it used to be before, but can now move by magic, it should still be a weapon.
If it turns completely into a creature in all sense (like turning into an animal or something, and not being composed of metal anymore), then not being a weapon makes better sense.
The words "Flying" and "Animate", even the card image imply the first for me, but you are right that the card text does specify "turn", which implies the second instead.

So from a technical viewpoint, the card is fine, but from a "backstory" viewpoint, it is not.

* The Parallel Universe issue: instead of changing its text, it should simply copy the card exactly as it is (instead of randomizing the skill, for example);

That's a good way to do it, same ability would make more sense indeed. It should still specify whether it copies temporal effects and alterations, like poison counters on the creature, frozen or gravity pull status, etc, or just the "base creature card".

[Arondight]

-Animated weapons don't count as weapons anymore, so you can't destroy them with spells that destroy weapons, like Explosion. This again doesn't make sense, because even if a sword is flying, it's still a sword and should be vulnerable to cards that affect weapons/permanents. Changing card text to "Turn your weapon into a creature, and it no longer counts as a weapon" is recommended if this is intended behavior.

Well, the weapon goes into the creature slot, so obviously it's a creature. You can't destroy creatures with Explosion. That's why Animate Weapon is used to avoid cards like Steal and Explosion. It's common sense.

-Animated weapons with triggered abilities trigger their abilities multiple times if the weapon can attack more than once due to adrenaline. For example, a Druidic Staff attacking four times will heal for 20 life instead of 5. This doesn't make sense because even if the weapon attacks more than once, the healing ability is not connected to attacking (unlike Vampire stiletto, where it makes sense to gain more life from more attacks).

This is intended behavior of Druidic/Jade Staff. Before, the bug was with creatures, Adrenaline/Epinephrine, and Empathic/Feral Bond, but that was removed. The description may need some tweaking, but it is not a bug.

-To go even further...When animating a weapon, for example a Druidic staff, it will replace it's triggered ability with its attack.
I would expect it to be a 0/7 creature that still has the ability "weapon deals 2 damage at the end of turn", so dealing 2 damage. (or a 2/7 one dealing 4 damage)
I would also expect Adrenaline to work on the attack, but not on the triggered ability, whatever the triggered ability does (healing, damage, other effect).

Once again, this is intended. As the weapon's/creature's attack is tied with it's ability. For example, Gnome Gem Finder, Firefly, Elite Firefly, Ash Eater, and Ray of Light make you gain quanta when they have attacked or attempt to. When those examples have been buffed with Adrenaline/Epinephrine, you gain more quanta by how much more attacks they make as their attacks or attempts at attacks are correlated to the gain in Quanta.

[Epidj]

i have one question     u guys have nothing else to do than look for minior mistakes in cardtexts or rules ?   use the trainer or just try a deck u want    maybe u spend your money for some "useless" cards but who cares i buyed a whole deck and found out it dont work    did i post anything like this ? u always can get mone   maybe one day is away for farm some AIs again

thats my point of it ...

[Seravy]

As an ex-judge of other card games, I know from experience how much trouble "minor" details like a word having two completely different meanings on two cards with similar text is.
Then again, people don't care, so I won't care anymore either.