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Penny Arcade UFS Card Game Question!
colecago
Registered User new member
Registered User new member
Please help, just picked up this game and fighting with my wife over some of the rules. I've played Magic and a few other card games in my years so I have different ideas of game mechanics, basically we question the blocking.
It's our first time playing and my wife thinks that if you successfully block a card, you block its special ability as well. Like if a card says "if opponent has 2 or less cards they lose 1 life" and the card attack damage is 3, she thinks if she blocks the card, then she doesn't lose the 1 life. I think the ability still happens because in the combat phases from the rulebook, it says resolve special abilities before assigning blocking. Resolve means basically do the effects. She still doesn't agree with me, even though several cards do not make sense otherwise, like ones that say "if an opponent does not successfully block, they discard a card", I say why would they need to say that if blocking removed special effects, its obvious that the effect would go through, she said, no, if they try and block and are unsuccessful then the ability happens, not if they just let it go through. There are a few other cards that have something similar that wouldn't make sense if blocking blocked the whole card and not just the attack.
Thoughts? I think its a big mechanic, and I play many things like magic and I think of it as she's blocking to counterspell a card not blocking the "attack" of it.
I even looked up the UFS rule system and they have a lot more to it, but they call the abilities the enhance step, it still wasn't good enough for her. She said only if I asked on here would she allow the rule to go through. We usually roll to solved these disputes and because I roll like Jerry, I always lose. There are some spellwars rules that she's won like that as well (like one saying opponent may choose to discard a treasure or take damage and she says she doesn't have a treasure so that card doesn't apply to her, but there are specific cards that say "Target: Player with a treasure" which they would put on there if that was the case). Anyways, could use some back up on this.
Jesse
It's our first time playing and my wife thinks that if you successfully block a card, you block its special ability as well. Like if a card says "if opponent has 2 or less cards they lose 1 life" and the card attack damage is 3, she thinks if she blocks the card, then she doesn't lose the 1 life. I think the ability still happens because in the combat phases from the rulebook, it says resolve special abilities before assigning blocking. Resolve means basically do the effects. She still doesn't agree with me, even though several cards do not make sense otherwise, like ones that say "if an opponent does not successfully block, they discard a card", I say why would they need to say that if blocking removed special effects, its obvious that the effect would go through, she said, no, if they try and block and are unsuccessful then the ability happens, not if they just let it go through. There are a few other cards that have something similar that wouldn't make sense if blocking blocked the whole card and not just the attack.
Thoughts? I think its a big mechanic, and I play many things like magic and I think of it as she's blocking to counterspell a card not blocking the "attack" of it.
I even looked up the UFS rule system and they have a lot more to it, but they call the abilities the enhance step, it still wasn't good enough for her. She said only if I asked on here would she allow the rule to go through. We usually roll to solved these disputes and because I roll like Jerry, I always lose. There are some spellwars rules that she's won like that as well (like one saying opponent may choose to discard a treasure or take damage and she says she doesn't have a treasure so that card doesn't apply to her, but there are specific cards that say "Target: Player with a treasure" which they would put on there if that was the case). Anyways, could use some back up on this.
Jesse
colecago on
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Penny Arcade was the first set of UFS. It was a boxed set. Later, the Penny Arcade boxed set was rebooted as a stand-alone, and (maybe you have a better idea than I do, since I never bought the new version) perhaps simplified/re-worded to get more appeal outside of UFS?
In any case, the designer for the reboot was _also_ a designer for UFS at the time, and was a very experienced UFS player, so I'd be surprised if they're not the same on this count.
In UFS, cards had Enhance abilities (E abilities) that could be played during an attack (each player took turns playing E's to affect the attack), Response abilities (R abilities) that could be played in response to a particular trigger (each player took turns playing R's to that trigger, and sometimes confusingly, to other R's), or Form abilities (F abilities) that could be played only on your turn when you weren't attacking.
E and R abilities could appear on attacks themselves; the E's on an attack were only available while resolving that attack, and each one could only be played once per attack. As you said, this is pretty much the equivalent to what you're looking at in the reboot.
When resolving an attack, both players took turns resolving _all_ the E's they wanted to play before moving on to the block step. Since most E's affected the speed and damage of the attack, they had to go into full effect before blocking. Their effects might change whether or not you wanted to attempt blocking at all, as they might make it more or less difficult to block, or more or less worthwhile to spend a card doing so.
The corollary to this is that abilities--including ones that cause direct loss of life--happen immediately (unless some Response ability triggers that can specifically alter or negate it). Successfully blocking an attack _only_ affects whether you take full, half, or no damage from the attack. It doesn't affect abilities that have already resolved.
So, with apologies to your wife, she lost that life already, when the ability was played. The blocking happens after.
"Losing life" due to an ability is, in MtG terms, direct damage. "Taking damage" from an attack is a subset of life loss, and is more analogous to a creature dealing damage in MtG. (It'd be like if you had a Grizzly bear attacking that also had a Tim-like direct poke ability that didn't require a tap.)
Also someone joined us for Spell wars last weekend and agreed with me on the treasure rule so she went for that as well.
Thank you very much, look forward to playing more of this game.