Bungled Heal doesn't create any kind of disadvantage to the player. If you don't want to use it, can you safely ignore it - and that's why it shouldn't be a handicap card. Furthermore, if you cast it when the closest enemy to your target already has full health, then you will get the positive healing effect for your own team without giving any healing to the enemy team. So the card is actually pretty useful in many cases.
Why then is BACKBITING STRIKE not a disadvantage? I could choose not to play it, or to only play it when I had enough armor to block the 3 damage that it causes. Is the logic there any different?
That's not quite enough. You can safely ignore Backbiting Strike. What's more important, I think, is what you said first: it doesn't create any kind of disadvantage to the player. Likewise, Healing Pulse COULD heal enemies, but it creates no disadvantage for the player. Edit: Hah, timing.
Fair point about backbiting strike, and Demonic Pain is another example. In that case, I don't know what defines a handicap card. I suppose there are no hard-line rules to determine whether or not something is a handicap card. For example, it seems a bit arbitrary to me that Backbiting Strike is classed as a handicap but Bungled Bolt isn't. And Demonic Pain counts as a handicap card, but Demonic Feedback doesn't.
Backbiting Strike is actually not a handicap card, and can't be used to equip items in the "handicap only" quest. It is a "worst" quality card though.
Dang it, I checked Backbiting Strike repeatedly to remind myself whether it were hybrid red-black, and I thought it was. While looking right at it. Alright, then it's much more clear-cut. Backbiting Strike and Bungled Bolt may hurt you, but that's just the price for getting damage on the enemy. Firestorm is similar. They aren't Handicap cards. Demonic Pain, as Jon has said, should probably be a Trait: Demonic Feedback is white because it is helpful and merely has a price for getting card draws. An Assist version of the Attack cards listed above. Bungled Heal and Healing Pulse, of course, have no reason why they must automatically make the user suffer. It all works. If Jon edits Demonic Pain.
I have to say i honestly like that you don't have to take the damage from demonic pain but i can see where the thought is coming from.
I thought I checked the backbiting strike handicap status as well, to confirm what you two were saying. Is it possible that someone edited the wiki after our posts? It's probably just that I fail at checking. In any case, in my opinion none of the cards we've mentioned should be classed as handicap cards because they don't match the definition I gave in my first post which is that all handicap cards create an unavoidable disadvantage for the player. So bungled bolt, bungled heal, and backbiting strike wouldn't count, because you can safely ignore those cards when you don't want to play them - and they can be useful when you do play them. Whereas Unstable Bolt should* be a handicap card because it prevents the character from moving (safely). ... ... Now that I think about it, even with my so called 'definition' some cases are not completely clear cut. In particular, I think that Ill-fitting Armor should be a handicap card, but that Heavy Armor shouldn't be - even though it has a very similar effect. I suppose one could make it so that even handicap cards can be considered "good" so that heavy armor is a handicap card, but that would undermine the challenge of the "only handicap items" quests. So I'm starting to think it's inescapable that there must be some designer discretion in the choice of what is and what isn't a handicap card. [* ie. it "should be a handicap card" if my definition was being followed. But if that rule isn't being followed, then I think it's fair enough to say that unstable bolt is useful enough to not be a handicap card.]
