A slightly new take on my previous suggestion: To compensate for the minor complexity added by making purges work based on card type, make Purge a keyword and apply it to enough cards that its effect quickly becomes common knowledge. Assuming the term "pure Attack cards" is obvious enough, we get: Purge - Discard all Assist and Boost cards attached to target enemy or discard all Handicap and pure Attack cards attached to target ally. Applied to the most relevant cards, the new texts are: Purge - Purge. May Self Target. Purging Burst - Purge. Burst 1. Purging Strike - Purge. It could also be applied to: Holy Presence - At the start of each round, Purge and Heal 1 adjacent allies. Keep. Lateral Thinking - Purge yourself. Draw a card. Shrug It Off - Purge yourself. You may play this card while Stunned. Cantrip. Gene Therapy - Heal 3. Purge. For each card purged, attach a random Boost card to the target. Destructive Purge - Purge. For each card purged, attach a random Handicap card to the target. Even though the effects are actually more complicated, it suddenly becomes much easier to remember what all of these cards do. If you want to see purges used more often, I think this is the best way to do it. Players need a good reason to include something in their deck that isn't directly helping them deal more damage, and I think this makes purges versatile enough to be considered worthwhile inclusions. EDIT: The above doesn't work for Hit The Deck and Icy Block. It's a simple fix, though: Purge - Discard all Assist and Boost cards attached to target enemy or discard all Handicap, Block, and pure Attack cards attached to target ally.
Thus far I'm firmly against complex purge rules for basic purge cards, and find 'pure attack' an unnecessary element that detracts from the current system as presented. The versatility of a straight remove-all-attachments is far more fun and balanced to my mind. I'm also opposed to the insistence that all purge cards equate to cards like Shrug it Off, which could use more incentive to slot (by being better than a standard purge). That said, the idea of adding a purge keyword seems pretty convenient, and I'm quite in favor of that. Then again, that doesn't really work as smoothly with the 'remove all attachments' concept when applied to cards like Shrug it Off. "Purge self. Beneficial attachments are not removed by this card." does seem a bit off." Could always go with a Purge All Purge Debuffs approach, but that also seems a bit roundabout. So the easiest approach may be, to use two different keywords- which REALLY would make it stick in people's minds: Purge : Remove all attachments on affected units. Purification : Remove all attachments on affected units which are not boost or assist cards. (And, if needed: ) Subvert: Remove all boost and assist cards from affected units. Of course, there's one tiny oversight both our posts haven't thus far addressed: Lateral Thinking doesn't actually currently HAVE purge- it only removes handicaps at the moment [unless it was improved along with Shrug it Off and I missed it]. Then again, no reason it can't just retain the same phrasing it currently has.
Purge keyword is great idea. I also like the simplicity of removing all attachments with regular Purge.
In that sense, the exclusion-based nature of my keywords seems to avoid that problem, since IB would be retained/removed where most beneficial.
So purge not removing my enemy's Blind Rage is by design? I was expecting it would get stripped as well because of the beneficial portion of it's effect.
Nope, counts as a negative card, thus is kept, in the current system. It's one of the weird quirks of it, and one of the reasons a straight 'remove all' is more handy to have, even if it's not always 'ideal'.
Yeah Lateral thinking got hit hard by those stealthy purge updates. Its back to being relatively unplayable, especially since it can draw you a new handicap right after getting rid of one. When there are adjustments to purge an the whole bunch of cards that deal with attachements, dont forget to include lateral thinking. (maybe extend it - "draw a card, immediatly discard that card if it is a handicap")
But then you don't get the card draw if the top card of your deck is, say, Obvious Maneuver. Or am I misunderstanding your request?
yes. Seems like a deal, doesnt it? Skipping to the next card would of course be favourable. Do i have to do all the work here?
Going all the way back to the scenario Scarponi outlined in his post about the test cases, I think the fix is actually pretty simple to keep Purge working as intended. For cases like Radiation Bomb that immediately attach the handicap, just program the attachments your opponents get from those attacks as 'belonging to them' so they can have the option of purging it from their characters. Or, to put it more simply, have every 'Handicap' card attached to a player be classified as 'belonging' to that player. Hit the Deck, Anvil Strike, and Icy Block are another odd set, but perhaps instead of attaching the green card to the characters, you attach a black version of the card that counts as the 'handicap', or in the case of Icy Block, a red version of the card. Just because the cards themselves are a certain color doesn't mean they have to attach to players as that color, right? Although I suppose that does have the potential to be a bit more confusing... Admittedly, this does leave a few fringe cases. While I'm content to leave most handicaps right where they are, things like Blind Rage, Festering Guts, and Mad Dog are potential Handicap cards you might want to get rid of. I'm not really certain as to a workable solution to those just yet, but the first scenario (where you can't remove radiation induced handicaps under any circumstances) definitely needs to be fixed.
Why can we only purge handicaps casted on the enemy, what's the idea behind it. And is there someone looking at the problem, or are we the only ones here that have a nice chat about it? Purge is somewhat the most important card after the expansion, from my point of view. Would be nice if it worked like it should.
Idea from an anonymous person: Purge: Discard all beneficial cards(add a new column in the card database for this) if this targets an enemy. Discard all unhelpful cards(add a new column for this) if this targets an ally.
I'm really not sure why people are so deadset on having purge function as a perfect dispel, when having it remove all attachments is easier to consider, more versatile in effect [eg, removing blind rage], much more tactical in use, much more appropriate to the quality of the card, much more thematic to dispel as a concept, much more in line with how other setting and games treat dispel, etc. Though, the tactical elements aside, my main concern still remains that other dispel effects [eg, Shrug It Off, Linear Thinking] are so underwhelming compared to purge, and at one/two steps higher quality- the target self usually makes up for the extra benefits of the card (eg, cantrip), meaning they're basically just higher tier than purge for no reason: At least, so long as purge functions the same way they do (in not removing buffs). Giving purge a potential downside makes other dispel effects far more interesting. [Meanwhile Cleansing Presence is fine on balance, but still often underplayed while purge is readily available] But all that aside, I could phrase it this way: I don't see a balance issue or thematic issue that actually requires purge to do more than a straight dispel. :X Well, that's the 'keep campaign interesting' perspective, anyway
I'd much prefer if purge simply removed all attachments. All this business about who owns the attachment card and what kind of card it is just makes things unnecessarily confusing. It's confusing enough that one's own Firestorm doesn't get purged (because it isn't a handicap)... all the complication about Blind Rage and radioactive terrain are just far too much nonsense. In fact, purge doesn't even do what it says it does. It currently says "Discard all enemy cards and all of your handicap cards attached to affected characters."; and so one should expect that it would purge handicaps created by enemy radiation, because they are both "enemy cards" (which get purged), and "handicaps". From the description of purge it sounds like those card should definitely get purged... but they don't - because blah blah blah, handicaps, ownership, created, blah blah, unnecessarily complex rule. From my point of view, purge would still be plenty powerful enough if it simply purged everything. Of course it could be made stronger by treating handicaps differently, and that would be fine from a balance point of view - but I don't think balance is the core problem here. The core problem is transparency. The current version of purge requires research and study to understand; and I think that distracts from the gameplay. For simplicity's sake, I think purge should just clear all attachments.
I don't mind the current mechanism and i get whats happening. I think the learning curve whats purgable is pretty steep. At the same time i think bringing purges shouldn't be in vain, but rewarded, so i would be on board for unconditional handicap purging.
