Brain Burn burning brains.

Our group had a little bit of an ideological fight between the conservatives and the liberals.  Specifically, those who would like to consider card effects as conservatively as possible when ambiguous, and those who would like to stretch until a rule confines them.

The card that hit our group and caused a few fights was the Brain Burn card.  Its top text (using the current edition's wording):  "Put the Villain Trash on the bottom of the Villain Deck."

Our liberal players seized on this, and combined this with the following from the Rules and Clarifications file for SotM:  "When a player applies an effect that affects multiple cards, the player chooses what order the effects occur."  Their conclusion is that this means that Brain Burn allows them to target each card in the Villain Trash, and thus, choose the order of the Trash before it goes on bottom of the Deck.

The conservative players in the group believe that the Brain Burn card targets the Villain Trash specifically, and does not individually target each card in the Villain Trash.  This would then mean that the effect resolves instantly, with no race conditions--the Villain Trash is turned upside down in its current state, and placed immediately under the Villain Deck.

Which ruling is correct?

Given that a players deck, trash, and hand are define as individual entities in the game, I would say it targets the entire trash at one time.  Thus, the entire trash as a single unit is moved to the bottom of the deck.

I go with this idea because it is the simpler of the two, and the idea of the design of the game is to be as simple as possible in such situations. It also makes other cards much simpler as well, such as NightMist's card which allows a deck to be switched with it's trash, (The deck becoems the trash, and the trash becomes the deck, as an atomic swap. It would be a nightmare (and potentially an undesireble time extension of the game) to move each pile from one to the other one card at a time.)

But maybe that's just the conservatie in me talking, heheheh.

I don't know... I think it would be fair to put it on the deck in whatever order, but I don't know if any rules actually affect this.

There's a rule that says, as I recall, when something is ambiguous the players decide.

That could be used to say that the players decide the order of the cards or it could be used to say that the players decide whether or not the cards get ordered.

Generally, the rule is read the card as plainly as possible and do the thing it says. If it was meant to target each card in the trash individually, that's what it would say. It doesn't, though, it targets the trash itself.

Also, who wants that downtime while players optimize the order of a deck?

There's 9+ pages of rules questions here where we debate the semantics of things like the very definitions of words that would attempt to prove you wrong.    

Is that actually in the rulebook somewhere?  Or is that just the generally accepted policy for most games with possibly ambiguous rules?

I tend to shuffle the villian trash before sliding it under the deck, no real reasoning behind it, it's just because.

Wow.. let me start off by saying that I've logged plenty of sotm games, and Brain Burn is very seldomly used.    When it is used, it tends to be for the "getting things out of the trash" purpose.    Changing the order on the cards of the deck really practically never matters, so it probably wasn't worth arguing about...

With that said, I'm inclined to agree with the Liberals here.  None of Visionary's other cards that screw with the deck mention that you can choose the order, but you can.   For example, Precognition you can choose the order of what goes on the bottom of the deck, as well as Prophetic Vision.   So the fact that it does not specifically mention that you can choose the order does not bug me.

Also, if there are cards in the trash you don't want to bring back under any circumstances (cohorts, flagships, etc.) you could put them at the VERY bottom, so there is some tactical advantage there. Or if you wanted to put all the Darken the Skies at the top, with the mask at the bottom, so the MAtriarch is basically sitting around for a few rounds, you could do that.

Precognition is worded differently, though. It's looking at individual cards, which is why you get to pick the order.

 Not sure what you mean exactly,  it looks at a specific number of cards (3) as opposed to all the  cards in the trash, which is a variable number.   That is the only difference.

The specific situation was one in which the players had managed to get Matriarch down to 0 cards in deck, 0 cards in play, and all cards in trash.  The Visionary player was choosing to go out with a bang, by doing Brain Burn as their final card (the damage would kill them).

The liberal view of it was that this would allow us to stack both Carrion Fields at the top of the deck, followed by 3 Darken The Skies, followed by both Horrid Cacophonies, followed by Huginn, Muginn, and finally all the Fowls and the Mask.  This would give the remaining players 9 turns of peace before the 10th turn that brought out the mask and all Fowls.  By this point, the group should have been able to easily burn away both Carrion Fields, and Tachyon should have the ability to cancel damage dealt by the Matriarch in response to the Fowls dying.

If it looked at individual cards in the Villain Trash, it would read " Put each card from the Villain Trash on the bottom of the Villain Deck." As is, it talks about the Villain Trash as a whole. I would prefer it if it had you shuffle, but that's neither here nor there.

 I guess I kind of see what you're saying, but I still disagree.    I say for something that deals herself 40 damage, let her stack the deck however she wants.

 I guess it's not quite 40, but you get the idea.

From the online rulebook:

http://sentinelsofthemultiverse.com/system/files/downloads/Sentinels%20of%20the%20Multiverse%20Enhanced%20Edition%20Rulebook.pdf

Page: 11

Addtiionally, there are times when players may encounter ambiguous situations, such as tied HP. In any ambiguous situation, the players choose the outcome.

There are ways to reduce that damage (Ra converts all Heroes' damage to Fire damage and then makes Hero character cards immune to it), but that is a good point. I'm just strongly averse to the downtime for ordering 20-25 cards. Nothing will bring the game to a grinding halt quite like a player reading and individually valuating every card in a Villain's deck. But honestly for all the times we've done this to 2-5 cards we've probably ordered them without even thinking about it. It feels right to the way the game normally works to be able to do that with a small number of cards, I guess it's better to reward players for taking one for the team in these crazy 0.0001% of all games type of circumstances. I'm still on the fence based on the wording, but I hereby switch to the liberal interpretation. This has the added bonus of letting you organize the Villain trash for certain villains where you constantly search for specific cards, such as The Organization.

In any case, this whole discussion was an avoidable situation. A simple addition of "in their current order," "or in any order" would clear it right up.

Also, for the record, Nightmist's Mists of Time reads: "Nightmist deals herself 2 Infernal damage. Switch your trash and hero deck. Shuffle your deck." So whatever the ruling here, it's not going to end up with Nightmist players with perfectly structured decks. Though under the liberal interpretation they would be able to order their trash, if they cared.

Except, you switched your trash with your deck, so what WAS your trash is now your deck. THEN you shuffle your deck. So no, you can't order your cards that way. Nice try though.

Slightly off topic, but... am I the only one who usually orders their Trash? I mean, with Tachyon I have two piles in my Trash Section. Burst Cards, and not Burst Cards. When we fight the Chairman, I keep three seperate trash piles - Thugs, Underbosses, and everything else. That way it's faster if a Jail Break comes up, or if you're looking for a specific thug, or if you need to remind yourself how many Underbossess are in the trash. Same with Dawn and Citizens, and Omnitron and Components/Devices. It's just faster and more convenient.

In the rare circumstance that you find it necessary to (usually) kill off Visionary to stack the entire villain deck in this way, I honestly imagine that everybody will be in agreement as to what cards to place on the bottom.  The Matriarch's deck takes about one minute at most, even if there is a disagreement.  That's because 15 of her cards are the same card!  A further five cards don't mean anything if there aren't any fowl or masks nearby.  That still leaves time for a 30 second fight about the order for the cohorts and the Cacaphonies - if the game even goes on that long.

Yep. That's exactly what I said. No sorted Nightmist decks because you have to shuffle. Even if you're not normally allowed to sort your trash (which I kinda do anyway for convenience with some Heroes/Villains), Nightmist would then be able to choose the order in which the cards that used to be her deck entered her trash under the interpretation that your trash is always considered to be a collection of individual cards and never a unit in itself, effectively ordering it as she wished. You'd end up with a shuffled deck and a sorted trash. Not sure why exactly she'd care to do so or why it would matter, but it would be a thing that could happen I guess.

Nope.

Yeah, not so much with Tachy (I use a spindown d20 for tracking bursts), but definitely in other situations, including Unity and her bots (to find later), Argent Adept and his Instruments, and Expatriette and her Ammo. Often I'll just have the cards I care about rotated 90 degrees for easy access, but the idea's the same.

Me, too. Particularly with Tachyon and The Organization. I like Rabit's idea about keeping Argent Adept's instruments separate, too.

As many times as I've played Visionary, I have never used Brain Burn.

I would go with players choice.  I would probably just flip the trash upside down and put it under the deck, unless I had ordered it for bookkeeping purposes, in which case I'd probably shuffle it.

I only remember once actually contemplating it, vs. the Matriarch, but I didn't because we already had Flesh of the sun god and TtE on Matriarch so it wasn't worth it.

It's usually a dead card, but can prevent game loss against Terralunar Blade (esp. on Advanced), makes a great turn-1 play against the Chairman, counteracts Forced Deployment as very little else can, and can reduce the hassle of dealing with Omnitron, Citizen Dawn, and so forth, so it has lots of potential applications, though all of them pretty niche and only a few really worth the damage you take.  (If only you could Wrest yourself…)  Usually I'll discard it to Enlighten, but not always.  I do wish it was a singleton.

In the case of the Matriarch, however, its usefulness varies extremely drastically based on whether you can stack or not; other villains care only a little, but with Matty, whether you choose the order means the difference between just buying 1-2 turns before she flips, or foiling a Darken the Skies that you know is coming up, versus being able to completely and utterly make one of the game's only diff-4 villains your b****.  (For this reason, I find myself wanting to rule that you should shuffle the trash first, and put it under the deck without looking at the bottom card.  I will probably play this way in future, now that I've beaten the Matriarch once and proven that it can be done…it wasn't as lame as when I steamrolled the Dreamer, but it was still a rather sad and pathetic end for this, well, sad and pathetic but nonetheless REALLY POWERFUL villainess.)

This question came up again tonight, and the answer was really important in this case.  Going up against La Capitan, I have La Paradoja, The Infuriating Mable, Final Breath, and Raiding Party in the trash, along with Plunder.  I really want to put the ship on the very bottom, with Raiding Party under it and Mable atop it, with Final Breath atop that and Plunder on top.  If I'm not allowed to reorder the trash when Brain Burning (which, for the sake of fairness, I will currently assume), then I still get to put Plunder on top, but Raiding Party is second, and will bring out Mable and Final Breath, and Raiding Party and Mable will both destroy O/Es that turn, and Cappy will be two turns closer to getting to reshuffle her deck and resume being horrifying.  True, this is all 14 turns away, but I take nothing for granted when fighting Maria Helena Etc. Etc.  I really wish Christopher would confirm whether we're allowed to stack or not - if we are, The Matriarch is taken down a notch and that'd be sad, but if we aren't, it contributes to the general issue of La Capitan being far, far too tough for her printed difficulty of 2, taking away one of the better strategies for dealing with her.

Well, the cards will SAY whether you need to shuffle or not. Any time you have seen the order of the cards (like from a search or reveal) you HAVE to shuffle your deck, unless the main benefit of the card WAS to see the order of the cards. Brain Burn lets you put the trash (which you are explicitly allowed to look through at any time) and move all the cards from it (individually, not as a group) back to the bottom of the deck. It doesn't SAY to shuffle, so it would appear that the omission was intentional, by my reasoning.

Brain Burn is certainly an extremely situational card. I have only ever played it seriously on a few occassions, and they generally invloved either the Chairman, Dawn, or an Advanced OG Blade who has a scary good first 2 rounds.

You can choose the order the cards go under the deck though. I'd think that is a relativly safe bet.

We used Brain Burn to stop the The Matriarch from flipping, since it refills the deck without shuffling the trash in.

Stealth Bot was valiant in her sacrifice.

This is how I view this card and how you would sort the deck.

1.  There is no rule stopping you from re-ordering the villain trash.

2.  Brain burn has you put the trash on the bottom of the deck.

3.  Even if Brain Burn did not allow reordering, you could reorder the villain trash directly before playing Brain Burn, then just put it under the deck.

So basically even if the card doesn't allow you to stack the deck, you can still do it, since you can stack the trash right before playing the card.

Unless we get a ruling that trash order cannot be alterred by players this will be an option, with the amount of cards that shuffle the trash before revealling I don't expect that ruling to ever be made.

It's also often useful against Omnitron, short-circuits several of Apostate's more annoying cards (though it's risky since he might Profane Summon into the redecked Relics, rather than getting a Relic Spirit killed and move them from the trash), and was extremely good in a recent La Capitan fight ("All Together Now!  Wait, why can't I remember where I parked my ship?").  Against Voss it can cancel Forced Deployment if the timing is just right, and The Matriarch is mentioned below.  The Dreamer and Ambuscade shuffle their trash into their deck a lot anyway, so it does basically nothing but help them; it's a terrible idea against Gloomweaver (unless his trash has no Relics and you just want to stop a Vast Following of Cultists and Zombies), and does pretty much nothing against the rest of the villains (besides kill Visionary, which might occasionally be desireable if you want her incap ability sooner and she's clearly got a short lifespan anyhow - I could especially see this happening if Brain Burn is the only card in her hand, and an incapped hero earlier in the turn order has no more useful options than letting Visi play a card, which kills her and thus gives her things to do on her turn besides Enlighten someone).

So, off the top of my head, Brain Burn is decent-to-excellent against 8 of the 18 villains, irrelevant for 7 of them, and largely counterproductive for 3.  A better than 1/3 chance of the card being useful, combined with the ability to discard it for extra cards (unless you play Dark Visionary, which IMO you shouldn't), is not bad…but I do think it ought to have been a singleton, as I've drawn two copies in my starting hand in a distinctly excessive percentage of my games with her.  I doubt that there are ten games, out of the nearly 6000 documented in the statistics thread, where you wanted to play Brain Burn twice…there's precedent for >G changing card quantity in decks (Absolute Zero), so if I were hired on by them, one of the first things I'd try to do is replace one Brain Burn with an extra copy of Foresight or something (ideally I'd also give Foresight the text "When this card comes into play, you may draw a card and you may play a card"…given how it compares to her innate power, I very seldom want to use it, and making it not cost your play anymore would make it far more acceptible as an "I'll use this if I really need it" option among her several Powers).

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We do have at least one case where trash order needs to be preserved: Lost in the Past.  If there's anything that shuffles the Environment trash, that messes with Silver Gulch in a big way.  But yes, villains shuffle their trash often enough that an effect requiring villain decks to preserve trash order is unlikely to ever exist, unless some new villain deck itself contains that as a gimmick.

I don't have Silver Gluch so I don't have any reference for Lost in the Past.  I would like to see a ruling about intentionally reordering the villian trash.  Shuffling the villian trash makes sense if required of course but I don't see why people feel that because reordering isn't explicitly disallowed in the rules that it is okay.  I don't remembering seeing a rule about reordering the villian deck anywhere either.

With both Silver Gulch's Lost in the Past affecting the environment trash and now Freedom Tower's Ironclad Maintenance Bay, the trash order does matter. Ironclad Maintenance Bay puts the top card of each trash pile under its associated deck. We were playtesting when the previous comment was made so we couldn't exactly respond without giving away too much and by the time Vengeance came out this topic was pretty much buried.

I asked Christopher about this at Gathering of Heroes, and he said that you are not allowed to reorder the trash. The order they are in is fixed. The obvious exception being when you have to shuffle it, like with Dawn, Omnitron, and Gloomweaver.