Chastise on Unity Golem

Our group came across something last night and we were not sure how to handle it:

Fanatic played Chastise on the Unity Golem that absorbs hero damage. Off hand I cannot remember the exact text on the Golem card but it was something along the lines of it absorbs hero card damage. Chastise then made that card immune to damage. What should we have done or was it illegal to play it on the Golem in the first place? And would this also affect the damage that Fanatic was supposed to take via Chastise?

Thanks

That... seems like a crazy-good combo. Chastise says "no character cards", so the Golems are legal targets.

We played against The Organization and after about an hour of taking no damage we we're slowly wittling down The Chairman, but it just seemed like we broke something or did something wrong.

This combination does make an almost certain win condition for the heroes.  Chastise says that it can play on any target which is not a character card. As Stealth Bot is not a character card, Chastise can play on it.  Stealth Bot can redirect any damage which would target a hero target to it, reguardless of the source.  By being able to redirect and then nullify damage like this, it means the heroes can optionally not take damage.  While this can sound like an instant win for the heroes, it can be stopped by a villain getting his alternate win condition, destroying or otherwise removing from play ongoing cards, or destroying or otherwise removing from play mechanical golems.

Thanks for the update with this combo. I will make sure to prevent this from happened. I'm not a fan of infinite loops, loopholes, or the "two-card-instant-win-combo". Takes the fun out of it all i feel.

Destroying the ongoing card seems like the only reasonable way for a villain to disrupt this.  Seems like they would need alot of luck to reach an alternate win condition against heros who can ignore damage.

There was discussion in another thread about whether cards like Chastise would also have to be destroyed if Fanatic 'cannot deal damage'.  The only cards I can think of which cause that, though, either require her to first take damage or be the hero target with the lowest HP (unlikely with golems out).

The combo is entirely legal, but yes, can be wiped by anything that removes either ongoings or outright destroys non character cards, like Dawn's Aurora, or Apocolypse, Sedative Flechettes, etc.

It's damn powerful, but not all powerful.

There are a few way you can lose after getting this combo, most likely being when you lose Chastise to some Ongoing destruction effect.  Nevertheless, this is the most powerful combo in the game.  All heroes being indefinitely immune to damage is a little too good.  I don't allow this combo in my games.  (Change text to say target other than a character card or Stealth Bot.  Non-Hero Target other than a Character card, if you want to be cleaner.)

This came up in playtesting, by the way.  I don't know why it stayed in the game. 

Some time ago (before Rook City) Chastise actually had an errata, going from "play next to a target other than the Villain Character Card" to "play next to a non-hero target other than the Villain Character Card."  For some reason, by the time the Enhanced Edition came around (only looking at the card changes, not the actual cards themselves, as I don't have them), it changed back to "play next to a target other than a character card."  Not sure why it went back to allowing hero targets again, unless it was an oversight.

A reason for it to affect Hero Targets is so it can be played on Decoy Projection. It's not as busted because you can't nullify the backlash damage, but you could make Visionary effectively invulnerable for a few turns. Which is pretty cool.

I know when I brought this up in Playtesting, Christopher said that they had figured this combo out and intentionally left it in game.

Right.  I kinda like that combo.  It would just be cleaner to exclude all hero targets, rather then specifically Stealth Bot.

Thanks for the help on this one. I think in the future we'll try to use the combo only if we're playing against a Villian that has the ability to destroy it or likewise with an Enivronment.

Actually, in all the games I've played that had both Unity and Fanatic, that combination never came up.  Either one player had one of those cards, or neither player had those cards.  Never was there a situation where both cards were in hand.

 Well the point is you can sort of make it come up.    Unity can search for Stealth bot with Flash Forge (or Robot Reclaimation if its in the trash) and get it out really easy.  Chastise can't be searched for, but Fanatic has a ton of card drawing, I rarely play games with her where I don't see Chastise.

This point was addressed in play-testing, and Christopher said it was valid, but he understood if people wanted to house-rule it out.  If it wasn't in play-testing, I'd include the link.

I cannot find a previous ruling on this, so please pardon if I am accidentally asking something that's already been asked.

Looking at the Enhanced Edition Changes PDF for Hero cards, Chastise states that unless Fanatic deals herself 2 damage, [Chastise] is destroyed.  If that damage is redirected to Stealth Bot, hasn't Fanatic thus not dealt herself 2 damage, destroying Chastise?  It seems to me that it makes sense if the damage can be dealt to Fanatic and then reduced to 0 but it can't go to another target.

I think Arenson9 commented that the requirement is that she deals herself damage, not that she is dealt damage.  So, as long as she initiates the action of dealing herself damage, no matter what happens to that damage, she has satisfied her requirement.

In Rook City (I don't think I've seen in on any previous cards) there has been a new phrase on some cards that state "If he took damage this way, then X" as to make a requirement that not only is damage dealt, but that the damage remains and is not redirected in any way (or, at least redirect back to the initial target).

I think Arenson9 commented that the requirement is that she deals herself damage, not that she is dealt damage.

That goes against the previous ruling by Christopher (I think) that if no damage is taken, then none has been dealt.

The point I was making is that arenson9 had stated the card only requires the initial act of choosing to deal damage, not the follow through that the damage actually gets dealt.  So that wouldn't go against what Christopher said because it's looking for something different.

I'm with TheJayMann here. There's a whole bunch of reasons why reading an implied "is dealt damage" in addition to "deals damage" makes no sense. For one, it breaks if there are damage increases or reductions that apply. Galvanize gives Fanatic +1 damage, so she actually takes 3 damage and the condition to not destroy it fails to trigger. Which is dumb. It also makes other cards which include an explicit "if a target is dealt damage this way" requirement redundant. If there's one thing I've learned about the templating in SotM, it's that economy of words is important to the team (eg: every instance of "would" that lacks an "instead").

Consistently throughout the game, "deals damage" means "outputs a packet of damage and then other things can happen to it," and "is dealt damage" means "HP are reduced." It's kind of confusing to have such similar-sounding names for these two different things, but at least it's self-consistent.

Sigh. I wish I had the time to go through all of the old threads in detail.

There is ambiguity in what 'to deal' means. It might mean initiating an attack. It might mean the target actually taking damage. Perhaps this will be the thread where we marshall all of the known cases where something is triggered based on dealing/taking damage and we can then ask for a definitive ruling …

… but I don't have my cards in front of me at the moment.

If there's one thing I've learned about the templating in SotM, it's that economy of words is important to the team (eg: every instance of "would" that lacks an "instead").

If they'd just replace "at the beginning of the XYZ turn" or "at the end of the XYZ turn" with an icon, they'd have lots of room to add "insteads"...