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Mei Feng and Effigy and the Infinite Railroad


Hateful Darkblack

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Hey! A topic coming up on A Wyrd Place.

Mei Feng with Arcane/Shadow Emissary and Conflux of Mei Feng.

The Emissary drops a Scrap Marker.

Mei Feng then autosucceeds on Railwalker indefinitely unless she Black Jokers.

Can she keep doing this for a long time for card stacking? Fish through her deck to spend AP to repeatedly cast until she gets rid of the Black Joker? Keep flipping through her deck for a reshuffle? Stall the game until her opponent calls the TO or just leaves?

How does this work in play?

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To save anyone else the trouble of working out the sequence:

1.  Conflux of Combat upgrade gives the Emissary the Deconstruction action which puts a scrap marker down and then says:

Until the end of the Turn, friendly Leaders which target the Scrap Marker with an action gain +6 Ca for the duration of the Action.

Railwalker is 7:tome, TN: 14, and the Express Lane trigger's on :tome to allow Railwalker to be taken again.

"I declare Express Lane as trigger, and I'm going to use Railwalker, targeting the same scrap marker that I'm already in base contact with because I just placed the model in base contact with it."

 

Edited by solkan
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For what it's worth, I don't think it should take a person very long to perform their unopposed, no-need-to-cheat flips to cast Railwalker.  So something like:

Have you seen this trick before?  No?  Here's how it works.  The Emissary put down this scrap marker, and Mei Feng gets a +6 Ca to use Railwalker targeting it so she can't fail.  So I'm just going to quick burn through my deck to a. force a reshuffle or b. burn through the black joker.  I'm going to make it fast, and just flip, because I can't fail until I hit the black joker.  Here I go.

seems like it would be just fine.  And then just start flipping cards, fanning them out a little bit so that both players can see everything that's getting flipped without having to wait several seconds between cards.

So I think a person should be able to do that in a timely (fast) manner.  Otherwise, stalling is stalling.

 

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Very exploitable. Rather than just milling out the black joker, you could also stop if you hit a run of low cards, such that you have "milled" more low than high. Basically, since you can choose when to stop (barring black joker), you could opportunistically use this the greatly change the probabilities in your favor.

Not sure if it would be game breaking, but it wouldn't take much code to compute the potential impact. For that matter, a bit of machine learning could find a near perfect strategy pretty fast, after which some cleverness could probably simplify the near perfect strategy to a pretty damn good strategy that a human could actually carry out...

Not sure how to fix it in the rules :( I suspect most folks would not like this.

Since you never know what order the rest of your deck is in, this is pretty useless for shaping your deck. If you do it blindly you would make your deck worse as often as not. At the very least you would need a simple card counting method to decide when to force a reshuffle, e.g. add 1 for every severe card and subtract 1 for every weak card flipped and do this is if you get higher than 6 (or whatever threshold). You can't reliably use it to stack the deck in your favour, but you can remove a deck that is poorly stacked.

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Very exploitable. Rather than just milling out the black joker, you could also stop if you hit a run of low cards, such that you have "milled" more low than high. Basically, since you can choose when to stop (barring black joker), you could opportunistically use this the greatly change the probabilities in your favor.

Not sure if it would be game breaking, but it wouldn't take much code to compute the potential impact. For that matter, a bit of machine learning could find a near perfect strategy pretty fast, after which some cleverness could probably simplify the near perfect strategy to a pretty damn good strategy that a human could actually carry out...

Not sure how to fix it in the rules :( I suspect most folks would not like this.

Since you never know what order the rest of your deck is in, this is pretty useless for shaping your deck. If you do it blindly you would make your deck worse as often as not. At the very least you would need a simple card counting method to decide when to force a reshuffle, e.g. add 1 for every severe card and subtract 1 for every weak card flipped and do this is if you get higher than 6 (or whatever threshold). You can't reliably use it to stack the deck in your favour, but you can remove a deck that is poorly stacked.

Thus I called it 'opportunistically'. If you never hit your target threshold, you'd just mill to the BJoker. But since you can choose to stop early, you CAN choose to quit when ahead.

You're trying to make it sound like Schroedinger's Deck Shaping is somehow more useful than rolling dice to warm them up.

Shuffle a deck of cards, and then flip the first five cards face up.  Suppose they're all high value cards, you've now determined that it's going to be at least 49 cards from the deck until you see those cards, so you've done yourself zero favors.

Suppose, instead, that they're all low value cards, you've now determined that it's going to be at least 49 cards until you see those cards.  You still really haven't done yourself any favors, since you have no idea what order the rest of the deck is.

Especially since what's actually going happen is that you're going to get a mix of high and low cards, or just average cards, and statistically all you've done is waste time flipping cards in the deck.

 

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As a TO this seems to be easy to make sure that there's no stalling. In the Gaining Grounds rules under the Sportsmanship there is the following sentence, "Activations should be played in a timely manner; players should not waste time."

If I saw or was called over by another player and the Mei Feng infinite Railwalk combo was happening I would ask the Mei player what the point of executing the combo was and if they could answer anything besides flip cards I'd ask them to get to the point, otherwise they weren't doing what Gaining Grounds requires them to do and they'd get a warning and a DQ if they continued the pointless flipping of cards.

 

This was caught in beta, but there is no point to executing the combo because it doesn't advance the game state. It simply wastes time.

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Can't see anything disallowing it rules wise. You do of course stand a large chance of wasting very high cards as well as low but maybe if you're holding the RJ you might consider it.

Just remember that this isn't a single player game. In a friendly game I would say you're being a male reproductive organ and in a timed tournament I would expect your TO to immediately diqualify you for stalling.

Edit: Maybe your opponent can give some leeway for quick uses of this. If you have like 2-3 cards in your deck and know one is the BJ I would see it as gamey but fairly ok.

Edit#2: Thank you Solkan! We need more comprehensible explanations like this to help people quickly get into the issue at hand.

Edited by Ludvig
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Very exploitable. Rather than just milling out the black joker, you could also stop if you hit a run of low cards, such that you have "milled" more low than high. Basically, since you can choose when to stop (barring black joker), you could opportunistically use this the greatly change the probabilities in your favor.

Not sure if it would be game breaking, but it wouldn't take much code to compute the potential impact. For that matter, a bit of machine learning could find a near perfect strategy pretty fast, after which some cleverness could probably simplify the near perfect strategy to a pretty damn good strategy that a human could actually carry out...

Not sure how to fix it in the rules :( I suspect most folks would not like this.

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Very exploitable. Rather than just milling out the black joker, you could also stop if you hit a run of low cards, such that you have "milled" more low than high. Basically, since you can choose when to stop (barring black joker), you could opportunistically use this the greatly change the probabilities in your favor.

Not sure if it would be game breaking, but it wouldn't take much code to compute the potential impact. For that matter, a bit of machine learning could find a near perfect strategy pretty fast, after which some cleverness could probably simplify the near perfect strategy to a pretty damn good strategy that a human could actually carry out...

Not sure how to fix it in the rules :( I suspect most folks would not like this.

Since you never know what order the rest of your deck is in, this is pretty useless for shaping your deck. If you do it blindly you would make your deck worse as often as not. At the very least you would need a simple card counting method to decide when to force a reshuffle, e.g. add 1 for every severe card and subtract 1 for every weak card flipped and do this is if you get higher than 6 (or whatever threshold). You can't reliably use it to stack the deck in your favour, but you can remove a deck that is poorly stacked.

Thus I called it 'opportunistically'. If you never hit your target threshold, you'd just mill to the BJoker. But since you can choose to stop early, you CAN choose to quit when ahead.

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Lots of previous conversation I cannot delete for some reason.

You're trying to make it sound like Schroedinger's Deck Shaping is somehow more useful than rolling dice to warm them up.  Shuffle a deck of cards, and then flip the first five cards face up.  Suppose they're all high value cards, you've now determined that it's going to be at least 49 cards from the deck until you see those cards, so you've done yourself zero favors.

Suppose, instead, that they're all low value cards, you've now determined that it's going to be at least 49 cards until you see those cards.  You still really haven't done yourself any favors, since you have no idea what order the rest of the deck is.

Especially since what's actually going happen is that you're going to get a mix of high and low cards, or just average cards, and statistically all you've done is waste time flipping cards in the deck.

 

It is though.  The big difference between dice and the deck is that with the deck, each subsequent flip is actually impacted by the previous flip; if only because you cannot flip the same card twice in a row (can't flip 2 8s of crows).  So if you start with a fresh deck and flip off the top 5 cards which all come up low, we can now say with certainty that the remaining 47 cards are *more likely* to flip higher then the original, unprocessed deck.  True you cannot ensure a particular card will be next*, but you can certainly boost the odds.

 

*You absolutely can guarantee the next card will be something.  It just takes a VERY LONG time.  If the deck is 45 cards (one of which is the red joker) then you railwalk 44 times.  If you flip the red joker in those 44 cards, railwalk the 45th time.  Shuffle the deck, try again.  Eventually, the red joker won't be in those 44 cards.

Edited by Clement
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You absolutely can guarantee the next card will be something.  It just takes a VERY LONG time.  If the deck is 45 cards (one of which is the red joker) then you railwalk 44 times.  If you flip the red joker in those 44 cards, railwalk the 45th time.  Shuffle the deck, try again.  Eventually, the red joker won't be in those 44 cards.

Taken to its logical extreme, this actually means you can establish a deck consisting entirely of an arbitrary set of cards if you have the Black Joker in hand. You can't decide the order, but if you wanted (as an example) a five-card deck containing only the four 13s and the Red Joker, that's theoretically possible to arrange using the above method and a very large amount of time.

(On average, getting the Red Joker as the last card in the deck would take about an hour of flipping and shuffling, assuming you can keep up the pace of flipping cards. Getting all the 13s and the Red as the last five cards, at the same constant pace without breaks, would on average take a few years.)

Hopefully you and your opponents can simply agree not to do this.

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This ability just mechanically is dumb. I can't understand why Wyrd made it. Honestly, it comes off as lazy, not hey this a cool fun thing we made up.

I don't think anyone caught on to this during testing.

I suppose the correct way to do it would be to allow the Mei Feng player to pick the cards he wants his deck to have and then shuffle those while putting the rest into the discard pile. If he has the BJ in his hand, that is. Because that it what he could do but it would just take a long time and there's really no need to do it "for real" (I don't want to wait that long!). So let him take all the Severes and RJ and make a deck of those. Sure, it makes Mei Feng quite powerful but what the alternative is just silly.

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This ability just mechanically is dumb. I can't understand why Wyrd made it. Honestly, it comes off as lazy, not hey this a cool fun thing we made up.

I don't think anyone caught on to this during testing.

I suppose the correct way to do it would be to allow the Mei Feng player to pick the cards he wants his deck to have and then shuffle those while putting the rest into the discard pile. If he has the BJ in his hand, that is. Because that it what he could do but it would just take a long time and there's really no need to do it "for real" (I don't want to wait that long!). So let him take all the Severes and RJ and make a deck of those. Sure, it makes Mei Feng quite powerful but what the alternative is just silly.

Getting a deck like that would take on average about 183 000 years of shuffling. I would just refuse to play anyone stupid enough to try.

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This ability just mechanically is dumb. I can't understand why Wyrd made it. Honestly, it comes off as lazy, not hey this a cool fun thing we made up.

I don't think anyone caught on to this during testing.

I suppose the correct way to do it would be to allow the Mei Feng player to pick the cards he wants his deck to have and then shuffle those while putting the rest into the discard pile. If he has the BJ in his hand, that is. Because that it what he could do but it would just take a long time and there's really no need to do it "for real" (I don't want to wait that long!). So let him take all the Severes and RJ and make a deck of those. Sure, it makes Mei Feng quite powerful but what the alternative is just silly.

Getting a deck like that would take on average about 183 000 years of shuffling. I would just refuse to play anyone stupid enough to try.

It would certainly be one seriously long game if you did!

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Sure, it makes Mei Feng quite powerful but what the alternative is just silly.

Personally, I think the best alternative is just to houserule that you can't cast Railwalk at the same target twice in a row. That would have absolutely no impact on "normal" uses of the action, but would completely shut this unintended interaction down.

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I think the point here is any Mei Feng players could decided, hey I'm just gunna flip some cards. Sure, they might be good, they might be bad, but I got some good cardes in my hand, I feel safe milling a little to see the lose ones maybe go. I also can see a player, at the 2nd to last turn of a game during a tourney when the clocks getting low and knows that extra rounds would hurt him when he's winning already, could use this ability to just stall.

But these aren't huge cases. I dont expect it to really be a crisis. Its just not a good mechanic. I saw an issue on the scorpious card too among others. I think there's a balance issue with the Outcast emissary versus the others. Overall, I don't feel like the book was tested well enough. I dont recall even see the open beta for it.

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I saw an issue on the scorpious card too among others. I think there's a balance issue with the Outcast emissary versus the others.

Mind sharing? I would be very interested.

Overall, I don't feel like the book was tested well enough. I dont recall even see the open beta for it.

The open beta was completely public and ran for quite some time. I'm surprised you missed it but it's a shame you did.

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If my opponent is just trying to get rid of the Black Joker from the deck and wants to quickly flip until its in the discard pile so Mei Feng can continue her turn without flipping the black joker then I dont have a problem with it. If my opponent has the black joker in his hand and just wanted to do a complete reshuffle of the deck, lets say the red joker was already in the discard pile, then i dont have a problem with it. 

If my opponent uses this ability as a stall tactic or some kind of reshaping of the deck over and over again then I would call shenanigans. No matter how a model and its abilities are designed we need to be reasonable with each other. We must not forget we play the game to have fun. I dont recall any tournament giving a new car or $25,000 as a first place prize. 

I agree its a cheezy ability that probably needs to be reworked a bit but if my opponent usues the ability for instances like I mentioned above and is quick about it I guess i can live with it. Just roll my eyes and move on. 

if you dont want the cheese to continue for more than one turn feel free to kill the model providing her with the ability. 

 

 

 

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The good thing is that since the ability hasn't yet been printed onto a card, there would still be time to fix it somehow before the Emissary is released.

Unless we're getting Emissaries for Black Friday 

(Fingers crossed, but not holding my breath because I don't look good when I'm blue)

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An easy fix would be to say that triggers from CA actions targeting his marker do not receive the +6 to CA

That would significantly weaken the ability as many times when you use the marker "legitimately" as part of a longer Railwalk it wont be the first marker/construct you use.

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