So I’m primarily a MtG player who started playing HS since the inception, fell out of it, and back at it again.
In Magic, if I have a card that has been taken from me and I use a spell that says ‘Return target permanent to it’s owner’s hand’, it goes back to my hand, since I am the owner of said permanent, even though my opponent controls it. In Magic, control does not equate to ownership.
In the same situation in Hearthstone, the card goes into the opponent’s hand, which I find a little basic. Should not the same ruling from Magic apply? The return to hand wording could easily read ‘Return a minion to it’s controller’s hand’.
Card “ownership” is weird in hearthstone, along with the lack of graveyard allowing a minion to die and be revived repeatedly while stacking up the total number of that minion that “has died this game”
Sometimes the simplicity of the game rules causes some awkward effects like this. I definitely agree that return to hand effects should be a counter to thief cards.
The default ruling in physical card games is that stuff that returns cards to their owners hands/decks returns it to the person that owns the card, not the person currently in control of it on board.
It’s not really a hearthstone problem, exactly, it is just not the expected behavior from CCG veterans outside of hearthstone.
But this is a physical security issue, not a rule issue. Putting my card in your hand makes it far easier for you to simply walk off with it. That’s the only reason the MTG rule exists, and cards are designed around it.
In a purely digital game, it doesn’t matter where the cards go during a game.
Why would it be common sens ?
If you steal a card, that card is now yours, you now own it
If the card is returned to it’s owner’s hand, it’s bumped in the hand of its new owner
Nothing has been violated here
Arguably it does not make common sens that you still own a card that is no longer yours since it has been stolen
This is not common sens in action, this is rulling.
You will not argue with the rule of american football for allowing to touch the ball with your hands while it is not allowed in soccer. They are not the same game, they don’t have the same rules.
The only thing you can really point out in Hearthstone is the lack of explicitation of those rules that you most often have to learn the hard way. Like when you bump a minion in a full hand. Beforehand you can’t know if it will add it in their hand, make it vanish, do nothing or destroy it
Precisely because of that, your argument has the same merit as mine. Not more, not less.
Because of different meanings behind the words “owner” and “controller”, it’s dubious which will happen, until you play it and see for yourself.
I’m the true owner of the card. The person who stole it from me is either “thief”, “controller” or “current owner”, all more precise than simply “owner”, which makes it common sense that the card should be returned to the primary owner, not the current owner.
But I guess the interpretation is subjective until you play the card.
The devs get away with bad precision of language in hearthstone all the time because the server handles the rules.
The problem? It’s really tough to tell what the intended behaviors are and what are bugs sometimes.
Like how we had an infinitely long thread on how wheel of death makes sense to work because the phrase “in X turns” was ambiguous.
Or this monstrosity:
With this phrasing, even in hearthstone, it would imply that it went infinite with itself.
“After” in hearthstone requires the full event to occur in order to trigger. Then you gain 2 more, which would be a new armor event, which should then trigger the rockstar again. Even if it didn’t go infinite with itself, this phrasing should cause 2 of them to go infinite (or Blizzard’s 30 trigger limit).
If they wanted this to be better language precision within hearthstone’s ruleset, it should read: whenever gain armor, gain 2 more instead.
The timing of the event is no longer ambiguous and no longer implies a second armor event is occurring that could further trigger armor gaining triggers.
Being a digital card game has allowed the devs to be lazier about their card text and rule set. Players shouldn’t have to play a card interaction to see how it works, but we frequently do.
Which is why most of the cards with that effect do not use the word owner
Most of them are one-sidded which prevents any missinterpretation
Shadowstep does not read “return a friendly minion to its owner’s hand”, it clearly indicates that this minion will be brought back to your hand wherever it came from first
Since the generic rule is that “an opponent minion goes back in the opponent’s hand, and a friendly minion goes back in your hand, whoever summoned them first”, a card that allows to do both doesn’t yield much ambiguity
The only strange wording of them all is freezing trap, which is directly targetting an ennemy minion, but still reads “owner” instead of “opponent”
The weird part here is that cards that steal like Sylvanas do use the term “control”
So there is a bit of the owner/controller conflict that we see in other CCGs, Hearthstone simply handles it differently where taking control also takes ownership, which is why stealing a card prevents it from being revived by the opponent as well.
Hearthstone tends to use the phrase “started in your deck” when referring to cards you have in your collection and put in your deck, because ownership is a bit nebulous elsewhere.
Nope, when triggers simultaneously/slightly prior to. After is an event AFTER it finishes resolving. When would partially fix the card text.
You gained armor
After, you gained more
Well, now you gained armor again, so after, you should gain more.
Regardless of the word, after or whenever, with 2 of that card on the board it would create an infinite loop if there was not a built-in failsafe in the code
Regarding the main topic it doesn’t make sens to want to compare all the rules of mtg and hs. One is rooted in physical limitations while the other can break free of them.
In one of the latest videos of Rarran, while discussing it, he had the realization that handbuff/Deckbuff couldn’t exist in mtg since there was no possible way to track them physically
The biggest issue with stuff like this is that the players can’t even tell what the correct way it should play out is in a lot of cases. We have had a good number of bugs that people just assume is the correct way a card should work until a dev comments on it or it gets fixed later.
Half of the reveal thread on this was wondering how the hell it worked.
Most of the questioning was if it permanently gained the attack or not, which this card is super not clear about.
Then when it launched, it didn’t count the attack from weapons, only card effects that directly gave hero attack. Also it was temporary gains.
It was reasonable to assume based on the text and behavior, that this was the correct interpretation of the card because that’s how the game was handling it.
But nope, it was a bug, and now it also gains weapon attack.
This kind of stuff is what I mean when I say that Blizz overly relies on being a digital card game to handle rules that really should be more clearly aligned to card text.
Hearthstone can do some fun cool things in the digital space that physical can’t. It shouldn’t give up the need for extremely precise language on cards that physical card games need simply because the server handles the rules.
