This whole sentence is straight ridiculous.
No point is being made by it.
Sap: good wording
Tough Crowd: stupid wording
The solution is just never use the word “owner”
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There’s another dubious one - Canary, 2nd excavation reward, which says:
“Return an enemy minion to its owner’s hand”.
Why not just write "Return an enemy minion to your opponent’s hand"or “Return an enemy minion to their hand”?
This just makes it seem like it’s possible to use that card to return an enemy minion to YOUR OWN hand, if that minion was originally played by you.
There’s no other way to interpret that wording but to accept that possibility. If you don’t do that, it means your reading comprehension is very limited and you probably had issues in school because of it.
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Contradicting a sentence without providing any clue of what you mean has always proven to be the best way to advance the discussion. Good job, keep it up that way 
Also if you don’t get the point of that sentence then maybe you should have read the first replies of the topic. Starting to read a thread down the middle is rarely the best practice.
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I will, as long as you keep typing nonsensical sentences.
I am just providing the same amount of sense back.
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The basic definition of stealing is taking something that is not yours and claiming it yours.
If you can’t understand how that matters for the topic you’re free to learn basic understanding skills.
Once done, if you still think the point is not correct you are free to debunk it providing actual arguments.
Claiming something nonsensical without explaining why doesn’t make it nonsensical.
To prove it with your methodology : claiming that my sentence is ridiculous and nonsensical IS ridiculous and nonsensical. Therefore, my sentence is not ridiculous and makes sens.
No, cuz this is Hearthstone, not MTG.
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The only person who owns any Hearthstone cards whatsoever is Blizzard. It’s in the fine print of the user agreement. You can use the cards in your collection but there are no players who qualify as owners in Hearthstone.
So really, Tough Crowd should send a minion to Microsoft’s hand. Wherever that is.
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molten giant is the worse…
its been 10 years and it still doesnt work like the text suggests…
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I still get annoyed that holy wrath deals damage based on the card’s cost in the deck instead of in hand because it has to draw it first.
Extra annoyed that cards that discount the card as you draw it (like shadow fiend) will reduce the cost, but cards like molten giant dont.
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Control, yes, controller, no. It’s an important distinction.
They really should just use the word “controller” instead of “owner,” it’s more descriptive of how Hearthstone handles card effects. Current controller is the owner.
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And current owner is the controller.
If you’ve only played Hearthstone, it is a distinction without a difference. There’s only a problem when people assume rules from other games apply to this one.
No, it’s not the only problem, the problem is also in their wording (as shown in previous replies, some even have pictures). As I said, if you don’t find their wording problematic, you obviously have issues with reading comprehension.
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Right, that’s kind of the core of the issue.
In Hearthstone there’s no difference, but there is in the meaning of the words.
The card developers SHOULD be making their cards crazily precise with their language so that there is no ambiguity or need to have played the scenario out within Hearthstone in order to have an understanding of what will occur.
In English there’s a subtle but real distinction between control and ownership. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they don’t. That’s a precision of language thing the developers should be considering when making card texts.
Unfortunately, they often hand waive it due to the system handling the rules and leave it to the players to figure out after a card doesn’t exactly behave the way they thought it would on an initial (and valid) reading.
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Well, since I comprehended it and you didn’t…
I agree.
But to complain about it after seeing them not do it for 11 years is silly. They know. They deliberately chose a looser ruleset, generally easier to learn rules and less upfront complication presented to the player. That was a design choice, one that was hugely successful at getting people who thought games like Magic were too hard.
Yes, that design choice comes with downsides like inconsistency of expectations. But the digital format does help fix that. When players have to enforce the rules themselves, they can get stuck on incorrect interpretations and never figure it out. I’m not sure there was ever a table who actually used Banding correctly, as an example. But in Hearthstone, it takes one game of “huh that’s weird” and now the rule is clear.
Is it perfect? No. But it’s also not hidden. The same clarity that you ask for has been given, in that they simply never have had the tightness of the rules that other games do. This is not a surprise, and yet you act like it is one. I was around for the beta and launch, and people had MTG-styled rules confusion then. I could forgive them. I know that you know better.
My issue is that they could avoid most of that by just being more cautious about their word choices. It’s sometimes particularly bad.
The digital format does help a lot with it, but as I’ve said earlier, sometimes it’s tough to tell if something is even a bug without asking devs about it because the card text is so ambiguous at times.
It’s not really the rules themselves I take issue with as much as how the cards badly describe them. That’s a really easy fix, but one they basically put zero effort into doing.
It’s not hard to avoid using the word “owner” when “controller” is the more precise word to use, or any of the other myriad cards that could be fixed with a single word swap or two to make it clearer to someone that doesn’t have my knowledge of the game.
It would help make these threads not happen in the first place. Yes, I know how it works, but I also fully understand why others wouldn’t.
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I’m sorry, but that’s completely irrelevant here. Let’s pull the image again…
↑ There’s no good reason why it couldn’t just say “return a minion to its controller’s hand.” It’s clearer, and there is oodles of space left on the card so there isn’t any worry about needing to shorten a ten letter word down to five.
I agree with this. And I’ve defended cards that have weird wording when a clearer wording would not fit in the text box, with precisely this reasoning. But that principle really only applies to cards with multiple sentences of text. This isn’t that situation. It could be zero games and the rule is clear.
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Yeah, there are definitely times where it isn’t going to fit in the box.
Like: cast an elemental invocation. They obviously can’t list all 4 on the card itself prior to play.
I do like that they fixed a lot of these cases in the card library now showing related cards and effects. It would be nice if they expanded that to clarifying notes when a card is a little off due to text box size limits. (I.e. ALL vs ALL with the shaman excavate reward and wave of nostalgia)
But yeah, a card like tough crowd has no real excuse in having the imprecise wording.
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