MArcomage

Zika1984Car wrote:
Can someone please explain to me how does this card (Emissary of the afterlife) exactly works?

If you go to the Cards section and set the Advanced filter to Discard and the Support filter to Undead, you'll generate a list of cards that are flagged as Undead Support and include Discard effects. These include Corpses behemoth and Unholy Shrine, both of which cause you to discard several Undead from your hand to grant you a positive effect.

Playing Emissary of the afterlife after one of those cards (Or, apparently, Lich if it replaced an Undead from your hand) will cause you to take the discarded-by-effect Undead cards back into your hand while dealing 10 damage per affected card.

It does not work following any other mass-discard effect such as Evolution. It used to function in such a case, and this behavior was decidedly overpowered and not intended in the card's design.

rework this card description is so confusing and hard to understand. Also condition to play that card is almost never comes its kinda of usless to take that card to undead deck to wait that situation to happen and hope that this card wont get discarded then openent discards your card also hoping u have resource + u played undead on last turn ..its kind of miracle 3 contition to happen to play this card sucessfully

Althought the condition is hard to achieve, this card is only meant to be a combo card with imensive potential. I don't see why we should rework every card which is hard to play or complicated (poor divine guidance :'( ), because cards like this makes this game interesting. I see that it needs much hand managing, but thats the flavour of this card.
To be complicated does not mean that it should be reworked, and for buffing its potential power just too high for 12/12.

So, whats the point against niche cards that are existing in the game? If you cannot buff or nerf it, you should leave it as it is, althought it is only usefull in special conditions. Reworking does only destroy a beautifull concept.

Anyway, the rewording was needed due the abuse with whirlwind

Edit: and the recources to play this card after corpse behemoth and undead shrine is quite easy, since you gain the stock from corpse behemoth after triggering the keyword and undead shrine does not need recruits and gems at all.
And about the discarding thing... what where discard cards made for if not for game changer or combos like this one?

The whirlwind abuse case is still there, though... If you play whirlwind and then an undead support card, you can play Emissary of the afterlife the next turn for up to 70 damage.

Edit: And, as an added benefit, you get your Emissary back, too!

The description, as it stands, is very vague and misleading. My interpretation, and probably other new players' interpretation of it as well, would be as follows:

If last card played was Undead support

So cards like Death Wave, Eternal Guardian, Crypt Sentry. Note how there's no mention of the card needing to be a Discard card.

replace cards in hand

Replace every single card in your current hand.

with your discarded Undead

With randomly chosen cards with the Undead keyword from a list of cards that were discarded by the player during the course of the match.

So that led to these:
http://arcomage.net/?location=Replays_details&CurrentReplay=314747&PlayerView=1&Turn=48
http://arcomage.net/?location=Replays_details&CurrentReplay=314747&PlayerView=1&Turn=81

Since all of the conditions in the description of the card were met, I expected it to replace my hand with Army of Darkness cards (list of discarded cards: Army of Darkness, random(Army of Darkness) == Army of Darkness). But apparently that's not how the card works in the slightest, and the description is wrong.

So how about changing the description to:

If last card played was Corpses behemoth or Unholy shrine, return its discarded cards

No more ambiguity, no more chance to have any exploits, and the description is even shorter than the original.

Your truncation is actually severely insufficient. The current list of Undead Support cards (as revealed by using the Support dropdown list in the Cards section) that discard from your own hand is five cards, not two.

Corpses behemoth
Emissary of the afterlife
Necromancy amplifier
Necropolis
Unholy shrine

...and you would still have to specify that it only functions for Undead cards from the discard list rather than returning all discarded cards. Plus, you would have to go back and edit this card's text when other changes are made to the game such as the addition or removal of an Undead support, and the game is smartly designed to avoid that as it would make updates a greater nightmare than they already are.

Still, you're probably right that it could specify "recently discarded" cards. I think it used to, but card terminology was since streamlined. It's probably outlined more specifically in the game's rules or FAQ section that "discarded" always refers to those that are still visible in a discard list. (If I'm wrong and it isn't, it should be. Consider this an appeal, then. ;) )

DPsycho wrote:
Your truncation is actually severely insufficient. The current list of Undead Support cards (as revealed by using the Support dropdown list in the Cards section) that discard from your own hand is five cards, not two.

Corpses behemoth
Emissary of the afterlife
Necromancy amplifier
Necropolis
Unholy shrine

Yeah, and they are not revealed when using Support and Discard drop-down lists, because for some reason Necromancy amplifier and Necropolis don't have the actual word "discard" in their descriptions. And neither does Emissary of the afterlife itself.

DPsycho wrote:
...and you would still have to specify that it only functions for Undead cards from the discard list rather than returning all discarded cards.

Which wouldn't be a problem for Unholy shrine, Corpses behemoth and Necromancy amplifier, because they only discard Undead to begin with.

DPsycho wrote:
Plus, you would have to go back and edit this card's text when other changes are made to the game such as the addition or removal of an Undead support, and the game is smartly designed to avoid that as it would make updates a greater nightmare than they already are.

And yet the addition of new cards causes the card to unintentionally become more exploitable, as seen in this thread. Having a static list of cards would prevent that from happening.

So you're proposing changing and limiting the card's functionality rather than just changing the text as you've stated?

I prefer it being more useful rather than less, given the choice.

DPsycho wrote:
So you're proposing changing and limiting the card's functionality rather than just changing the text as you've stated?

I prefer it being more useful rather than less, given the choice.

It depends on whether you can change the text to something that isn't misleading. If you can't, then change the functionality a bit so that you could. Or change the description to "To know how this card works, see the enclosed instruction manual" :P

I agree that this card description can be confusing, but I really don't like static list of cards in effect description. Actually, if you would trace all the card changes during last 3 years, you would see that vast majority of such cards were transformed to a dynamic list that uses deck filters. The description of recently discarded cards is a bit complicated (although present in the FAQ), maybe we could slightly alter the card effect to simplify the card description.

For example it could only target cards discarded by card effect, not by discard action.

As this replay shows, the card text is deceiving:
http://arcomage.net/?location=Replays_details&CurrentReplay=314540&PlayerView=1&Turn=25
.
Evolution is definitely not an undead support card!
We need a clear description of what and why happens when this card is played.

sq wrote:
As this replay shows, the card text is deceiving:
http://arcomage.net/?location=Replays_details&CurrentReplay=314540&PlayerView=1&Turn=25
.
Evolution is definitely not an undead support card!
We need a clear description of what and why happens when this card is played.

Yep, I've tried the trick and it worked against my expectation.
also take a look at the final move of that game and you'll see another tricky way to use the emissary.

i know that emissary could be used with whirlwind

Ah, wow. In both of those cases, the conditions were met, technically. The last card played by the Undead deck player were Undead support, but in both cases said card did not cause the mass discard. In the first case, the opponent caused the discard (and the last card played happened to have been Undead support), and in the second, it was Whirlwind followed by an Undead support.

So the card is actually functioning as the text describes, but this seems to me to be unintended use. I, and I assume others, expected that the Undead support would have to have done the discarding, but clearly that's not actually the case. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to redo the code.

In the mean time, maybe I should add Whirlwind to my Undead deck...

I propose to rephrase (and recode) the card in this way:
If last card played was Undead support, replace cards in hand with the Undead cards in your discard pile.
Attack: 10N
N = #replaced cards

I think this coulde be easy to understand and there will be no more problem with Evolution.

If we need* to solve the "whirlwind" problem the only way is to remove quick from whirlwind (making it "aria" at least).
Actually the real problem of this combo lies nor in Emissary nor in Whirlwind, it's caused by the system that sees relocated cards as discarded cards; but that's probably an unsolvable issue.

*do we really need to solve this problem? this is one of the few non-preconstructed non-selfevident combo in the game. I think that this kind of combo is what people (ok, I'm talking about myself) look for in a cardgame.

This kind of synergy is too good to be removed from game. In fact, I think we need more tricks like that.

My biggest point here is not that we necessarily need to remove this effect. My point is that the card description is difficult to understand, and even so it still does not describe the effect.

Ok, we can have non self-evident combos, but if a player cannot trace what hit him, it becomes a cheat

NG_Beholder wrote:
This kind of synergy is too good to be removed from game. In fact, I think we need more tricks like that.

I wholeheartedly agree

How about changing the target cards to those who are present in the discard pile, but are not present in the hand?

The problem with that is that it can affect the outcome when this card is used legitimately. If you played an Undead support and discarded five Common Undead and happened to draw two of the same completely by chance, you would then be dealing 20 less damage compared to current.