Can the Corp use Mumbad City Hall when there is only one card in R&D? Does it matter if that card is an alliance card?
Yes you can, whether the last card is an alliance card or not. Since R&D is a hidden zone, the game doesn’t check whether the last card in R&D might meet the criteria for the search when determining if Mumbad City Hall’s ability has the potential to change the game state.
Can I use Mumbad City Hall to search for an alliance card that I can’t afford to play or install, just to shuffle R&D?
Mumbad City Hall can resolve at least partially any time there are cards in R&D, so it can be activated regardless of the outcome its effect will have. However, you can only fail to find on a search if there are no cards matching the search criteria. If there are any alliance cards in R&D that you can play or install, you must find one of them, reveal it, and play or install it. If there are only alliance cards that you cannot play or install, you must reveal one of them before shuffling it back into R&D. If there are no alliance cards in R&D, then you do not reveal any cards, and the effect just shuffles R&D.
This feels extraordinarily hard to enforce, but what sort of penalty should a judge give if Mumbad City Hall was used to shuffle when there are actually targets in their deck? And if you’re judging a game where somebody does fail to find, should you look through their deck to check whether they just made a legal play? I can’t think of any other situation that’s nearly as hard to tell if a player made a legal play as this one (it’s impossible without inspection) but there’s no other way (aside from getting decklist and checking all other cards in play).
The floor roles don’t seem to specify anything about this as far as I see. Still, I would like to know the correct protocol on being able to check if a play was legal (probably the weirdest part) and what to do if it wasn’t.
I don’t see why this is any harder to police than all kinds of illegal plays involving hidden information (e.g. installing an agenda as a piece of ice, etc.). If you have doubts, call a TO to check the deck for legal targets. Cheaters will be hung from the yardarm.
The biggest difference I think is that if you, as a judge, are watching a game, you can see whether or not somebody is cheating immediately in the installing-agenda-as-ICE case. In the other case, a player could say “use city hall, fail to find, shuffle” without looking at their deck or looking in any way where the judge can’t see every card in their deck. There is no way for any player to verify that this player is cheating without looking through their deck or at their decklist and at every other card-that-could-be-alliance.
Also note that you’ll be able to tell after the game if it’s an agenda or not by simply flipping the card face up, and that cheat can be uncovered by a variety of in-game mechanics. This one cannot be resolved as such, a player could have/could claim to have shuffled facedown Alliances into their deck through various effects or could also claim to have drew all of their Alliance cards between the time they failed to find and the point it’s called into question.
I want to ensure nobody can cheat and get away with it and want to ensure that this rule is followed (even if I think it’s a bit silly), but there is no protocol for doing so in situations like the one I described. I want to enforce the rules, but it doesn’t really describe how.
Yeah, this can come up with any search effect. The issue is that it’s impossible to detect whether a player is lying or telling the truth when they fail to find without looking through the deck or checking the decklist. Cheating prevention that relies on players telling the truth is perhaps a misguided paradigm.
But that’s exactly the issue, there’s no reason to suspect a problem in most circumstances. With all other preventable sources of cheating (that I can think of), you can notice and/or suspect a problem and do measures to protect against it without calling a judge. There’s no way to distinct times when a player says “search for a thing, oh damn I can’t find it” between the truth or a lie.
This issue is resolvable (it takes a hell of a long time to police but it is doable), but there are many ways to do it (cross-referencing the decklist or looking through remaining deck for example) and FFG don’t define which option you should choose or how to resolve this issue. There are cases where it’s outright cheating (immediate DQ) and there are cases where it’s not cheating and was an honest mistake (a lot of players are not aware that you cannot ‘fail to find’ if you have valid targets), how should that be treated?
You bet your ass if someone says “fail to find” without even looking I’m calling a judge.
Usually, reminding someone of the rule is enough in my experience. If someone called me over at one of my events, I would simply look through the deck to confirm.
I think you have a cut and dry rule and some cut and dry best ways to handle enforcing the rules, but it’d be pretty beneficial to have some examples and special attention to it in the next edition of the floor rules.
At a GNK yesterday I Hostaged when I wasn’t sure what was left in my deck, and the only connection left was Fall Guy. Targetted Marketing was in play, naming Fall Guy. I had Levy in hand to play the same turn.
Temptation maaaaaaaaaaan.
EDIT: WAIT, I’M TERRIBLE AT NETRUNNER, HOSTAGE SAYS YOU “MAY” INSTALL.
Well, that’s interesting. In my experience a lot of people do not abide by that rule, out of habit as much as anything else. I’m gonna survey the players at my GNK today and see what they think.
Also, even if most players do maintain the order of their deck while shuffling and the rest will happily change their habits, @Xenasis still raises some excellent points. There should be a rule stating you can always fail to find - in fact I assumed there was, since I know that after some debate FFG introduced that rule for the Thrones LCG last year. The reason is a practical one. As has been suggested to already, it’s just not practical to have a judge come and check the whole deck on every fail to find, and it wastes a lot of time.
Then there’s the good point made about Heritage Committee which I’m not sure was totally clear - even if I maintain the order of cards in R&D while searching, with this ruling I can see what the top 3 are before I select the Committee, so if I don’t like what I see I can get a different alliance card, shuffle, and click to search again, seeing 3 fresh cards on the top that I may want to draw. That seems against the spirit of corp draw cards, which always come with the inherent risk that drawing certain cards (too many agendas) at the wrong time can lose you the game.
Heritage Committee is ruled correctly. I kind of like that this game has an advanced mechanic that I’ve not found in any other CCG, and would really hate if Foundry-ABT, Hostage Street Peddler onto OCA, and Mumbad City Hall Heritage Committee were removed because it “breaks the spirit of the game”. Would be the most inappropriate knee jerk reaction since the Frenchies made up en passant.
It look me a while to understand the two Marked Accounts scenarios. So it seems the basic actions (install, advance, play an event, purge, draw) all trigger and are not card-specific, but any card abilities (Marked Accounts, MCH) are specific to that instance of the card, and are not commutative with the basic actions (e.g. Anonymous Tip, Draw, Draw does not trigger, even though the Tip click results in draw).
So dumb… Genetics Pavilion remembers that the runner already drew 2 cards if you rez it after they drew 2 cards but Jeeves doesn’t remember how I spent clicks if I rez it after I spent clicks…
Yeah, just think of it as every time you see a card with a little click symbol for a paid ability, you add an extra possible action type to the list on your action reminder card. If you have two Capital Investors rezzed, you have two extra actions on the list, even though they do the same thing. If you use the action from ‘Investors A’ three times, you trigger Jeeves; if you use the action from ‘Investors A’ once and the different action from ‘Investors B’ twice, you don’t trigger Jeeves!
(While this is mainly theoretical, I suppose it could just about come up with Political Operative trashing a copy of an asset you have used already to prevent you getting the trigger. Well done if you manage to manufacture that situation in your game!)
The Raman Rai ruling (about face-down) is interesting. It means that you can use him to incrementally turn your archives face-down provided you have cards you can swap with in HQ, which is another, easier way for IG to “discard” cards to apply its ability.
