@RTsa you’re exact, I think you made a good summary of the consistency problems that ruling implies.
I’m not sold too because of “NBN: Controlling the Message looks to see
if the first card to be trashed is trashed”.
I disagree with that. CTM doesn’t look for anything, it records its trigger or not, simple as that.
In my understanding of action + consequence, no card ended trashed, so the trigger never recorded.
In his understanding of action only, the trash action was made so its trigger records but fizzle. And he’s the boss, so he’s right.
When you play a trigger situation like ABT/Foundry, Foundry is actually waiting for the rez to trigger. So triggers can intervene in the middle of something, or in the end, with no major problems.
Here with this ruling, CTM is triggering before any card actually ends in archives, this is really weird to me.
Not sold aswell.
As I explained, meeting trigger conditiom and triggering are not the same thing.
That’s fine though. I have nothing really further to add to this conversation. I suppose you’ll just have to chalk it up as one of many weird things about Netrunner
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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I’m really not melting those 2, you’re the one who’s doing this.
“if the runner is doing something like this, then” => you’re cuting the thing in 2, not me.
I’m waiting the runner to “do the thing like this”, not waiting the runner to “do something”, record a trigger, then check if it was “like this” after simultaneous effects.
This way to record trigger is totally new. They do not have one time component and one qualitative component that have to be sorted if they happen to be in the same assertion. This is too complicated for me sorry, it’s not supposed to be harder than Boson physics.
So, time component have higher priority than qualitive component but how quantitative component if there is an “a”, or an “any”, or a number ? I’m not the one that is making things complicated.
It’s not new at all. It is in the core rule book. It has literally been the way since the beginning. Pages 21 and 22 lay out the differences between the types of abilities, and the section on simultaneous effects shows that abilities that meet their trigger conditions simultaneously trigger in the order as determined/chosen by the players.
I do not seek to complicate, I seek to illuminate. It’s really not even that complicated, you are the one trying to insert your own interpretations and biases into the interaction. You should instead seek a more complete mental model of how the game works, rather than insisting that the person breaking it down to as small of constituent components as possible is trying to make things complicated.
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I’m the first one to understand why that ruling is related to an interpretation of a card text, ~50 posts ago 
You say “simple”, to me it’s still quantic. There is no element to say if the card is speaking about the rule action (because “trash an installed corp card” action doesn’t exist if I’d nitpick) or about action + consequences.
OK, I think I get this. I was pretty confused too, but I think I understand it now; thanks Jacob!
I suspect it’s the wording that throws people off as much as anything, so just to check that I really do understand it: am I right in thinking that any triggered effect of the form “When X occurs, do Y” might more fully be written as “When X would occur, if X occurs, do Y”? And that what CtM’s ability really says is “The first time a card would be trashed, if that card is trashed, trace 4 blah blah blah”?
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100.000 likes.
It’s new.
The prerequisite of CTM is “trashes a card”, that prerequisite has not happened fully but the trigger is still recorded, this is totally new and not in core rules.
I particularly don’t understand why “they” are understanding X as an action in the when part, and X as an action + consequences in the if part, to make CTM fizzling by replacement. Or else, the runner was still making the trash action so CTM would trigger after Slum replacement effect.
This is inconsistent here too. My second problem is here, with that ruling. What is X is changing if you’re in the when prereq, or in the if for simultaneousity. And that is no way “simple”, in any cases.
In my model, X stays action + consequence in the when part, and there is no new if stuff. And if there was one, mainly to solve simultaneously triggered cards, it doesn’t change the problem. All Netrunner worked fine with that model, various trigger concurrency problem aswell.
Here, this is new.
What happens when Sneakdoor running and the runner moves from the archives through Copycat or Bullfrog ?
(unrelated Q., I’ve just forgotten this)
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There is no such thing as actions and consequences. You are trying to add extra layers of abstraction to the game.
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So how CTM triggers, and why it’s fizzling in Damon’s / your ruling is still based on two different interpretations of the prerequisite text.
You’re saying the “when” CTM prereq, is for the action of trashing a card, I’d say fine with that, let’s record that prereq then and see what happens.
When checking after Slum, the runner magically stopped to make the action “trash a card” ? Not at all : Film Critic specifies it stops accesses, Slum doesn’t specifies it stops the “trash action”, or that the card is “no longer being trashed”. But in consequence of Slum, the runner trashed no card.
So here, you are suddenly switching to interpretation #2 (which is mine btw), that “no card was trashed so it fizzle”.
You’re not making CTM fizzling because the runner stopped to make the action “trash a card”, because the trigger is still in the “todo list”. You’re making CTM fizzling because he trashed no card.
So you’re saying for the when part “ok, prereq is ON” because of the “trash card action is OK”, then after this, say "well it fizzles because of “trash card action is OK but no card was trashed in consequence because of Slum”.
Well if you were waiting a trash consequence then the CTM prereq should never had hit in the first place.
This is totally inconsistent to me.
In programming terms. There is a an event distributor in the game, and then there are event listeners - the cards themselves.
In this case we have 2 listeners for the trash event: Slums and CtM. Let’s say the event also has an additional parameter called first. The fist time this event is triggered it marks the first flag as 1.
The runner runs an asset and chooses to trash it. The event distributor notes this, and sends a trash event with the first flag set to 1.
Now Slums catches the event and asks the runner if they want to RFG instead. They do, so trashing is replaced by RFG.
Next CtM catches the event, and notices that the first flag is set to 1. However, it notices that no card was trashed, so it fizzles.
The runner then runs another asset. This time the event distributor also sends a trash event and since it already has sent the event once, it sets the first flag to 0.
CtM catches the event and notices that the first flag is set to 0, so it does nothing.
So the key point here is that the event distributor doesn’t care what the listeners do with the event. From its perspective it already sent one event with the first flag set to 1, so all the remaining trash events should be sent with the first flag set to 0.
I could write this code no prob, so I don’t see how this is not explicitly clear.
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This was indeed also why I’m not totally sold on this logic.
edit: I’m just a bit queasy about how you could ask security testing “did this happen” and it says “deffo, yep!”, and then you ask apocalypse, and it says “hah, nope”.
I’m imagining, for cards that triggers on “firsts” that the card is sitting there all happy and peppy, going “NOW IS MY CHANCE YAY”, and then it’s suddenly not a successful run on archives anyway, so it’s sad. But as that was their chance, there are no more chances. This makes kind of sense to me.
However, I have no idea how it then would work if we had a card that said “Gain 3 credits on the second successful run on archives in a turn.” or something to that effect.
Because in my head, that card would then have a counter, counting “one successful run” once the first successful run on archives happens, and once the second happens, the card would then again go “NOW IS MY CHANCE” (which might then turn out to be a fluke if that run was a Sneakdoor run).
But then if the first run was sneakdoor, the card would go like “One succ- No wait. No successful runs on archives”. And we’d have the weird situation where your first run on archives would be the first successful run, that turned out to not be a successful run on archives anyway, but on HQ, while the second run on archives is the first successful run except for card that ask about the first successful run, and the third run on archives is the second successful run. And we can all agree that that’s weird right?
Then write it, and notice where you put the “and card was trashed for real” in your code.
If you put it in the event catcher, then CTM never triggered on first run. If you put it in the simultaneous solving pile, then you’re making CTM a special non-consistent case.
I’m told lots of us can program, so if you look at this using pgming analogy, then a lot of us will start to notice things are artificially patched on this exact moment.
Yep, this is the same as the reasoning behind the Tori Hanzo/Net Shield interaction that we already had a ruling on. It’s just that the trigger event is replaced rather than prevented in this case.
The reason I think it causes very understandable confusion is that this interpretation sits uneasily with the actual wording! It is easy to accept that when you “do” something, this could be interpreted to refer to it being triggered, or actually resolving and that these would lead to slightly different interactions dependent on what the intention was.
What we actually have is a trigger clause of “The first time that X…” which is resolved as “The first time that X1, if also X2, …” The way these things have been ruled to resolve don’t simply rely on a specific interpretation of a term (which might be confusing at first, but readily understandable), but actually have a different number of trigger conditions to the number of triggers written on the card.
The solving pile is not simultaneous. It’s a stack with an execution order. Because of race conditions (e.g. multiple replacement effects) all event handlers must check that all of their execution conditions are still valid when they are given the turn to execute. For CtM these are: 1) this was the first trash event; 2) the card ended up in the trash pile.
This is no different from having Patron and Sec Testing on the same server. Both of the event handlers want to consume the access “token” to replace it with their own effect but once one of them has consumed it, it’s no longer there for the other. Nevertheless, both event handlers have been triggered, and will not be triggered again because an event with the first flag set to 1 will not come, since it has already been sent once.
In case of CtM + Slums, they both look at the card that was accessed. Slums consumes it first, removing it from the game. Then CtM goes and checks if it’s in the trash pile, and it’s not so it just goes “hey, what’s going on here, i guess it’s best to not do anything”.
And just to clarify, it’s doesn’t matter whether CtM thinks it has been triggered or not. The event distributor only ever sends one event with the first flag as 1 each turn, so no matter how grumpy CtM gets, there will not be another event that would satisfy all the checks in its handler.
So you say you ask a 1-life token for CTM.
Not in the prereq part, but in the call back.
Interesting. 
This is interesting because the 1-life token on sectest actually works in the event catcher. The 1-life token on apoc/sneakdoor work on the event catcher aswell.
This is a new concept and I’m wondering why only 5-6 persons noticed that here.
Are we seriously having another 25 post argument about this? I’ve never liked how ABT/foundry works, but at a certain stage it’s not worth every discussion being about it. I think that the usefulness of this thread is being significantly reduced by arguing with Damion by proxy.
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Same here…
I hope there will be a clarification on the FAQ. If the FAQ says “jump”, i will jump, no question asked.
First, thanks a ton for writing this, reading through it was super helpful. But I have a really slow friend, and, when I showed him this, he ended up more mind-fucked than he did elucidated (again, this guy is SLOW). I think his confusion was partially over this:
His backward line of thinking is “Wasn’t the whole reason that ST + Sneakdoor was revised was because Sneakdoor was considered a constant ability (by the ancur wiki, it says abilities starting with “if…” are constant), and thus sneakdoor occurs before ST even checks? How does this interaction actually play out? Can you still get the credits for ST after sneak door? Related to the salsette slums / CtM interaction (and how replacement effects still pop triggers), I can’t imagine so?”
Another reason he’s confused is related to a previous discussion about Credit Crash / Imp vs. Chrysalis / TFP. I just can’t make my friend understand why the corp cards are (seemingly) getting priority here.
I hate to ask for more after you wrote such a long article, but could you help my friend out? I’m sure he’d appreciate it.