Is there a ruling from Lukas or some other precedence to go by?
The ability that sets X is a constant ability. The core rule book defines constant abilities.
Constant Abilities
Constant abilities continually affect the game as long as the card
they appear on is active and any other specified conditions are
met. They are not triggered and do not have costs associated
with them. An example of a constant ability is the card
Experiential Data, which reads, “All ice protecting this server
has +1 strength.”
So whenever the amount of NEXT Ice in play changes, you change the value of X. This is because the ability continues to affect the game while the NEXT Gold is active, so X is continually being updated to the current number of NEXT Ice that are rezzed.
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Exactly what I was looking for, thanks!
i don’t see how this helps. we knew it wasn’t a triggered ability (the rulebook specifically indicates there are only two types of abilities), it’s just unclear if another entity resolving them has any knowledge of what X is
for example, if Net Police is rezzed, and Wormhole deals X net damage, there are two active values for “X” in the game and it’s unclear if Wormhole understands either of them
i asked this question a wihle ago and have not received a response
This helps because we know that NEXT Gold’s X value is constantly fixed to a known (variable) value. Other cards values of X have no bearing on what a Wormhole will see. As far as Wormhole is concerned, the subroutine doesn’t say “X net damage”. If there are 3 NEXT Ice rezzed, Wormhole sees it as “3 net damage” because X on NEXT Gold is currently 3.
I’d like to add that Corporate Troubleshooter cannot be rezzed on the encounter paid ability window anyway. If the corp wants to use it, he needs to rez it on approach, always at the same time he rezzes the Ice or he’ll miss the opportunity if the runner decides to not use paid abilities on approach. TBH there’s little reason for the runner to use any that still warrant a Troubleshooter rez afterwards (Nasir makes a very notable exception obviously as stated earlier…).
I was thinking what would be such an interaction for a runner not playing Nasir. I came up with fetching Parasite on an Ice with Ice Carver/Scrubbed installed to avoid on-encounter effects such as Troll’s trace or Tollbooth’s toll on the Ice. Add in Hivemind to get enough counters to blow up Tollbooth on encounter. If there’s no Nasir or on-encounter effects, there’s really no reason to do anything on approach as the runner. 
I agree, but I don’t think we even need to get into what kind of ability it is. Marcus Batty, says to “resolve 1 subroutine on a rezzed piece of ice” (basically like Wormhole/Orion). This just means that Batty is saying, “hey, NEXT Gold fire that net damage subroutine” and NEXT Gold does it.
This has been discussed in the past when people were wondering how Wormhole works with Data Raven: you fire off Data Raven’s subroutine and you place a token on Data Raven if it succeeds:
13 Wormhole
The subroutine that resolves is not considered to be on Wormhole (e.g. when the Corp uses Wormhole with cards like Data Raven or Viktor 2.0, the power counters are placed on those cards and not Wormhole).
(FAQ 2.0, p. 11)
The distinction is not what type of ability, but which cardboard is triggering the subroutine.
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Not sure if the Wormhole / Data Raven discussion is relevant here. Both Data Raven and Viktor 2.0 state that if succesfull , place a token on Data Raven / Viktor.
So the subroutine being fired already refers to the piece of ice the token has to be placed on.
So even if we would get some ice that would ‘copy’ these subroutines , it would normally still end up on Data Raven or Viktor.
The problem here is that we don’t have any other ice that is worded with an X in there. All other ice with variables refer to those variables in the subroutines (Cortex Lock , Next Bronze , Next Silver, IQ)
Draco uses an X to describe something , but that certainly isn’t an continuous effect.
That being said , my guess is that the declaration of the X is a continuous effect. but there is no precedent.
Next Gold seems horribly worded in comparison to all the other ice we have.
“Do 1 net damage for each rezzed piece of NEXT ice.”
"Trash 1 program for each rezzed piece of NEXT ice."
These 2 would have fixed this whole situation right up.
I was responding primarily to this question:
“The text that defines X is not part of the subroutine but is it static X or dynamic? Do we have an official response?”
Since the text that defines X is a constant ability that will always update to reflect the number of NEXT Ice rezzed.
@magaruis There doesn’t need to be existing precedent to figure out how this works. In fact we are setting it right now by reading the rules as written. Abilities can either be constant or triggered. There’s nothing to trigger within the ability, it just checks the number of NEXT Ice. There’s nothing that indicates that NEXT Gold does any work to ‘set X’ before or when the subroutine fires. This means it’s a constant ability, and we know how those work. X is constantly equal to the number of NEXT Ice rezzed, and any time the subroutine is used on NEXT Gold, it simply does damage and trashes programs equal to the number of NEXT Ice in play. Wormhole causing those subroutines to fire wouldn’t have any difference because the ability on NEXT Gold that determines X is always determining X.
I could understand this being an issue if the ability were worded like “On encounter set X equal to the number of NEXT ice rezzed” but it doesn’t do that at all. There’s no requirement from NEXT Gold aside from being rezzed for X to always be a known value.
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Two things:
- The FAQ ruling says the subroutine is not on Wormhole, so we know for sure it isn’t a copy whenever we get text that says “resolve subroutine on a piece of ice”.
- The counters end up on Data Raven and Viktor 2.0, because they use Self-referential Language:
Unless otherwise noted, a card with text that refers to its own card title only refers to itself and does not refer to other copies of cards with that title.
(Core Rules, p.21)
understanding that the first part of NEXT Gold is a constant ability as opposed to a triggered ability is a given. it’s clear that there is an X always defined in play. if Searchlight is on the board, however, there’s another X always defined in play, and another if Net Police is in the remote, and it’s not clear if an entity that is not any of those cards resolves a subroutine involving X, whether it knows if one or any of them exist.
the point it comes down to is quite simple, and it’s whether Marcus Batty is trashing these programs, or NEXT Gold is. if NEXT Gold is, it’s aware of the value of X all the time. if Marcus Batty is, how does he know what X is?
NEXT Gold is doing the trashing. It is the card with the subroutine being resolved.
Other rezzed cards with definitions of X are irrelevant. X only matters for the card that X is printed on. Do you mean to tell me that if the Runner has Darwin instaled and the Corp rezzes a Net Police that suddenly they must share an X value? That foesn’t make any sense.
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I think the language “Resolve a subroutine on another piece of ice” pretty clearly indicates that it’s the ICE’s point of view that matters. Batty doesn’t have a point of view there, he’s just causing that ICE’s subroutine to fire, not copying the text somehow and resolving it on Batty.
This seems like one of those instances where the only way to get a weird result is to not read the cards literally. It seems intuitive that the mental model would be “Batty is firing a program trashing subroutine” and then following from that model would come a lot of weird edge cases like “What does X mean now that it’s on Batty instead of Gold?” but the original (intuitive) model is bringing in mechanics that aren’t literally implied by the text.
TLDR: Batty literally says “resolve 1 subroutine on a rezzed piece of ICE” and that text even uses the word on to let you know where the subroutine is when it’s fired. Reading the cards and game rules literally, there seems to be no room for ambiguity. The ambiguity comes from how we think about Batty’s relationship to the subroutine, but he really has no relationship at all.
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[quote=“linuxmaier, post:686, topic:1437”]
Batty literally says “resolve 1 subroutine on a rezzed piece of ICE” and that text even uses the word on to let you know where the subroutine is when it’s fired. Reading the cards and game rules literally, there seems to be no room for ambiguity
[/quote]i entirely disagree. the word “on” is where i find ambiguity in the wording of the card, since “on” is also the only way to refer to things that are on a piece of ICE. were Marcus Batty intended to resolve the subroutine from his own piece of cardboard, he’d be worded identically
i understand the simplest explanation is often the correct one, but in a universe where a single guy makes interpretations that indicate you are spending credits if you are spending 0, but not dealing net damage if you are dealing 0, i don’t find anyone’s (including my own) interpretation of this text compelling
Since he’s worded almost exactly like Wormhole, it seems like he’d work that way, no? There’s no precedent for something actually gaining the text of something else in netrunner (this is an example from Call of Cthulhu) so if we were to actually see it, it would almost certainly be more explicit than just using the same text that has always been used for a different mechanic.
EDIT: If I were trying to differentiate it and I was going to pick a subtle (rather than drastic) word changing to make it behave as though the subroutine was somehow on Batty, I would say “from” instead of “on” since “on” really really implies that the subroutine is still on the ICE, not somehow just text-copied from it onto Batty.
I mean, if your point here is that there’s no point arguing because there have been weird rulings like with RSVP/Yog and so every card could be an oddball, then sure. Perhaps Lukas could make this card a lot weirder than it’s worded. But if there’s any point at all in us (the players) trying to figure out how these cards work without checking each one with Lukas first, then Batty seems like a really easy read.
Yeah, I don’t think X has ever been intended to be a global variable that multiple cards interact with in Netrunner, so I see no reason to interpret it that way. Much more likely for it to be an internal placeholder that behaves as the card it’s printed on indicates.
[quote=“linuxmaier, post:688, topic:1437”]
Since he’s worded almost exactly like Wormhole, it seems like he’d work that way, no?
[/quote]I’d agree. is there a precedent for Wormhole resolving other subroutines?
when i checked for a precedent about Wormhole, i found the bit about self-referential cards still placing counters on themselves, but nothing about specifically which card is resolving the subroutine
found this upthread:
(emphasis mine)
this is a long-resolved issue, not sure why we’re having so much toruble…
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didn’t see that. sorry to bother
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OK, I’ve got one:
Rezzed Red Herrings on Archives, Hades Shard fires. Runner accesses Herrings first and trashes them. Does the “+5 credits to steal an agenda” persist throughout the access step, even though it’s not part of a run?
(looked through ANCUR, didn’t find anything on the issue)