Most people's comments are just rationalising that allowing QA then movement would break the game. But that's  because of the existing game space and rule structure, which is as it is because it was designed that way. Almost every objection could have been addressed through the game development if QA+move was part of the original design space. It either wasn't, or got knobbled as a short cut to try and balance address other problems. The later seems the most likely. I'm not saying it was a bad decision, but it does stick out a bit.

Again, as iI said in my original post, if the arbitrator for rules in MW is that things should happen the way you think they should, then there isn't any rationale for preventing QA+move.  I can move then do x, so I should be able to do x and then move. You can't. Why not, you just can't the rules say so. To me that's an arbitrary rule that just looks like it was stuck in place to fix something that couldn't be fixed more elegantly.

My question isn't what are all the reasons that make it bad to change this rule now. I am asking about the design story and challenges that resulted in this approach to the rules.

I thought some of the comments regarding the origins of the term here
http://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Ameritrash

Were interesting. Hadn't really thought about it as a spin off from the term eurotrash ...

Fair call,  and nice analogy. I've been learning the guitar for a while and am definitely concious that if I'm thinking about it, then it's not working/flowing right.

I've wondered a bit around a chess clock,  and like the idea of timed games,  but can't work out how you'd manage the joint  spell selection time.

A possible solution could be a round timer, as much as you'd like to think that everyone played fairly but it would eliminate the opportunity to waste too much time

is many other stuff to keep in mind so in the end you cant decide this purely by logic. You need to develop an intuitional feeling for what you can endure and what not.

I don't really agree, gut feel, intuition etc is sometimes just code for lazy logic. In this game you can know how much damage you can take.  You don't have to guess. How much damage you might take is more an estimate, but it's easy enough to look around the possibilities, see the flow the opponent is in (attacking,  retreating, consolidating etc) and decide if youre safe, yiuneed to panic or can afford a risk.

Just reviewing the link below (top 50 most purchased games) -While Mage Knight and Lords of Waterdeep are on there and Mage Wars isn't, neither is summoner wars.  It might just be that the two player card battle type game doesn't have the same love as some rule finicity never ended even when it should have 2 hours ago slog, or a geeky pasted theme on a light worker placement games

As a mage wars fan I thought that this geeklist was a little sad.  http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/160432/the-top-50-most-purchased-games-july-2013-edition/page/1?

I think it presents a different picture to the view in this thread that BGG is all about euro games.  A lot of the top 50 in this list are strongly thematic games.  There are a fair few cube pushers too, but I was disappointed over all to see that despite Mage Wars advancing in the rankings, its not even close to BGG recorded sales.

Dominion is 4%, I think the points you raise would push more for the 20-50%....anyway, stop encouraging me to derail my thread!

It's interesting to see how much broader Settlers is than Dominion; likely because they sold in Barnes and Nobel and in malls. I expect Mage Wars would be even less broad than the other two, especially because BGG users are likely the hard core of early adopters and Mage Wars is so new. Still, 5% would be my guess.