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Rules Discussion / Re: Focused Strike and other Academy Cards: "attack" means "attack action" in Arena?
« on: June 10, 2018, 09:41:44 PM »
As referenced in one of the linked threads, I remember a discussion I had about using the word "attack" to mean different things between the two games would bite us in the butt. In general, I would recommend reading all text on Academy cards, when used in Arena, to mean the same thing they generally would in Arena. So this would only work on one attack, like the other "Strike" cards. And I'm pretty sure that was the intention.
The problem is, that causes some of the other academy cards to behave a bit wonky in Arena. In Arena, each roll of the dice is one attack, and the entirety of the attack steps is an attack action. Normally if something gained a trait for one attack, it would lose it before doing another attack in the "Additional Strikes" step. But having that happen with traits like doublestrike and sweeping doesn't make sense because it would lose them before they could actually be utilized. They become nonsense on certain Academy cards and the cards would be useless if played as written. Obviously, we're not going to have useless cards. So we had to do some mental gymnastics and make special exceptions for them to get them to work. This resulted in "well, attack should just be attack action in this case." That allows those cards to function and makes sense because Academy has the two terms being synonymous. But these should really be considered special exceptions, and not a precedent to judge other cards by. In general, just play the cards as written.
The problem is, that causes some of the other academy cards to behave a bit wonky in Arena. In Arena, each roll of the dice is one attack, and the entirety of the attack steps is an attack action. Normally if something gained a trait for one attack, it would lose it before doing another attack in the "Additional Strikes" step. But having that happen with traits like doublestrike and sweeping doesn't make sense because it would lose them before they could actually be utilized. They become nonsense on certain Academy cards and the cards would be useless if played as written. Obviously, we're not going to have useless cards. So we had to do some mental gymnastics and make special exceptions for them to get them to work. This resulted in "well, attack should just be attack action in this case." That allows those cards to function and makes sense because Academy has the two terms being synonymous. But these should really be considered special exceptions, and not a precedent to judge other cards by. In general, just play the cards as written.