Send an image file to me specifically? You could host it on use.com or on dropbox and pm me a link, I suppose.

Welcome, IronLegionnaire.

I usually use an image hosting site like www.use.com, since the forums don't really have very good image hosting capabilities. use.com also takes care of html formatting for posting the images.

Are you saying that you are developing a Mage Wars mtg set editor module? If so, I am sure that would be useful to many people.

There is a mage guarding and a deathfang guarding in a zone.
A Gremlin wants to attack the mage, can he do it?
Or can the enemy mage decide, that the deathfang has to be targeted?

Attacker decides.

Guarding just means the attacker has to attack a guard.

"If you are making a melee attack, the target must be in the
same zone as the attacker. If there are enemy guards in the
zone, you must choose one of the guards to attack (see
“Guarding” on page 29)."

"If there is an enemy guard (a creature
with a guard marker) in a zone, then you cannot melee
attack any object in that zone other than enemy guards.
This condition is checked when the attack is declared."

"You can never remove more damage than the creature currently has. Any excess healing or regeneration is lost."

Bleed: "...Whenever this creature...heals...you may remove 1 Bleed condition for each point of healing you cancel"

I would say that you can use healing to remove bleed, because it says that you cancel the healing (a specifically defined effect), not the damage removal (a more general result of healing).

Cancelling a spell prevents it from resolving. Cancelling a point of healing should prevent it from resolving as well. If it did resolve, it would be lost, but since it was cancelled before resolving, it still counts as being cancelled, and so you can use it to remove bleed. I think the key thing to notice is that nowhere in the heal effect does it state that an uninjured creature may not be healed, only that if it is healed, you cannot remove more damage than it has.

I think I know what the problem has been in this discussion - we are not talking about the same thing at all.

You have created a model to give you the "value" of a card. The problem is that it is not possible to assign a value to a card, due to the complexity of the resources in the game, and therefore this analysis does not tell us anything useful.

To have a meaningful discussion about payoffs in Mage Wars, we have to stick to things that can be measured. Mana fits this bill perfectly, since it has an explicit value. Life/Damage can likewise be easily analyzed. Actions are trickier to analyze, and attacks even more so, since they sometimes have traits. Traits are impossible to value objectively.

What the no-early-payoff perspective has been arguing is that strictly in terms of mana, the mana crystal pays off by the 5th turn after casting, which is a straightforward calculation (if we neglect future discounting, which complicates matters more than I want to get into). This analysis treats the net mana gain/loss as the value of the crystal.  Include actions into the analysis, and it takes at least 6 turns (possibly more) to pay off, but the exact number cannot be given since there is no objective way to translate actions into mana that applies to all situations.

To illustrate a "model" based on this (Warning: this is a thought experiment - I am not proposing this as an objectively true model), consider the following:

1. Since meditation amulet values a full action at 3 mana, and moving is clearly less important than action (not always true, note), let the value of a quick action be ~2 mana.
2. Aside from costing an action and providing mana, the crystal has no other significant benefit, so we may neglect all other properties (we could look at spellpoint cost, but there is no clear way to relate that to mana, so we'll assume that the player has an arbitrarily large spellbook).

Then the (mana) value of a crystal as a function of turns X after casting is
[1 mana per turn]*[X turns]-[5 mana spent]) - [1 quick action = 2 mana] = X-7 mana
Therefore the crystal breaks even (has mana value = 0) only on the 7th turn after casting.

Obviously, there are a number of circumstances that could cause us to value a quick action differently, but the point is that each part of this model is tied to a measurable aspect of the game, even if the valuations are subjective and vary based on situation. Valuing a quick action as 2 mana is not based on a whim - it justifies itself by analogy to the meditation amulet. This model attempts to assign a mana value to the crystal, i.e. the amount of mana that the crystal is worth as a function of time. This is the sort of model that can be profitably discussed.

The reason that we do not accept your model is because "Action potential" does not appear to be tied to a measurable aspect of the game. The (X-5) part of your equation is clearly the mana cost, but we don't see how you get + 0.5*x. How did you you get 0.5, exactly? What is the logic behind valuing action potential at that? And how does action potential relate (in a direct way) to resources in the game?

Your model does not have a clearly articulated justification, and it is not clear what your model is measuring. If it expresses the mana value of  the crystal as a function of time, then what justification can you give for 0.5*x? If it is not the estimated mana value of the crystal, then what is it?

It is not possible to give a single number to any spell that represents its entire value. The mana crystal is possibly the simplest card there is, and we still can't give it an objective mana value, let alone an overall value. Others have tried to value cards in the past and have failed - there are just too many variables and too many possible game situations for any analysis to give an objectively true single value. The best we can do is to try to value aspects of spells - in the case of the crystal, we can analyze how long it takes to pay for itself.

What exactly does x represent and how did you derive your equation?

To Wildhorn and ACG - why did you decide the real Mana Crystal was better than the fictitious Mana Crystal?  Why is the round-by-round return better when your argument is no benefit in rounds 2-5?

Because, all other considerations aside, I would rather have $1 every day of the week (M-F) than $5 on Friday. Resources now are worth more than resources in the future (future value discounting). Similarly, I would rather have $5 now than $1 every day of the week (M-F). The fictitious Mana Crystal is obviously worse because it delays payback. But by the same token, the delayed payback of the normal mana crystal compared to doing nothing makes it obviously worse through the first 5 turns (obvious to me, anyway). The reason that this didn't  persuade me as an argument is that the reason that the fictitious mana crystal is worse than the regular mana crystal (delay of mana receipt) is the same reason that the mana crystal is (initially) worse than nothing.

Remember, we weren't claiming that the mana crystal does nothing, just that there is no net benefit. BoomFrog gave a good summary of the difference between gross and net benefit.