Why can't a player perform damage calculation while prizes are flipping over?
For the same reason mentioned before in this thread. "The prizes themselves aren't allowed to influence you as they are revealed." You can never know in every situation whether the player is really just doing damage calculation of if they're actually trying to find a certain prize card (which isn't part of Psychic Cut's effect at all). So to ensure that the prizes aren't influencing your decision, you have to announce beforehand how many you're going to flip and then you're bound to that count.
Not sure on the penalty, though. Flipping the maximum number? Yikes. On the surface, it sounds pretty harsh. But I don't see any other penalty that would take into account all the "devious" scenarios. :lol:
Seems to be one of those vague rules. Kind of like with Team Galactic's Wager, everyone assumes the maximum allowed will be drawn instead of having an amount to be drawn declared before the draw.
LOL. That's an interesting analogy. Nobody declares how many they're going to draw up front with TGW because, usually, everyone just draws the maximum. That much is consistent with the discussion so far. If you don't declare, you're forced to draw the maximum.
But if someone who wins with TGW stops at 2 and says that's all he wants, I guess he will actually be forced to draw all 6 because (presumably) he didn't state that he was only going to draw 2 up front and TGW doesn't say "draw up to 6 until you find what you're looking for". So the player isn't allowed to just search the first X number of cards until he hits on what he's looking for. So, yeah, it does make sense that he would be forced to draw the maximum in that case even though he wanted to stop at 2. Unless, of course, he declared he was going to draw 2 before drawing any.
That's my opinion anyway.
Is announcing "how many" specific to a definite number? Or can it be as vague as "enough"?
To me, that sounds like a fair question. But I don't think just saying "enough" would be sufficient. It doesn't place an upper bound. It only specifies a lower bound. You can eat "enough" cake to fill you but keep eating anyway. :tongue:
But it does seem like stating a description of an exact number should be the same as stating the exact number itself. As long as that description isn't based on something not specifically allowed by the effect. For example, stating "I'm going to flip up prize cards until I find that Gardevoir that I know is prized" does, in fact, specify an exact number (assuming Gardevoir is really prized). But it requires that you be given a special privilege (searching your prize cards) that's not allowed by any effect at the time.
However, stating something like "I'm going to flip up exactly the number of cards required to knock out your active Pokemon" seems like it should be fine. It's an exact number, whatever that is, and it's based on doing something you can always do (calculate how much damage is required to knock out your opponent's active Pokemon). So then it would seem you could start flipping over prizes, adding up outloud as you go until you reach that magical number. The problem is if you do go over that number, the penalty will end up being as described here...flip the rest of them up.
LOL. Ok, that's enough for today.
Thomas Dorris
In the top 2 match the guy did it how you are supposed to.
