Just a warning to those reading; this deck is going to reference
another area of dispute I have with official, "from the top" rules for the game. If you don't think that appropriate to the discussion, I suggest you don't even read the post, let alone read it and post to say how off topic you think it is. Just as I will honor the rules in organized play, instead report me to the Moderators and let them take official action if it is "that wrong". Otherwise your best bet is to ignore me. :lol:
It's not that you aren't allowed to disagree with it, or to express disagreement with it, or even that disagreeing with it is bad.
We're just kind of confused why you would choose to disagree with something that isn't exactly up for debate. The card ruling is the card ruling. It's confusing and unusual (in the case of Drilbur), but it's the ruling. Creatures made it, and they by definition define what the ruling is, so... what room for error is there?
As stated, it forces a judge to be called over for what could be a pretty common situation. If a judge is unavailable, it forces a blind level of trust
beyond not allowing one player to shuffle/cut after the other; it would be akin to allowing your opponent to perform coin tosses in secret and 'report' the results!
It reenforces the precedent set by the Smeargle's Portrait/Engineer's Adjustments rulings that I
similarly disagreed with. In both cases, it seems that the-powers-that-be are just creating more complexity than needs to exist to address the problem.
Past precedent in card design is that if an effect alters the content of a non-public knowledge zone, something must be done to verify the effect has been followed correctly. Yes, this is almost always included in the card's text (and possibly always has;
it happens a lot). If you get hit by something like
Lass, you have to show your hand since if you didn't, you could keep a Trainer in hand. If you use an effect like
Ultra Ball to search your deck for a Pokemon, the effect requires you show your opponent to prevent said opponent from grabbing whatever they want instead of just a Pokemon. If you use almost any effect that messes with your deck, unless it specifically states not to, you need to properly randomize your deck afterwards (that is shuffle).
Now, as stated, this is almost (or possibly is) always included in the card's actual text... but it really
shouldn't have to be. A lot of these are so common they should be metarules, if not listed in the actual basic rules. Then we come to some of the rulings that, as alluded to earlier, exist because a specific result is desired, and something is basically "made up" to justify it. Namely, the contents of the deck being unknown.
If the appropriate people from Creatures, Inc. want to tell me that "Yes, the deck is supposed to be unknown." great, then I can tell them that they can choose to follow that up be telling me whether I am to consider them to be lying, or making an extremely bad design decision... though likely I will tell them both.
Having to reveal your deck after a failed search is time consuming. So time consuming that it makes sense to just allow such searches to fail, even though this can produce various points of "advantage" for a player. Instead of just wording all cards that search so that they are searching for "up to" the amount, or just admitting that this is why a deck search can fail, we get this bizarre logic that the deck is to be unknown.
The deck is never truly unknown; well, maybe if someone builds your deck for you, registers it for you, and thus you never saw it until you began playing!
Even within the context of the game, your exact deck (the deck that you draw from, as opposed to your total 60 card deck) shouldn't become "unknown" in the middle of a card effect (see Pokemon Communication).
I could go on to even some fundamental game mechanics and decisions I question, some of which can realistically be addressed in future expansions. I won't, save to give the basic example that I question the exact Video Game Type to TCG Type conversion system. I don't have all day to study that, and am not foolish enough to claim I am absolutely right that it can be done better, but I am looking into that. Something as simple as moving the "Poison" sub-type from Psychic to Darkness shows promise... and as we just saw, getting the new Dragon-Type solves many old "clashing Type" issues.
Hopefully I have successfully explained myself. While I would love to convince readers that these things have merit, I will settle for at least being understood properly before being disagreed with. :biggrin: As one last thing, this is a thread about this ruling, and it is in a discussion forum and not something like "Ask The Masters" where I would be horribly off topic doing anything but saying "Okay, so that is how it works."
