Few Against Many (L5R rules board)

A topic from AEG's L5R CCG Rules forum, copied for Oracle of the Void from a copy of the forum saved in October 2015, so pages it didn't save are missing. Players' names are left out; the rules officials are named. Rulings are as they stood on these dates; later rulings, the rulebooks and the Rules Archive may differ.

A player, 4 March 2008

Few Against Many Reads, "Few Against Many 0G 2FV Limited: Attach a target Follower in your hand to one of your target Personalities, reducing its Gold Cost by the Personality’s base Force until it attaches. Reaction: Before another player’s card’s effect destroys one of your Personalities, bow one of his Followers: Negate the Personality’s destruction." [MRP, Samurai Edition, 25 July 2007]

There is a post on about page 4 or so here where a moderator states this could be used to save only a personality, not any other cards in the unit, from destruction from

a) Hired Killers (Destroy Unit) b) Ruthless Advance (Destroy Unit)

I don't see why the reaction would occur? The reaction is when a personality is going to be destroyed. Both of the above cards destroys the unit. For that reaction to occur rules-wise you would be saying that when a card destroys a unit, the player the card is played on gets to decide what parts of his unit get destroyed first. Why does the follower get to stick around long enough to save the personality, and then get killed. This ruling would seem to say the person gets to say, "ok in the unit, first the personality will get killed, but I'll prevent that, then any followers"

I just don't understand this. I can understand traits on personalities (Daizu/Sozen) preventing their death...

But it seems that you are allowing a reaction that only is triggered by "personality destruction" to trigger on unit destruction as well. And you are allowing a follower for some reason to not be destroyed long enough to save it's personality, and then die.

It seems the ruling is clear, and I'm just complaining, so very much thanks in advance for humoring me with an explanation.

I'm not finding how to reply, so sorry, but I'm just adding this to the bottom- Thanks for your quick response.

I just still see some conflict in your response:

"rules.l5r.com wrote: Effects on a unit are applied to the Personality and all cards in the unit at the same time."

- - But you are not actually following this rule, because you are saying that rather than the Personality and Follower being destroyed at the same time and only being saveable by something else, you are allowing the Personality to first attempt to be destroyed, but saved by the follower, before that follower is destroyed. You seem to be breaking your own rule. - -

""Before [Personality X] is destroyed," is a timing trigger that occurs before ANY of the cards in his unit are destroyed by Hired Killer or Ruthless Advance. You bow one of the (still not destroyed yet) Followers to Negate the "destroy target personality" effect, but the "and all his attached cards" destructions are still going to resolve just fine. "

Martin Lund (rules official), 4 March 2008

A unit is made up of a Personality and all his attached cards.
Effects on a unit are applied to the Personality and all cards in the unit at the same time.
Targeting a unit is the same as targeting its Personality.

Citation

So read "destroy target unit" as "destroy target personality and all his attached cards."

"Before [Personality X] is destroyed," is a timing trigger that occurs before ANY of the cards in his unit are destroyed by Hired Killer or Ruthless Advance. You bow one of the (still not destroyed yet) Followers to Negate the "destroy target personality" effect, but the "and all his attached cards" destructions are still going to resolve just fine.

Negating the destruction of an individual card in the unit does not save any of the other cards from being destroyed by an effect that says, "destroy the unit."

On: Few Against Many