Level Two - Lesson 2
Advanced Core Rules - Game State Maintenance and Determining Responsibility
Also available are archives of live broadcasts, where the Program Director goes over the lesson, answers any questions that folks may have and sometimes goes on tangets about other elements of judging. You can find the playlist of broadcasts on youtube.
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Hello there!
Welcome back to the level two lessons for the Star Wars™: Unlimited Judge Program!
As always, I’m your host Jonah, and today I’ll be talking about some of the advanced core rules. When we’re defining the levels and figuring out what to teach when, we try to teach judges the information that they need to know, in order to do their job effectively, without overloading them.
In an ideal world, every judge has a perfect knowledge of all the rules and interactions, but that’s not a reasonable expectation, and so we break things down into some chunks. Now, it is critical to have a strong base, which is why level one focuses so heavily on the fundamentals of the rules and why it goes into every single section of the comprehensive rules.
Level two, on the other hand, already has that information, and so we build upon it and begin to explore some more shadowed corners. Today, we’re going to cover the rules regarding maintaining the game state and responsibility for defeating units (which mostly matters for multiplayer, but does come up in two-player games).
These all fall under the banner of more complex rules, but are still fundamental to the game engine.
In our next lessons, we’re going to explore nested abilities and modified actions, which can get pretty messy. We’re also going to cover common clarifications - questions that players and even some judges frequently ask - the answer is often relatively straightforward, but the interactions are bit a less common, and so it’s less likely to show up at a small local event, as opposed to a larger event with more players and more rounds.
That’s a lot of talking about what we’re going to talk about, so let’s dive in.
Maintaining the Game State
While most of the game progresses because players are taking actions - playing cards, attacking with units, and using abilities, there are also a lot of things that the game does automatically - those can include triggers, delayed effects, and lasting effects wearing off - but those are things that cards and abilities instruct players to do, so those at least are visible.
But then there are things that have to happen because of the rules. There’s an old joke (repurposed to the modern era) - Damage doesn’t defeat units, game state maintenance does.
There are certain situations that need to be handled immediately, and take precedence over triggered abilities, player actions - pretty much before anything else in the game. These maintenance steps take place in a prescribed order, which can matter in a few weird corner cases.
First, if a player’s base has 0 remaining HP, they lose the game. This one is key - if a player has lost the game, there’s nothing they can do that brings them back from the brink.
Next, if a player controls multiple copies of a unique card, that player chooses and defeats copies of that card until only one remains under their control. Keep in mind that this sort of maintenance, as mentioned previously, occurs before triggers. If a player plays Admiral Trench - Holding the Line while already controlling another of the same, they will choose and defeat one before resolving their trigger, which would allow them to choose the just-defeated Admiral Trench and return it to their hand.
The third step of game state maintenance is cleaning up any upgrades that aren’t attached to a unit. If you have a Jetpack attached to a Nite Owl Skirmisher, and the Skirmisher is captured, defeated or otherwise leaves play, the Jetpack is defeated after the unit has already left play.
Next it’s checked to see if a unit guarding a captured unit has left play, in which case the captured unit is rescued - this is covered in 8.34.4 as well, but since it’s one of those “immediately” effects, we need to sequence it appropriately.
The last of these is if a unit has zero remaining HP, it is defeated. This one is also pretty straightforward, and one that you’re likely comfortable with.
However, it’s when we start to have to apply more than one in a sequence that things begin to get interesting.
AP controls Supreme Leader Snoke - Shadow Ruler, and NAP controls a Battlefield Marine. AP then plays a second Snoke. What happens? Will the Battlefield Marine get -4/-4 and be defeated or will it survive somehow?
Well, we have two things that we need to look at. AP controls two copies of the same unique unit while NAP controls a unit with -1 HP, which is no good.
We go through these steps in order, and resolve the uniqueness rule first. We then go through the other steps in game state maintenance, and we look to see if any player controls a unit with no remaining HP. However, constant effects, as the name says, apply constantly and update constantly, so as soon as one of the Snoke’s was defeated, Battlefield Marine reverted to being a 1/1, and therefore is not defeated.
Let’s take a look at another scenario. Warzone Lieutenant is upgraded with Academy Training and has four damage marked on it. How does this resolve?
Well... we go through the steps in order. We first see that no player needs to be defeated, nor any unique units. No upgrades are unattached, and nothing needs to be rescued, so we can check to see if a unit needs to be defeated - and we find that the Warzone Lieutenant should be defeated. After we do that, we start at the top of the process again, to make sure that nothing has been missed and this time we find that there is an Academy Training that’s not attached to a unit, and so we defeat that as well. Then we check a third time, find that all is well and move on.
That makes enough sense - let’s ge just a little bit convoluted.
AP has played Legal Authority on their 97th Legion - Keeping the Peace on Sullust and captured NAP’s own 97th Legion. NAP plays Change of Heart on AP’s 97th Legion, and then plays a second 97th Legion.
The game state as we move forward is that NAP controls the 97th Legion that belongs to AP, which is guarding NAP’s 97th Legion, and they have just played their second 97th Legion. What best describes what happens next?
Well, lets go through the steps one at a time. The first thing we have to deal with is uniqueness - NAP controls two 97th Legions, and must defeat one of them. If they defeat the one they own, nothing else needs to happen. But, if they defeat the one owned by AP, the next step is to defeat the Legal Authority that is not attached to anything, then the 97th Legion that was captured is rescued.
And then we do the maintenance check again and find that NAP controls two 97th Legions again, and must defeat one of them.
As of the publication of this lesson, there isn’t a huge amount of practical use that comes from knowing and understanding the sequence of these steps. However, with more unique units that have constant effects that modify power and HP, or as cards care about what is in play at a certain moment in time, understanding the order these apply in will become more and more impactful and relevant.
So, to remember the sequence: it’s bases, uniqueness, upgrades, rescuing and finally units.
Determining Responsibility
It’s nice to know who to blame when something goes wrong, and section 1.18, Determining Responsibility, helps you know who, exactly, was responsible for a unit being defeated. This is important for card abilities like “if you defeated a unit this phase”.
First, if a player is directly instructed to defeat a unit, such as the Uniqueness rule or a card like Rival’s Fall that says “defeat a unit” that player is responsible for defeating the unit.
If that doesn’t clear it up, we next look to see if the unit was defeated due to having its remaining health reduced to zero by damage. If that’s the case, the player who controls the source of damage is responsible. Using Open Fire or attacking an enemy unit and dealing lethal damage leaves you responsible.
Next, if a card's ability causes a unit to be defeated, the player who controls the card is the one responsible. Superlaser Blast doesn’t specifically instruct a player to defeat a specific unit, nor does it deal damage, but the player who played the event is responsible for the devastation it brings.
If that doesn’t clear it up, if a unit is defeated during regroup or when a lasting effect expires, no player is considered to have defeated that unit. For example, if I played Moment of Glory on my Warzone Lieutenant, and my opponent attacked the Lieutenant and dealt three damage to it, when the phase ends and Moment of Glory wears off, neither myself nor my opponent is responsible for the Lieutenant being defeated.
Next, an effect that changes the remaining HP of a unit causes the controller of that effect or ability to be responsible. This is where our friend Snoke, or Obi-Wan (in the form of Hello There) come in.
Finally, if none of these clarifications apply, the active player is considered to have defeated that unit.
Both of these sections - Game State Maintenance and Determining Responsibility are definitely more on the nitpicky side - they’re not particularly common calls that you’re going to get, but they are fundamental to understanding the core structure of the game.
However, because they’re not common and they don’t come up frequently, and because they’re so specific, it’s important to study them. In most cases, rote memorization isn’t helpful. Memorizing the text of every keyword isn’t terribly valuable, because there are constantly new keywords and because you have a general understanding of how they work, simply from playing the game.
These rules, however, are a bit more arbitrary. There’s a decision behind them - the game state maintenance steps are created such that effects like Snoke don’t create a split second where your opponent’s board gets -4/-4 and you’re able to have a one-sided board wipe. The determining responsibility rules are designed to make it so that what most players intuit as correct is correct, but it does need to be defined, because the game can’t run on vibes. A consequence of this is that sometimes the game does get very technical, and when you really dig into, some things end up being a bit less intuitive than you would think.
In any case, that’s all for now. Join us next time for discussion of Hondo Ohnaka, U-Wing Reinforcements, Ezra Bridger, Modified Actions and Nested Abilities! It’s gonna be a delight. If you’re watching this on youtube, and you want more level two lessons in your feed, go ahead and subscribe. Join us Tuesdays and Fridays on twitch.tv/swu_judges for live broadcasts covering the content of these lessons as they are released, and join the Star Wars: Unlimited Judge Program Discord to join the community in discussion of this and much much more.
As always, good luck, and have fun.