Talk:Attack

First draft

I think it's clear that a centralized location was needed to discuss the attack process, one of the core actions in the game with a trigger system just as complex as casting a spell. I considered calling this "Combat" but realized that a) card text uses "attack" rather than "combat" and b) there is frequent confusion by people thinking "the mage cast Fireball at me, how is that not an attack" which hopefully this page will help with.

What's here is a first draft. I spent some time on it but I'm sure improvements can be made. In particular:

• The strategy section is light, but it's a bit awkward since "combat strategy" is really just "game strategy" in many ways - at least when it's not "depends on the situation". It would be kind of nice to have a centralized place to go for general strategy advice, or at least a standard set of deck strategies to link to. Currently there's "board control" but AFAIK there's no equivalent for aggro.
• The "basic example" is still a little hard to read. I could cut it in half since it's actually 2 examples, but I don't think that's the problem - rather, there's just too many numbers involved and it gets very abstract. Perhaps that's just the nature of the beast, or perhaps someone can figure out a better way to present it.
• I did include a section on triggers pulled in large part from the Advanced rulebook. In my opinion many pages should have a section like this that's not comprehensive / filled with side notes, references, and rule numbers, but still explains the sequence at a moderate-to-high level of detail and mentions some of the more surprising interactions. This makes it easy-ish for folks to understand that weird effect they just saw without digging through a 30-screen document. So, please correct any mistakes and add interesting examples but let's also try to keep it relatively accessible.
• No images.

I have only one reference. Sometime later this weekend, I'm going to go back through current pages that talk about combat, including the AR, and crib from those. Also, no incoming links aside from those that already linked to Attack. I'm going to go through What Links Heres to find relevant context that now has a real article to link to, and also any pages that linked here intended to link to the attribute. By the way, I plan to do the same sort of follow-up for the Target page I created a week or two ago.

Maybe down the line all the triggered cards mentioned here could be tagged attack-related or combat-related and true card lists could be added; currently they're just "Triggered effect" I believe.

- jerodast (talk) 08:14, 18 June 2016 (UTC)