Whenever vs After - Design Philosophy Behind Triggered Abilities in Hearthstone
Max McCall is back and this time he's educating us on the differences between triggered abilities which sometimes may cause some confusion on why they work the way they do.
Quote from Max McCallWild Pyromancer is extremely enthusiastic about playing with fire. Even if you don’t control a Wild Pyromancer when you start casting a spell, if you control one after the spell resolves, the world is going to burn. This causes some confusion, because most triggered abilities in Hearthstone occur ‘whenever’ something happens. Why do we sometimes use ‘after’ instead?
Triggered abilities in Hearthstone work like questions. ‘Whenever’ is asking ‘Hey, you are doing something. Is it the thing I care about?’ ‘After’ asks a different question. ‘Hey, you did something. Was it the thing I care about?’ ‘Whenever’ is usually the most straightforward way of implementing triggered abilities. The trigger sees you do the thing it cares about and executes its ability. Then, you proceed with whatever triggered the ability. Typically this is to your advantage: when you use Power of the Wild to give your minions +1/+1 and have Violet Teacher in play, the Violet Teacher sees you cast the spell and creates an Apprentice before the spell resolves, so you get a 2/2 Apprentice. Sweet.
However, the timing of when exactly the trigger occurs is not always obvious. Consider a trigger that says ‘whenever this minion attacks, it gains +2 Attack.’ It’s not obvious if the attack buff is gained before or after the attack resolves; a good-faith reading could be interpreted either way, particularly for people who don’t have a fine grasp on the rules. Combat is key to Hearthstone, so you shouldn’t need a fine grasp on the rules to not be surprised by it.*
This is why we have ‘after’ in our toolbox. If we made that card, it would say ‘After this minion attacks, it gains +2 Attack.’ With ‘after’ it is unambiguous that the trigger occurs after the attack, and you can plan accordingly. We prefer ‘whenever’ but use ‘after’ in cases where we need to be more clear.
There are also some cases where we have to have the trigger occur ‘after’ for targeting reasons. Wild Pyromancer uses ‘after’ because if it used ‘whenever’ its ability would trigger before the spell you cast resolved. If you were casting Frostbolt on a minion with 1 Health, the Pyromancer’s trigger would kill the minion and it wouldn’t be in play when Frostbolt resolved. We’d have to do something inelegant to solve the problem of what should happen to Frostbolt’s visual effect in that case, so we use ‘after’ instead. Triggers that care about minions being summoned also tend to use ‘after’ because if we used ‘whenever’ the minion wouldn’t be in play when the trigger resolved, which looks weird visually and would also mean that the trigger couldn’t affect the minion being summoned. For example, Addled Grizzly wouldn’t work if it said ‘whenever.’
We’ve considered changing the rule for minions with ‘after’ triggers to only occur if the minion is in play at the start of whatever triggered them, but we decided not to. The current template for ‘after’ is clear in almost all cases, and while surprise Wild Pyromancer triggers off of e.g. Mindgames are startling, they do match the Pyromancer’s text. Since the rule is consistent and the text of ‘after’ minions match their functionality, we didn’t want to change the rules to fix this particular corner case, especially since it would introduce ambiguity with the general case for ‘after’ text.
*By rule, the trigger occurs after the attack is declared but before damage. We use ‘whenever’ on triggers like Cutpurse because the trigger isn’t relevant to combat, though.
When a priest steals my knife juggler - how does it make sense that he throws a knife at me?
Well, it's their Knife Juggler, and seeing the stealing minion having been played, how is this not logical?
Because its HIS knife juggler before he uses cabal. Battlecry always happens first. So when he uses cabal, he aldready got your knife juggler on board before Cabal is actully on the board at all. Now, since he has knife juggler first, its effect occours because then the Cabal is played.
http://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Advanced_rulebook
The minion is played BEFORE the battlecry, and enters the battlefield before the battlecry. The reason for this interaction is that Knife Juggler says AFTER, so it doesn't matter to whom the Knife Juggler belongs before or during the playing of the Cabal Shadow Priest.
He didn't address what is certainly the most un-intuitive interaction with the after keyword.
When you have Djinni of Zephyrs on the board and Entomb an enemy minion, Djinni is also returned to your deck. At the time it checks the condition, the enemy minion has been turned into a 'friendly' one.
It's not. just ask Disguised Toast.
yea because the minion becomes friendly the djinni triggers same with like potion of madness and similar effects that go from enemy to friendly
I just don't know why are they posting article about a thing that everyone knows for a very long time.
The short story of the article should look like:
Max McCall explains keywords used for triggers: "Whenever" means "Before", "After" means just "After".
Whenever doesn't mean "before," it would mean something closer to "during" or "while."
It's not a bug, it's just hard to make look visually not awkward.
What bothers me is not the "after" but the a "cast a spell" which implies (at least for me who played a lot of MTG). Whenever/after* a spell you cast is resolve would be clearer in my opinion.
* depending on how they want it to interact with mage's secrets.
Assuming that the pile is much simpler in HS and that you can't counter enemy spells, casting and resolving a spell will be two consecutive events, so it is not much of an issue, dont you think?
Not to mention that secrets resolve only partially as if they were enchantments whose triggered abilities resolve later in the game again. (Kind of Standstill, but with the opponent having first to guess if you played Standstill or another thing).
I hope we get a blue post about the if you have a x do y mechanic for cards like Small-Time Buccaneer and Chillmaw.
Rework
That's funny, coz if you switch stats buffed Buccaneer, he lost his 2 attacks and gain it again only, if you equip new weapon. Another good work bug testing team.
Triggered Pyromancer lul
I honestly think all effects should be "after" and they should not allow effects to trigger off summoned things in the middle of a chain. Allowing things to happen off creatures appearing in the middle of a chain of random effects never really results in a satisfying experience.
Also, battlecries should trigger on things that get summoned by other things. Why should they not?