"The Bucket"

NOTE: This post assumed the old refresh rule, I've given it a scan to update it but some things might be out of place. The analog still works though. Sup y'all, back again with something a little different this time. My teammate Dan won’t stop bugging me to put pen to paper on this, so it’s finally time to get off my ass and explain what I like to call “The Bucket”.

shut the fuck up carmen you idiot you dont know anything about weiss sch-

Shhhhhh, I promise I'm going somewhere with this. It’s a sort of companion, visual-mechanical aid to go with other great resources related to the topic. I’ll start with laying out the simplest game state that illustrates why we need to talk about this at all:

you can click on these to zoom in btw

Here we have the classic situation of opposing, power-tied “bombs”: if we front attack our Howzer into our opponent’s Wildberry Princess over there, how exactly does this resolve? We’ll ignore everything other than the Battle Step for the sake of clarity. We compare both cards’ powers, and upon seeing that they tie, they become simultaneously reversed. But wait, both these cards have AUTO effects that trigger when they become reversed, and that happened to both of them at exactly the same time. How do we go about resolving the simultaneous trigger of multiple AUTO effects?

Unlike other card games, Weiss Schwarz’s rules don’t have a good way to describe, let alone visualize, how this works. In the OFFICIAL comprehensive rules, you get this little gems of descriptive text that tells you how to resolve effects that happen trigger at the same time:

 

With these as our guide, we can work out our Howzer-Wildberry conundrum:

1. Turn Player chooses to resolve Howzer’s second AUTO effect.

2. Turn Player resolves Howzer’s AUTO effect, sending Wildberry Princess to the bottom of Non-Turn Player’s deck.

1. (Turn Player has no more AUTO effects to resolve!)

3. Non-Turn Player chooses to resolve Wildberry Princess’ first AUTO effect.

4. Non-Turn Player resolves Wildberry Princess’ first AUTO effect, reversing Howzer (even though he is already reversed from combat).

5. Non-Turn Player chooses to resolve Wildberry Princess’ second AUTO effect.

6. Non-Turn Player resolves Wildberry Princess’ second AUTO effect, and attempts to pay cost.

1. Non-Turn Player cannot fulfill the effect’s cost, as Wildberry Princess is no longer on the stage, and cannot be sent to memory.

2. (Non-Turn Player has no more AUTO effects to resolve!)

7. Turn Player proceeds to their next attack declaration, or Encore phase if it was their final attack of the turn.

While those official rules didn’t do the worst job of explaining how you’re supposed to work this out, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say it’s a lot less elegant than MtG’s stack or YGO’s chain. Those schemes of resolving player interaction both have a visual connotation that quite literally guides a player in how to resolve effects as they trigger, and clearly show when a player has priority over another. Weiss is effectively a free-for-all with the caveat that the turn player always has to finish all their effects first, which can be hard for newer players to grasp at all, and confuse the everliving fuck out of people coming from aforementioned other TCGs. To help with simply explaining this to new players (and speed up gameplay resolution between experienced ones), I’ve devised Weiss’ own quick-and-dirty visual representation for guiding players through effect resolution: the BUCKET.

Enter The Bucket(s)

As I illustrated above, Weiss Schwarz’s effect resolution is a bit of romper-room: the turn player has to finish all their effects first, but other than that, there’s no rigid order to how card effects have to be resolved. What’s the best way to visualize an unordered list where you determine what gets looked at first? Well, that’d be a bag, but we already have that bit of community jargon used for a climax trigger, so that leaves us with a bucket. A bucket has no order to the entities held inside it, and someone can easily look inside it to pull out entities from it in whatever order they wish. For our visualization, we’ll give each player a bucket, and they’ll throw all their AUTO effects inside it as soon as they trigger. The buckets hold all of the effects that are in “Standby” condition from the official rules, and through the use of this visualization, we can throw out that nasty duplicative terminology as well. Most importantly, a bucket has easily recognizable states of being full or empty, which helps us visualize when to advance the game state.

With this visualization in place, we can set up a couple “rules” of our own that simplify explaining how the official rules actually function:

1. The turn player MUST empty their bucket entirely before the non-turn player can resolve any effects.

2. Effects will be successively resolved from their owner’s bucket in whatever order the owner wishes.

3. If a new AUTO effect is triggered during the resolution of either players’ effects, it is immediately placed within its respective player’s bucket.

1. If a new effect enters the turn player’s bucket during the non-turn player’s effect resolution, rule #1 must be fulfilled before continuing to resolve non-turn player’s effects.

4. Rule Actions, both interrupt and check types, must be resolved by the relevant player before players can continue pulling effects out of their respective buckets.

1. Refreshes, Level-Ups, Refresh Penalties, etc… must be resolved as soon as they occur, no matter the player they affect. 

At the outset, this might not seem any more clear than the official rules, but lets walk through a much more involved example. In the interest of keeping my examples in English, I’m going to devise an absolutely hellish gamestate by mixing cards from a couple different sets. Lets just assume the traits and whatnot all work out, OK? I promise you that real game states can get just as complicated.

what, you don't run 6 nicos in your deck?

Just like before, we’ll assume that we are in the Battle Step, and that our opponent’s Lancer has just become reversed. At this point, several AUTO abilities trigger, and are placed in their owner’s respective buckets:

• Turn Player’s Bucket

• Ruby’s Climax Combo

• Non-Turn Player’s Bucket

• Lancer’s on-reverse “coinflip” ability

• Shirou’s buff ability

The turn player resolves Ruby’s Climax Combo, looking at the top 4 cards of their deck, selecting 1 character, adding it to hand, then discarding the rest. The turn player has now just decked out, and has to perform a refresh as an interrupt type Rule Action. The turn player then continues resolving Ruby’s climax combo, selecting Karen as the recipient of Ruby’s +2000 power buff. Now that the turn player has completed Ruby’s Climax Combo, they will take their refresh penalty as a check type Rule Action before any other effects are resolved. This causes the turn player to level-up as an interrupt Rule Action, which they also complete before continuing to empty their bucket. This level-up triggers Z3’s AUTO ability, which immediately enters the turn player’s bucket.

• Turn Player’s Bucket

• Ruby’s Climax Combo

• Z3’s level-up search ability

• Non-Turn Player’s Bucket

• Lancer’s on-reverse “coinflip” ability

• Shirou’s buff ability

Because the turn player’s bucket is not yet empty due to Z3’s ability triggering mid-resolution of Ruby’s Climax Combo, they resolve that ability before the non-turn player has the chance to pull anything out of their bucket. We can then just continue to follow the bucket model to finish out the effects:

1. Turn Player pulls Ruby’s CXC out of their bucket, partially resolving the effect by checking 4 cards from their deck, adding 1 character, then discarding the rest.

1. Turn Player decks out, refreshing their deck as an interrupt type Rule Action. They take their refresh point as part of the refresh process (as per the new refresh rule).

2. Turn Player Z3’s AUTO ability triggers, and is placed in their bucket.

3. Turn Player assigns Karen +2000 power, finishing Ruby’s CXC resolution.

2. Turn Player pulls Z3’s ability out of their bucket, pays cost, then resolves the effect by searching their deck for a character,

1. Turn Player’s bucket is now empty!

3. Non-Turn Player pulls Shirou’s ability out of their bucket, and gives Yoko +1000 power. (Remember, players can pull effects out in any order they wish!)

4. Non-Turn Player pulls Lancer’s ability out of their bucket, reveals a level 2 card from the top of their deck, then returns Lancer to their hand.

1. Non-Turn Player’s bucket is now empty!

5. Now that both buckets are empty, the game state advances to the next attack declaration step (Karen/Yoko’s lane)

By using the bucket model, players can work out and easily explain the correct way to resolve their effects without getting bogged down by clunky official terms. Weiss Schwarz is complicated enough as it is, so anything we can do as a community to make these trickier aspects of the game more readily understandable is a big plus. For those of you who are a bit more experienced and are still a little suspicious of using this model, imagine trying to explain why Encore and effects like multiple Aerosmiths or Ayame work the way they do to a newer player. Using the bucket model along with explaining that Encore works like any other AUTO ability makes these interactions easily understood, and gives a reliable pattern for players to relate to other similar situations.

The making of this visual aid wouldn’t be possible without more in-depth stuff like WeissTeaTime’s amazing multiple-auto abilities article, and is not meant to replace them. I just felt that without some sort of mechanism like “stack” or “chain”, explaining how effects resolve can get a little difficult when Weiss gets weird. At the end of the day, this is just my insane ramblings, but hopefully this helps someone figure out a ruling at locals or something somewhere. If you need help with other Weiss ruling stuff, Pattywagon’s WSAlmanac has a compiled list of some of the greatest articles our community has ever written, so hop over to the “Ruling questions and clarifications” section for some assistance.

- Carmen (@Beanwolf)