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Despite various attempts to explain “actions” in the original rulebooks and subsequent digests, ICE and its NetReps were notably vague when it came to defining what an action actually is. For example, the METW glossary simply says:
Meanwhile the MELE shortens this even more to just:Action: The various activities that you and your opponent can perform during play are called actions. Typical actions include playing a card, tapping a card, revealing a card, etc.
Neither definition mentions passive conditions, and in both cases, the player is left to figure out on their own what even constitutes an “activity”! Furthermore, ICE’s internal understanding of actions evolved over the years, as seen with untargeted effects like Rank Upon Rank (which we’ll come back to in a bit), complicating the average player’s understanding even more.Action: Any activity in the game (card play, a corruption check caused by Lure of the Senses, etc.). An opponent and yourself have the opportunity to declare other actions in response. Meeting active conditions and exhausting a play deck are not actions — they are declared and resolve immediately.
As a result of this ambiguity, there have been many competing paradigms put forth by various community factions over the years, such as trying to define actions as “effects that are initiated by players”, or “effects that stay implemented even after the cause is removed”, or “effects that can’t be undone”, presumably among many more. However, a close reading of the historical evidence reveals that none of these proposals accurately or precisely fits ICE’s eventual paradigm, and so this digest will attempt to parse the often-nebulous evidence in order to provide a practical definition as to what an “action” actually is (and isn’t) with the accuracy and precision needed for tournament play.
To preface, the primary reason that it matters whether an action is being performed is for determining whether players may respond. A chain of effects is only initiated when an action is declared, whereas card effects that modify the game rules don’t initiate a chain of effects and cannot be responded to, so this distinction becomes very important when determining whether the effect of a card already in play is an action from a passive condition or just a normal effect, as well as to determine whether it can be initiated during the current phase of the game or if it is ongoing, etc. But it is worth keeping in mind that a chain of effects is only initiated when an action is declared, so even if a card being played involves performing one or more actions upon resolution, those actions are all performed during resolution along with the played card’s other effects (and thus it doesn’t really matter whether or not each effect is an action for the purpose of resolving a card when it is played; again, the typical reason this matters is for activities other than just playing and resolving a card).
Secondly, although the MELE definition states that “Meeting active conditions and exhausting a play deck are not actions,” that wording is a bit of a mischaracterization. Tapping a character for an effect is an action, per METW, but it’s not treated as a separate action if it is performed as part of an active condition. It is worth keeping this in mind as well, since we will be defining actions broadly even though in specific cases that action might not be treated as an action (such as for active conditions) or players may not be allowed to respond to it (such as when exhausting a deck), but those should be considered exceptions rather than counter-evidence to what constitutes an action normally.
With all of that said, to return to answering the question at hand: both the METW and MELE definitions mention that playing a card is an action, and METW goes further by mentioning tapping a card and revealing a card. The through-line for all of these examples is that the player is “doing something” to a card, which this committee believes is consistent across ICE’s literature. Here, then, are some other examples of how a card’s position/orientation/status-in-the-game may be similarly changed in MeCCG (which might not be a complete list, but hopefully provides a sense of this type of action):
- attached
- discarded
- healed
- organized
- placed
- played
- removed from play
- replaced
- returned
- revealed
- shuffled
- stored
- tapped
- used
- wounded
“Doing something” to a company as an entity was also frequently cited as an action by ICE, specifically in regards to “moving” a company such as in the actual example of a passive condition under Annotation 9 in the Wizards Companion, but also with regards to cards like Long Winter and Snowstorm (ICE 115, 502, 519, etc.).
Although drawing cards or otherwise physically altering a deck’s configuration (again, such as through a passive condition) doesn’t come up often outside of cards like Great Shadow, Keys of Orthanc, and the like, these also fit the definition of an “activity” (and/or as noted in ICE 86 and the CRF for Sudden Call). There is not a lot of evidence here in terms of historical documentation, but it makes sense that physically altering a deck’s configuration would fall into the category of an “activity” in the English sense of the word, and this committee believes it is prudent to define it as such.
Making a check or otherwise rolling dice was also specifically noted as an action in METW and MELE:
Finally, we get to what is perhaps the least obvious type of action: applying a modification to an entity’s attribute(s). Although attribute modifications wouldn’t seem to fit with the other types of “activities” that we’ve listed above, ICE made a clear and concerted shift in the rules around the time of The White Hand’s release (i.e. after the MELE rulebook was finalized) so that cards like Rank Upon Rank would henceforth be classified as actions initiated by passive conditions (see ICE 35, 42, 77, 78, 79, 549, etc.). Some detractors of this ruling have pointed to the fact that an untargeted modification such as RUR is unlike a “normal” action because the effect continues even after it is performed, but the best way to square this logically is to think of the modification’s application as the action, similar to how tapping a card is an action that results in the card being tapped (and while some detractors have also pointed out that modifications ‘go away’ if the causal effect is removed, unlike how cards remain tapped even if the effect that tapped them is removed, this distinction from a definitional standpoint does not seem to be upheld in any of ICE’s literature, and the same literature is abundantly clear that the ultimate intention was for the application of an untargeted attribute modification to be defined as an action which then establishes an on-going effect upon resolution).A required or declared dice roll is an action and can be the target of another action or effect declared later in the same chain of effects.
To summarize, what all of the aforementioned actions have in common is that they change the board state in some way when they are performed, whether by altering the status of an entity or modifying an untargeted attribute of an entity within the game (including an attack), or otherwise affecting game pieces such as dice, decks, etc. To that end, this committee believes that a functional definition of an “action” would be as follows:
An action is a one-time activity that changes the board state in some way when it is performed (e.g. drawing a card or otherwise physically altering a deck’s configuration; making a check or otherwise rolling dice; moving a company; applying a modification to an entity’s attribute; a card having its position or orientation changed, or otherwise being played, discarded, tapped, healed, wounded, attached, organized, placed, removed from play, replaced, returned, revealed, shuffled, stored, used, etc.).
Conversely, effects that merely alter the game rules, or alter how an entity is considered or treated under the game rules, do not actively change the board state itself and thus are not actions. These would include effects that, for example, create a new restriction as to what can or cannot be done with specified entities; modify how much general influence a player has or how many cards are drawn when moving; contain words like “consider,” “treat,” “instead of,” or similar words/phrases that modify how entities are treated per the rules of the game rather than modifying the board state itself, and so forth.
![[-me_wi-]](./images/smilies/me_wi.png "Wilderness"){kind=small}
. Result of the action does not disappear, the company remains returned. If later Snowstorm will cease to be in play the company still remains returned.