Introduction
Hello, effect resolution in digica can seem daunting, especially so if you don't have any prior experience with trading card games. If you’re a new player, I don’t recommend viewing this lesson before playing the game yourself using the rules provided in the manual, and getting some experience with the game. This lesson will be overwhelming and possibly discouraging otherwise. If you want to start with the game, I recommend picking a deck with your favorite digimon or watching a channel like CardProtagonist or TheSqueakyMoose as they provide step-by-step commentary with card text on screen.
If you're someone coming from other card games looking to learn, I'd advise you try not to draw parallels of other games or apply their logic here. Comparison can help, but it often leads to confusion if mechanics don't match 1 to 1.
Disclaimer aside, let's learn our 2 most basic concepts, trigger and activation.
Trigger and Activation
Trigger - is a condition of an effect that, once fulfilled, allows the effect to enter a pending state, which is a fancy term for waiting to activate. Triggers are marked by the word "when" such as When Attacking, When Digivolving, "When any digimon suspend" and so on. Some exceptions include On Deletion and On Play, which are translation quirks, and End of Turn/Start of Turn or Start of X Phase
Activation - is processing the effect, or simply put, you do what the text tells you to do. Effects are activated one by one, activating one fully before moving onto the next one. Effects can also have activation conditions, marked by the word "if", which prevent you from activating an effect if not fulfilled. Such as "When Digivolving: If your opponent has no level 5 or higher Digimon, gain 1 memory". Note that these conditions only need to be true when the effect is due to activate, not when it triggers.
When it comes to triggering effects, it's important keep in mind that they're not windows of opportunity but rather points in time that occur from certain actions.
Example:
When Attacking effects trigger when you declare an attack with your digimon.
Say we attack our opponent. This triggers our digimons When Attacking effect which, when activated, allows us to evolve into a higher level digimon card. The card we digivolved into also has a When Attacking effect, however, because this effect wasn't present for the attack declaration, it won’t trigger.
Think of triggers like a clap rather than an applause.
When it comes to activating effects, a golden rule to follow is that you always do them in the order of the text, and you do as much as possible. Effects sometimes consist of multiple actions, and just because you can’t do one, doesn’t mean you can’t do the other(s).
Example:
ST18 Zephagamon's effect reads "[When Digivolving] Suspend 1 Digimon. Then, unsuspend 1 Digimon". It instructs you to perform 2 actions in an order, and because we do as much as we can when activating effects, you can still unsuspend a digimon even if you didn’t have one to suspend. One action is not reliant on the other. There is an exception to this when it comes to effect costs and conditions, but we’ll get into that later. Just keep this as your little golden rule.
With this knowledge, we can start applying effect sequencing, which is the order your and your opponents effects are activated.
Effect Sequencing
There are 2 main rules we have to follow here:
1) Derived triggers (newest trigger priority)
Say you have 4 pending effects and you choose to activate one of them, but its activation triggered another effect. That is a derived trigger, a newly triggered effect that must activate before all the other ones. You'll see this referred to as LIFO, Last in, First Out. Last effect that triggered is the first one to activate.
2) Turn player priority
If there are multiple effects triggered at the same time, they can be activated in any order by their owner. However, if these effects belong to different players, turn player has priority.
The tricky part is that you have to apply these 2 rules in order at every trigger.
Example:
Say a trigger occurred. You now have 2 pending effects, and I have 2 pending effects as well, they’re all waiting to activate. You're turn player so you choose to activate one of your effects first, but its activation triggers 2 new effects. One is yours, and one is mine.
First we apply rule 1, recognizing that the 2 newly triggered effects have priority over all the previous ones
We then apply rule 2, allowing you to activate your effect, and once you do, allowing me to activate my effect.
We then go back to the remaining pending effects and repeat if needed.
This can theoretically go pretty far, but on average you're mostly going to be dealing with 2-3 layers of this at a time.
It helps to find a system to keep track of effect sequencing for yourself. I've seen some people imagine it as a growing stack of pancakes, cause you eat them from the top down. Or a pyramid, because you remove bricks from the top down so it doesn’t collapse. I imagine it as brackets within brackets, since you always solve them from the middle outwards. Or you can just raw dog it, do whatever works for you.
Multiple triggers
Following Rule 2 of Effect Sequencing, let's learn how multiple effects can trigger
The simple example of multiple effects triggering is when an effect does only one thing, say, deletes 1 digimon, and multiple effects trigger from a digimon getting deleted. They all trigger at the same time, easy.
But let's say we have an effect that does a bunch of things in sequence. At different points of this effect, multiple other effects triggered. Applying what we now know about effect resolution, one would naturally assume that you resolve them in the order they triggered, but this would be a massive headache in practice and would add way too many layers to the imaginary pancake.
So what the game does is it treats any effects triggered during resolution of another effect, as if they all triggered at the same time after its resolution. So no matter when they triggered during the effect, it pushes them all into the same box at the end.
