Ruling Deck Search Items (Ultra Ball, Professor's Letter)

J

jty

Aspiring Trainer
Member
Hi Professors!

Just wanted to clarify if it is legal to use items to search your deck and not get anything

Situation A: Player uses ultra ball to search for a pokemon but deck has no more pokemon cards
Result: Nothing to get so the card CANNOT fulfill it's intention

Situation B: Player uses ultra ball to search for a pokemon but, for some reason, doesn't choose to get it, maybe he just wanted his deck shuffled. Or he used letter but didn't get any energies as he just wanted to check his deck contents

Is Situation B legal?
 
Yes. The contents of the deck are private knowledge. You can fail search for items.
 
Both situations are legal. This is even a tactic that's occasionally used to "burn" unwanted cards from your hand or get them out of your deck so that they're not clogging up your draw.

There are two exceptions to this rule however. The first is in regards to "tutor" searches like Computer Search, Roserade DRX (Expanded only), etc. that tell you to "search for a card" (any card, in other words). Since you must perform any affect as fully as you can, you must take a card in these cases. The exception to this exception is with cards like Battle Compresser that say "up to" a certain number of cards. In this case, zero counts as "up to" the amount (three in the case of Battle Compressor), so that's legal. "A card" however specifies that you must take one card.

The second exception is when you have no cards left in your deck. The contents of your deck are private knowledge and not tracked by the game state, but a card cannot be played if it is obvious to both players that it will have no effect. In this case, you can't search a deck tht has no cards left in it.
 
My Little Keldeo said:
Both situations are legal. This is even a tactic that's occasionally used to "burn" unwanted cards from your hand or get them out of your deck so that they're not clogging up your draw.

There are two exceptions to this rule however. The first is in regards to "tutor" searches like Computer Search, Roserade DRX (Expanded only), etc. that tell you to "search for a card" (any card, in other words). Since you must perform any affect as fully as you can, you must take a card in these cases. The exception to this exception is with cards like Battle Compresser that say "up to" a certain number of cards. In this case, zero counts as "up to" the amount (three in the case of Battle Compressor), so that's legal. "A card" however specifies that you must take one card.

The second exception is when you have no cards left in your deck. The contents of your deck are private knowledge and not tracked by the game state, but a card cannot be played if it is obvious to both players that it will have no effect. In this case, you can't search a deck tht has no cards left in it.
Click to expand...


Hi

Thanks! This clarifies a lot. So using battle compressor, I can take up to zero cards since there is an amount right?
 
Up,

I was wrong:
http://pokegym.net/forums/showthread.php?184907-Battle-Compressor-and-0-cards-discarded

So you must discard at least 1 card with Battle Compressor.
 
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