[Just_a_Bill]

Just getting caught up on some of these later units after a long hiatus. Two things struck me after reading this thread and the prerelease one:

1. A surprisingly large number of people seemed to think that "both ... and" somehow meant either ... or. At first I wondered if this meant the schools were doing an even worse job of teaching communication skills than I had thought. But, more likely, this is probably a symptom of the increasing pace of life and the relentless bombardment by ubiquitous electronic information; it's all making us into a society of skimmers. We read for a quick "gist" rather than full comprehension (making things ever more difficult for designers of games with significant component-level text). Anyway, not that this really has anything to do with Shurrak, but I was amazed by how this same issue came up over and over again, to the point where some people were accusing the designers of wording it poorly. They weren't perfect, but overall they did an excellent job with what WotC gave them, and they got this one right.
   
   
2. There was virtually no discussion of Shurrak's ability to swat defenders off of glyphs. I think Tai-Pan mentioned it in passing in the pre-release thread, but I wonder if this benefit got due consideration in all the theoryscaping? Sure, the opponent gets a turn to scramble back onto the glyph after Shurrak's turn (barring tricks like Red Flag of Fury, of course), but did he place exactly the right order marker on the right card? And was that the card he really wanted that marker on? The mere fact that Shurrak is standing there is going to make your opponent completely rethink his OM placements. It can be easy for this kind of "soft advantage" to fly under the radar until people actually play the unit enough to see it happen.