Rocket Racoon: I’ve got a bit of a detailed question, which I hope you will answer as fully as you can, thanks ahead of…

Question

I’ve got a bit of a detailed question, which I hope you will answer as fully as you can, thanks ahead of time 🙂 I’m trying to understand a situation, and I have a couple rulings that I’m not sure how they might apply. So, Rocket Raccoon is fighting Arnim Zola. Zola has 1 HP left on his first stage, and Rocket has Energy Barrier in play with 1 token, and 1 card in his deck. He plays Haymaker, attacking Zola. Now, several things happen, and I want to make sure I order them correctly: Rocket responds to dealing excess damage by drawing a card and reshuffling his deck, Haymaker is discarded, Zola retaliates, Energy Barrier triggers to prevent the damage and ends up discarded. Depending on the order of triggers Haymaker and Energy Barrier could each end up either in my discard, or in my newly shuffled deck.

In trying to understand how this works, I see 3 things happening more or less at once: playing an event, attacking an enemy, damaging that enemy. Damaging the enemy is the effect, while attacking an enemy and playing an event are more like processes which may generally have multiple effects (in this case there is only the one). As far as any nesting could go it seems like playing the event > attacking the enemy > dealing damage. The rules don’t provide any clarity on how this works. But, there are 2 rulings that seem to deal with situations like this: the Black Panther/Sneak Attack ruling and the Counterattack/Retaliate ruling. The Black Panther/Sneak Attack ruling says that Black Panther’s response to the effect of Sneak Attack triggers after Sneak Attack is discarded (i.e. after the process of playing an event is complete). Applied here, this should see Rocket’s response to the effect (dealing damage) triggering after the process of playing the event (so Haymaker gets discarded first, and is shuffled into my new deck).

Combined with the nesting above, Rocket’s Response should also trigger after the attack, meaning it will share a window with Retaliate. Retaliate, being a constant ability, has priority over a Response, so Energy Barrier also gets discarded before Rocket’s response (and shuffled into my new deck). This seems to contradict the recent Counterattack/Retaliate ruling though, as that ruling suggests that responses to damage (the last effect in the attack process) would trigger before Retaliate. (The Enemy Attack process does have more steps, but as dealing damage is the last step of that process, it seems to match this scenario where the damage is the last step of the player’s attack).

I appreciate your responding to the specific scenario, but what I would most like is some way to handle these timing scenarios consistently, whether the things which happen as the final step of a process (such as the final effect of an event, or the damage from an enemy attack) trigger responses to happen: before the process is complete, after the process itself is complete but before responses to the process itself, or at the same time as responses to the process itself. I hope that makes sense, thanks!

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