Coming from an old-school CCG player’s perspective, the text of the card dictates/trumps how the game does/should work.* Since I don’t have the game in front of me, I’m pulling the texts from http://plantsvszombies.wikia.com/wiki/Plants_vs._Zombies_Heroes, which is hopefully fully (or at least approximately) accurate.
Deadly: Any fighter with this trait always destroys any enemy fighter it does damage to. Heroes are not affected by it, and Armored enemy fighters can survive the attack as long the fighter’s damage does not exceed their damage resistance.
Since it says “fighter… destroys”, a zombie with the Deadly trait is the one destroying the plant, not the Deadly trait itself.
Super Stench: All Zombies get Deadly.
Toxic Waste Imp: All Imps are Deadly.
Though not the same wording, it’s reasonable to presume that all zombies gain the Deadly trait in the former, and all Imps gain the Deadly trait in the latter.
Overstuffed Zombie: This heals to full and gets +2(health) when it destroys a plant.
Vimpire: This heals to full and gets +2(strength)/+2(health) when it destroys a plant.
Yes @daperson12345, I was playing the final campaign against Citron (good call!) when I pulled the Overstuffed Zombie with Super Stench combo. However, as noted, this situation also occurs due to the Toxic Waste Imp and Vimpire interaction. Since we’ve determined that it’s the zombie doing the destroying, both Overstuffed Zombie and Vimpire’s abilities should activate in this scenario.
I think that what is happening is that the game compares the attackers’ strength/health values first to determine if abilities kick in. This observation is based on the Zombot Drone Engineer’s behavior, whose ability is “Whenever a Science Zombie does damage, that Zombie gets +1(strength)”. However, if a science zombie is destroyed during the attack phase, the ability does not activate. (Technically it should, but then we’d all be annoyed at the wasting of our time for meaningless animations!)
Therefore, since neither Overstuffed Zombie nor Vimpire destroy their opposing plant during the attack phase (i.e. their strength is less than the opposing plant’s health), their abilities likewise don’t activate even though they end up destroying the plant based on their Deadly trait.
Thanks for reading,
Aphid of Death
*Though this is an arguable point, it’s also slightly off-topic, so I’ll address it here as I don’t want to muddle the point above with this conversation.
Let’s start with Monopoly. When I roll the dice and land on a Boardwalk with two houses, I pay my friend $600. When I draw a Chance card that says “Advance Token to Boardwalk”, I move my figure to a Boardwalk with two houses and pay my friend $600. Now imagine that I am instead playing it on the computer. When I roll the dice and land on a Boardwalk with two houses, the computer docks my cache $600. When I draw a Chance card that says “Advance Token to Boardwalk”, my figure is moved to a Boardwalk with two houses, but the computer does not dock my cache $600 because I didn’t land there on a dice roll. Bugged? You betcha!
To bring this analogy to a similar setup, since PvZ: Heroes is in the CCG format, one could print the cards onto cardstock and use counters and whatnot to play the game. To play, you would read the text of the cards to determine how the plants and zombies interact with other game elements. As such, if the electronic version of the game behaves differently than I expect based on the text of the card, the electronic version is bugged, as concluded in the Monopoly example. Is it possible that cards are miswritten yet behaving as intended? Sure, but coming to that conclusion requires me to have the developers/designers’ knowledge… to which I’m not privy. Additionally, I’m going to presume that fixing a card’s text is easy vs squashing a bug.
Wonderfully explained @AphidOfDeath.
