There was some discussion in my home group yesterday as to the effects of pulse wave or energy explosion and how they effect pogs. 1) There were several stacks of pog stacks. One player stated that due to pw ignoring game effects it ignores stacking and therefore one multitarget pulsewave could eliminate several stacks of pogs all of which were in range! Another said no way! My take on it as arbitrator was that breaking "stack" as a "game effect" would be illegal as you cannot have more than one pog in a square without "stack". Please walk me through why it does or does not work that way. 2) A player stated that ee would tear apart pog stacks that were not adjacent from top down to wich I pointed out there is no adjacency, as well as no rollover from targeted pog as ee states! If the pog stacks were adjacent I would rule that no matter how many arrows the shooter has, only the top pog would be removed from adjacent stacks. I was also told no. Please walk me through this. Thanks for response in advance as the answers will be used as a teaching tool in my home group (myself included).

Please quote pulsewave and what it says it ignores. From there we can talk it through.

Quoted for reference

Stacking is not a game effect possessed or used by a character. It's a Heroclix rule. Pulse Wave would not ignore it.

Thats what I said and was also told "no". If you say it....I take it as law! Thanks!

Was just going to say that.

Note: the quoted text also confirms your ruling in the second issue. The stack is one character, a character cannot be adjacent to itself.

What about energy explosion adjacent or non?

If it were not the case, you ignore game effects while targeting not while doing damage so if you ignored that game effect you would be targeting all of the tokens individually and a pulse wave would kill the entire stack if it was ignored.

Edit: I guess that is what the other player argued. It is not the case, Stacks are a rule of the game and not a game effect.

Cool! you guys are all awesome and appreciated Thank You

Even if stacking was a game effect used or possessed by the stack Pulse Wave would not be able to ignore it as the golden rule #3 would prevent that.

To ignore the stacking would mean that two or more horde tokens occupy the same square and therefore the rule of occupancy would force that ignore to be ignored. So no matter how you look upon it. the stacking can't be ignored.

Then you could try this, from the Player's Guide.

Game effects which alter the way a figure is KO‘d or otherwise defeated cannot be ignored.