ok i was playing someone i play like everynigth. we see things diff most of the time and this is one of those times.

i have no ready chars but i do have one thats not stuned. can i use the non-ready,non-stuned char to play the effect of Firepits?

to me it should like i should be able to since its worded like Heroich Sacfice.

The Buck

Firepits of Apokolips
Location, 2
At the start of your recruit step, lose 2 endurance.
Exhaust a Darkseid's Elite character you control >>> Exchange control of Firepits of Apokolips and target face-down resource an opponent controls. Use this power only
during the recovery phase.

Exhausting a Darkseid character is part of the cost. If you can not succesfully exhaust a character, you can not pay the cost.

Heroic Sacrafice tells you to exhaust as part of the effect. By default, effects only care that you attempt the requested action, you do not need to be succesful at it.

it sound just like what i heard about heroic sacrifice. "firepits..." does not require you to exaust a "ready" character. so, if a charcter is already exausted, has the cost not already been met?

or is it the fact that the actual cost to produce the effect of "firepits..." is to exaust a charcter? the difference being that exausting a character is not the cost to play "heroic sacrifice", but rather to stun a character. then you can exaust the defender even if it's already exausted since exausting the character is not the cost to play it?

As noted by cdaniel, the devil here is, as always, in the details.

The Firepits have as part of their "cost" (the stuff infront of the arrow in this case) the need to exhaust a character, and if you're unable to do this, then the text after the arrow might as well have been blank. If you don't pay the cost (ie. exhaust a character) then nothing happens.

Whereas the ever popular Heroic Sacrifice has exhausting a character as part of the "effect", it sorta helps to compare Heroic Sacrifice to Mystic Paralyzis actually.

The "cost" of the Paralyzis is to exhaust your Doctor Doom, so if you don't exhaust the good Doc, nothing happens. The "effect" of it, is to exhaust target character, the card couldn't care less as to the status of that character, it'll just try to exhaust him. So you could conceiveably use Mystical Paralyzis on your own, exhausted, Titania if you, for some reason, wanted to give her +1 attack (and no, I have no idea why you would be using Titania in the first place either):laugh:

Regards
Melkhor, who hopes this helped clear up some confusion regarding "cost" vs. "effect"

well that sucks for my game plan but now i know. thanks guys