Is Death Card + Enhance working properly?

[santamonica811]

Game: 107137777, Tokyo.  Turn 5

Game had Death Card, and Enhance.  (and Villa, as well, in the kingdom)

I bought a Death Card, specifically to combine with Enhance.

DC: "You MAY trash this (or Action still in hand) for +5 coins."
Enhance: "You MAY trash a non-Victory card.  Get a card up to +2 more in value."

On Turn 5, I had my chance.  Used Enhance to trash Death Card.  I'd obviously get a replacement card up to 6 in value.  And I did get this.  BUT...according to the wording on Death Card, I should also have received +5.  Now, normally at this stage of the game, getting +5 would be meaningless (since I had already used my Buy for this turn).  But in a game with Villa, I should have been able to gain Villa from Enhance--which gets me back to my Action stage, while also giving me that +5.  I did try this, but never could get the 5 coins promised by the wording of Death Card...so I used Undo and used Enhance to instead get a Margrave. [And, of course, in any game that allows for plus-Buys, this combo could be very useful for a player who had accumulated additional buys in her or his turn.]

Nothing in the DC wording suggests that this combo would not work.  Nothing about the DC card needing to be trashed during one's Action phase, for example.

Is this a bug?  Or is it actually expected behavior?

[Ingix]

This is a common misconception.

When you play Death Cart, you can trash one of a few cards (itself among them) and if you do, you get +$5. If you don't play Death Cart, nothing of this is relevant for anything.

If you happen to trash Death Cart any other way (as you did), then nothing special happens. You get, as you noticed, the Enlarge effect, but nothing else. If you trashed Death Cart with Chapel, you'd get nothing at all.

In other words, the text on Action cards usually means only something if you play the Action card. There are exceptions for text "under the line":



Text under the line activates at moments specified there. For Death Cart, it works when you gain it.

Catacombs would be an example of a card that works as you expected. But that is only true because the "When you trash this" part is under the line. That means it works independently of it being played (which is a good thing, because in the vast majority of cases you trash it not from in play).

[santamonica811]

Ah,interesting.  I've been playing Dom online for a few years, and I never knew that above the line means "during Action phase," while under the line can mean different timing. 

Learn something new every day, I reckon.  :-)