Hi guys,

I have the following questions:

(i) When X cards are discarded from your deck, they enter your discard pile one at a time so the last card discarded is now the top card in your discard pile, right?

(ii) Are you allowed to browse your hold without any search effect when playing the Black sails agenda? I can't find anywhere in the rules insert anything in either direction.

(iii) In order for you to search for a card you must win a challenge in which you had a naval attacker. This means that the attacker must have been declared using the new naval mechanic (thus having to effectively attack with two characers, one normal attacker and another one naval attacker) and the response cannot be triggered by a character with the matching challenge naval enhacement icon attacking normally, right?

Thanks in advance!

tarkin84 said:

Yes. Cards are discarded from your hand or deck one at a time in the order in which they are discarded. So the last one discarded would be the top one of your dicard pile.

tarkin84 said:

The information that has been spoiled thus far shows that The Hold is information that is to be hidden from your opponent (Naval Reinforcements says to "reveal" the character). However, it is very telling that with the plot, you "reveal" the character (rather than searching for the character and then revealing it), and that with the Agenda, you "choose" a card from The Hold (rather than searching The Hold for a card). That means that while the contents of The Hold are hidden from your opponent, they are not hidden from you. This implies that you can look through The Hold, the same way that you can look through your plot deck or through the cards you have in Shadows.

It's probably a little unsporting to pick up The Hold immediately after it has been created and spend the next 10 minutes looking at every card, but it actually makes a lot of sense to peruse it immediately in order to get a feel for how you need to play and how soon you will need to dip into The Hold. For example, it's important to know if your only Maesters ended up in The Hold so you know whether to play At the Gates or Naval Reinforcements as your first plot. 

tarkin84 said:

No. The "After you win a challenge in which you had at least 1 Naval attacker…" language is something that is defined at the resolution of the challenge. Once you resolve the challenge, the game makes absolutely no distinction on how the character with the Naval Enhancement got into the challenge. The designation "Naval attacker" means "attacking character with a Naval Enhancement." So it doesn't matter whether the character was declared in the standard framework event or using the Naval enhancement mechanic; you just have to end the challenge with an attacking character who has the Naval enhancement. 

This is a corollary to the fact that a character that is removed from a challenge is considered to have never participated in that challenge at all. So, for example, if you used the Naval enhancement to declare a character as an attacker, and that character is subsequently removed, that character is not considered to have participated in the challenge at all. So it is the fact of participation at resolution that matters in general in this game. This sets up the above conclusion that it is the fact of participation that makes a character a "Naval attacker," not the exact method by which it was declared as an attacker.

(As a side note: the assumption, of course, is that the character has to have a Naval enhancement on the challenge icon corresponding to the challenge type. For example, say you have a character with the power and military icons, but only the military icon has the Naval enhancement. You win a power challenge with that character. It is not immediately clear without something official from FFG whether or not you had a "Naval attacker" in that power challenge, although the assumption seems pretty clear that you did not have a Naval attacker in the power challenge, although that same character would have been a Naval attacker in a military challenge, whether he used the enhancement to dictate the timing of being declared an attacker or not.)

 

~ Aren't you gald you asked?

Actually, Ktom - would you  mind clarifying a few points? 

I was just looking this up as you answered, and I can't actually find any reference in the rules that discarding happens 1/time (only that drawing does). Is this a precedent from the CCG days, or a really obvious failure to search for the right wording in the FAQ/rules.

Secondly, has there been a "Naval" rules insert made available yet? I know the Spaniards have theirs, but I haven't seen a scan to translate it. What you say about "naval attacker" goes directly against what a spaniard I played against told me as we played, but that's not to say he was right! Do we actually have a written-down version of the naval rules, aside from what was mentioned in this article  and the previous article it refers to?

-Istaril said:

It's precedent based on what you found for draw that has always been in practice. I bet you practice it, too.

Cards are drawn individually, even when a single effect allows you to draw multiple cards. A direct result of this is that when an effect says to draw X cards, you actually have X different "after you draw a card" Response opportunities, right? 

Well, when an effect says to discard X cards from your hand or your deck, you actually have X different "after a card is discarded" Response opportunites, right? So work it backwards. If "draw X cards" creates X different Response opportunities because cards are drawn individually, is there any reason to think that since "discard X cards" creates X different Response opportunities that cards are not discarded individually, too?

Plus, you know, if cards are not discarded individually, why the different wording on Fishmonger's Square, Support of Saltcliffe, and Corpse Lake?

-Istaril said:

I haven't seen a final rules insert. If the insert says anything different from what I said above in terms of defining a "Naval attacker," then FFG is going way outside the normal definitions and mechanics of the game. In no other situation does the game remember how a card got a particular status without something specifically saying "by X." (For example, "after a card is knelt" vs. "after a card is knelt by a card effect.") They also would have changed things a lot from the time Naval was first spoiled and I confirmed with Damon the equivalence of "declare" for Naval and the framework events in terms of card effects that limit declaration of attackers and defenders.

That's not to say they haven't, but based on the articles spoiling the mechanic and the basic definitions of the game, "Naval attacker" should mean "attacker with the Naval enhancement," not "character who was declared as an attacker in the current challenge using the Naval mechanic." If the rules document has it the other way around, then it is dicta from FFG that is contrary to the normal "logic" of the game. 

The other point, that "Naval attacker" would only count if the enhancement was on the corresponding icon as opposed to any icon, was an admitted assumption and something that the rules insert would hopefully clear up.

I guess it is too early to know without the Naval rules insert… I am having trouble seeing that "naval attacker" is just a participant based on the wording of some of the card effects that trigger off it.

The new Fleet characters provide what appears to be this distinction in their Responses:

Response: After Fleet from The Arbor is declared as a attacker, choose another attacking character you control. Stand and remove that character from the challenge.

This is also pulled out of the "Reach of the Kraken" article posted back in August 2012:

"Like the Fleet from Pyke (Reach of the Kraken, 5), these new Fleets are powerful seven-strength Armies, each of which features a enhancement on one of its icons, carries the war crest, brings a strong keyword into challenges, plays at a discount if your opponent controls an agenda, and allows you to stand and remove a character from any challenge the Fleet joins as a attacker."

To me, it is identifying "naval X" based on how they entered the challenge.  I think there are some card effects that only care about possessing the enhancement.

ktom, did you ask the designers for this clarity back at World's(or some other time)?   I mean, I'll trust your judgment, but the wording of these effects are tricky, especially when there is a new standard player action that allows you to "declare" characters with the enhanced icon as an attacker or defender. 

I really hope the rules insert clears this up, because I can see it either way, but first instinct for me from the beginning was that the wording appeared to make Naval declarating different from normal declaration of a character.

ktom said:

That satisfies me.  Please ignore my most recent post.

Re: Discarding. You're right - I do practice it! But I've practiced a lot of things that turned out to be wrong :P. I was actually specifically thinking of Support of Saltcliffe, because it seemed that since it specified "One or More" that it could specifically imply that cards are discarded all at the same time (and corpse lake responds to the effect and not the actual discards). That doesn't mean I disagree with what you say at all - it's how I've played it and the "Draw" rule was the reason I played it that way, just that I couldn't find a rule to quote to support it.

And I guess anything about the naval enhancements is speculation, at least until we see the insert. I'm really wondering how it interacts with certain specific cards (Eg. "Dragon Sight") if it uses the word declare, although I imagine that just because you have to declare defenders before attackers, doesn't mean yo ucan't jump some in afterwords.

Bomb: I'd say there is a difference between DECLARING a character as a Naval attacker and WINNING a challenge in which you have at least 1 Naval attacker. So I don't think there is a conflict between your interpretation on the Fleet's Response and my interpretation of the Agenda's Response. 

-Istaril said:

Unless the rules insert contradicts this, Dragon Sight would do exactly that, prevent charcters on the opponent's side from being declared as defenders after attackers are declared. The only things this doesn't effect are The Greatjon and jump-in characters, so long as their text doesn't state they are being "declared" as defenders.

stormwolf27 said:

I don't think this is true. 

Dragon Sight modifies where the framework opportunity to declare defenders happens in the flow of the game. It does not place limitations on which characters can or cannot be declared as defenders.

The Naval mechanic counts as declaring the character as an attacker/defender, but it is done as a separate player action, not as a framework event. As such, while effects that modify what happens when a character is declared as an attacker/defender will impact the use of the Naval mechanic, effects that impact/modify what the player may do when attackers/defenders are declared will only affect the framework opportunity to declare attackers/defenders.

So with Dragon Sight, the text, "The opportunity for your opponent to declare defenders after you declare attackers is lost." only refers to the player's framework opportunity to declare defenders, not to the use of separate player actions to use the Naval mechanic to declare defenders.

 

If you are uncomfortable with this idea that cards referring to a player's "declaring" attackers/defenders only affect the framework event, then you are going to lose games to Abel's Washerwoman. If such things apply to Naval declaration as well as framework declaration, then her text "Response: After the defending player declares no defenders, claim 1 power for your House." can be triggered any time she is attacking and you don't use the Naval mechanic as a player action. 

Or what about Stealth? The rules say that you assign Stealth "before defenders are declared." Nothing there about it only happening once per challenge. It's just that historically, defenders have only been declared once per challenge, so Stealth was only assigned once per challenge. If things like Dragon Sight stop you from using Naval to declare a specific character as a defender, then each time you do use Naval for a specific chracter, I should be able to assign Stealth - no matter how many times you use Naval.

Anyway: End result - I don't think Dragon Sight stops you from using the Naval mechanic as a player action to declare individual defenders. You only lose the opportunity to declare defenders as the normal framework event in the "declare defenders" framework action window.

I actually think Stormwolf was saying the same thing you are, Ktom, by saying that what would happen would be "exactly that" (my assumption naval characters could still jump in after) and that characters could "jump in" (although he spoke of The Greatjon and not of Naval Enhancements, which actually use the word declare). That said, it wasn't very clear. 

While we're discussing (somewhat fruitlessly, as we really need the insert to be sure), the other aspect that occured to me was whether a character that does not kneel to attack would still kneel to be declared as a naval attacker. I assume it would - again based on assumption that existing "attacker/declaration" modifying effects apply only to the existing framework actions of declaring attackers/defenders. 

That assumption though leads me to the counter-intuitive idea that Naval Enhancements can bypass the requirements of "Desolate Pasage", which seems wrong.
 

-Istaril said:

Hard to tell, really. What is difficult is that because Naval does count as "declaring" the character, using Greatjon as an analogy for when you can and cannot use Naval doesn't work - because, for example, Greatjon can "jump" in as an additional defender in a Joust and Naval (reportedly) cannot. That is, Naval is limited by things that refer to "declaring" while Greatjon is not.

-Istaril said:

Hard to say. On the one hand, not kneeling to attack/defend is a direct modification on how the character behaves when it is declared as an attacker or defender. On the other hand, Naval is a separate effect/player action. It's not like you can bypass the "kneeling" requirement of The Wall when jumping a "does not kneel to attack or defend" Night's Watch character into a challenge. We'll have to see how the rules insert phrases it.

-Istaril said:

Naval should not allow you to bypass requirements placed on the number of characters that can/cannot "defend" (like Naval not being able to break a Joust on defense).

I may have contributed to that momentary confusion on your part with my "when it refers to 'declaring characters,' if counts for Naval, but when it refers to 'players declaring,' it doesn't" is really only applicable to when passives/Responses are valid, not to constant effects restricting declaration.

I bought the cp today so I took a picture of the rules insert for anyone who wants to read them. It looks like they covered how it works quite well. http://oi47.tinypic.com/b3vm9j.jpg

I'm really sorry about the formatting of my recent message. Its really hard posting on these forums on my smartphone.

Bomb said:

Thanks for the info! It seems like they specifically rule that you need to have declared a character as an attacker/defender through the naval mechanic for it to count as a naval attacker/defender. 

There's no clarification on how it interacts with "Does not kneel to attack/defend", nor on our Dragon Sight/Desolate passage questions, although the latter two I think we all agree on.

Wouldn't the "doesn't kneel to attack/defend" card text trump the "kneel and declare" rule? How The Wall acts doesn't matter, it says "put … into play, knelt as a defender"; the character doesn't enter play standing to be knelt afterwards, it enters play already knelt.