The Vulcan Hello Again

by Matthew Zinno, Errata Team Leader

5th November 2018

I feel like I was just here.  Only a few days after bringing you a few errata cards tied to The Gift expansion, I am back with a traditional first-Monday-of-the-month batch of errata.  

The first big theme is that the Vulcan cycle of cards is coming off the ban list.  IDIC: The Wisdom of Surak got a ban due to the power it provided for gaining any skill needed, on demand.  Several Syrranites had the printed skill of Honor, and those that aren't could gain it relatively easily using The Katra of Surak, and then IDIC: The Wisdom of Surak would let them use that Honor as any other skill when they needed it.  With the help of the playtesters, we have kept the theme and direction of the card intact, scaling it back to just a single use, by a single personnel.  

Second in the cycle is Seek Hidden Reliquary, which "Wisdom" downloads.  It, in turn, downloads Kir'Shara, and also provides it with further rewards.  Getting these two cards in play rewarded you with points in two ways:  boosted points for missions (even ones that were already solved), and points for the INTEGRITY of a new personnel that you'd also get to download -- and if you were trying to use this just for the points (and perhaps anyway), the person you want is Surak for [12].  Moreover, all of this benefit was not very restricted to the intended recipients, the Vulcans.  The mission point boost was only for missions (because story-wise, the post-Kir'Shara Vulcans are the ones who grow into what we see in The Original Series), but that covers a lot of missions used by all affiliations.  And although Surak only naturally reports to a Vulcan (or ) Outpost, it's not a large burden to seed a Temporal Micro-Wormhole in order to get him and those 12 points into any affiliation's deck.  Today's errata addresses these problems with cultural enforcement.  You now need to have a personnel in the mission attempt in order to get Kir'Shara's mission point boost (and it's not retroactive anymore), and also to get the personnel download from Reliquary.  In addition, Seek Hidden Reliquary now plays on a personnel, not a mission.  That means that Taking Charge can't download it, so it will be more difficult to get access to (except in Syrranite decks).  

Another Vulcan card was involved in a different problem.  IDIC: Power of the High Command gives rewards for playing Scheme cards, and one of those -- Romulan Minefield -- was found to be too big of an interference problem.  Romulan Minefield has been banned, and I'm sorry to report that testing for it is still ongoing; it's not coming off the ban list today.  But we did recognize that one thing that was missing from this card interaction was cultural enforcement.  "High Command" is intended to be used by the affiliation, but it gives its Scheme-related benfits without regard to affiliation.  With today's errata, its benefits are conditional on having four personnel in play.  Vulcan military decks can use this IDIC card once again, but pure decks won't. 

The rest of the changes relate to a rules change the Rules Committee made regarding the handling of "your facility".  Some cards, particularly those of recent design, could lock a player out of fully using what should be a shared facility (such as an HQ or a Nor) if their opponent happened to see that particular facility first.  Most cases of such a lockout were fixed by a change to the rules regarding how Headquarters reacted to this phrase, but that left a few verbs -- Alliance for Global Unity and Cross-Quadrant Expansion -- which could apply to Nors with potential lockout situations.  These cards have been slightly rewritten to no longer mention "your facility", but instead a concept similar enough for each card's gameplay.  In a similar vein, MACO Training Camp (not a facility, but Time Locations have a similar nonduplicatable-but-shared status) has major rewording but hopefully minor gameplay change (outside of a mirror match, which was the problem).
 
These errata, as well as those announced on Friday, take effect today, November 5.  As always, thanks go to the many teams involved, including Errata, Rules, Art, and Playtesting. 

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