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Strategy Articles
Rules Update, April 2021
by James Heaney, Rules Manager (1E)
5th April 2021
Happy April! Today is the first Monday of the month. After the major changes to sites, Nors, and regions two weeks ago with Dogs of War, and the unloading of loaded skills last month, we on the Rules Committee figured it was time for a light rules supplement. (Besides, we were a bit worn out!)
This month, the main thing we're doing is updating the Glossary to reflect the clarifying errata from the Series Q Virtual Promos. We went to all the effort of updating the wording on these cards to reduce or eliminate their Glossary entries, so now we're actually doing that. There is one substantive change involved, though -- and it involves a twenty-year-old ruling you've probably never heard of -- so stay tuned!
You can check this out in this month's Recent Rulings Document.
Promo Series Q Cleanup
We were able to delete the entire Engage Shuttle Operations entry from the Glossary thanks to its sleek new wording (thanks as ever to Art for their help making those clarifying errata happen!), and we cut two sentences out of the Black Hole entry. (Most of the rest of the Black Hole entry is dealing with Temporal Rift, and we'll deal with that text if Temporal Rift ever gets a promo of its own.)
Vulcan Mindmeld Chaining Allowed
The Glossary has stated, since 1999, that you cannot "chain" Vulcan Mindmeld. That is, if you use Vulcan Mindmeld to give Spock all of Sarek's skills, and then use Vulcan Mindmeld again to have Savvik mind-meld with Spock, she would only gain Spock's skills (not Sarek's skills).
The card itself gives absolutely no indication of this rule. There are no other skill-shares in the game that work like this. There are no reasons in the rules to expect Vulcan Mindmeld to work like this. It's just a random exception, a special rule specific for this one card, buried deep in an arcane rules document.
So, when Vulcan Mindmeld was selected for Promo Series Q, we were going to give clarifying errata to to the card so that it would now state this anti-chaining rule directly. But, after talking with Design and the (at the time) interim Balance director, we came to a joint conclusion that few have heard of this rule, fewer remember it, and that, with the revised Vulcan Mindmeld (from its Live Long and Prosper errata), it almost certainly isn't necessary. So, with Balance's blessing, we instead left Vulcan Mindmeld's wording intact... and deleted this rule.
You are now free to "chain" your Mindmelds. Have at it!
"Does Not Work With" and Release This Pain
Oh, and I almost forgot! Nearly three years ago, we revised some rules about the phrase "does not work with." On the forums, a diligent player recently noticed that we forgot to update the Glossary entry for Release This Pain to match those revisions. As a result, the Glossary entries for "Release This Pain" and "does not work with" directly contradicted each other. We've now fixed that.
As a reminder: the rule since 2018 is that Release This Pain does override "does not work with" restrictions that are purely affiliation-based (like War Council). So do Brainwash, an Emblem, They Call Themselves The Maquis, or any appropriate Treaty card. Come to think of it, that gives me a sweet idea for a new deck!
Ongoing Business: Emergent Life-Form and U-Turns
Last month, when we released our ruling on how Emergent Life-Form works with Cytherians, we also mentioned, almost as an aside, that Emergent Life-Form can only move a ship once, in one direction, at the start of any given turn -- something we thought well-established by various informal rulings going back decades, and that we thought we were only formalizing.
In the forum reaction, this ended up being the item that ended up causing the most discussion and disagreement! It's always the one you don't expect.
Fair enough, though! In the public thread, we read some very innovative arguments about how the movement rules work. Several were arguments that we had frankly never considered -- and which have significant implications that reach well beyond Emergent Life-Form to impact a number of other cards, such as Loss of Orbital Stability. I promised to take the issue back to the R.C. and provide an update on the situation in our April 5th news article, even if the news was "there's no news."
There's no news. We have discussed the issue and I think we are close to a consensus approach to resolving it, but we don't have it ready for release. I don't think the ruling on ELF will be overturned, but I can't foreclose the possibility. Hopefully we'll have a final resolution for you next month. Until then, the current ruling printed in the Glossary stands.
Also this month, we removed the temporary ruling about victory conditions in timed-out tournament games because the Organized Play Guide got updated (thanks, Mr. Sonsteby!), and we added a temporary ruling about what happens to Staging Ground if Deep Space 9 is commandeered (our temporary answer: nothing happens, the card keeps working).
Thanks for reading! Be sure to tell us on the forums what you think of everything we've done this month. Hopefully you're happy, but, if you're not, we want to hear that, too. Until next month, we'll see you on the spaceline!
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