July Brings 1E CRD, OTF Updates

by Allen Gould, First Edition Rules Master

4th July 2011

The First Edition Rules Committee has released updates to the Current Rulings Document (CRD) and the Official Tournament Format Ban List. As always, these updates are effective immediately.

Errata
Ajur and Boratus get matching erratas to their special abilities, replacing their dilemma discard with revealing, and changing the random selection to opponent’s choice. Discarding dilemmas in any form is a very powerful ability, and while we’re still nailing down exactly where the cost is for it, we know it’s higher than “two personnel on a planet”. In addition, random selection of seeded cards has never worked out terribly well in practice. Revealing a dilemma (even if it’s opponent’s choice) from a four-card combo is still generally enough to give you solid intel about the rest of the combo, and is much more in line with a personnel’s special ability. As part of the errata, both cards are removed from the OTF ban list.

Obelisk of Masaka receives errata to limit the downloaded Masaka to only target the downloading player.. This gives download-to-hand abilities some room to breathe without changing the “mulligan” ability.

Vetar gets a minor errata, changing the 2E Pursuit keyword to the 1E icon.

Rules
The big change this month involves some standardization of how we refer to cards, and this month’s update is just the first step. In essence, the goal is to have three types of references:

1. Exact card title (e.g. “Nullify Kevin Uxbridge”). If we name the exact card title with no qualifiers, then we only mean that card (or members of the card title group, like Kevin Uxbridge: Convergence)
2. Personas (e.g. “any Data”). This usage stays the same as it always has.
3. Characteristics. This is the “everything else” category, and the short of it is simple: a card has a characteristic if it says it does. Is Bob an Admiral? He is if he’s “Admiral Bob”, or his lore says he’s an Admiral, but not if he “brought coffee to the Admiral”. The goal is to keep this as simple as possible.

The biggest actual change here is that we’ve removed the “card” rule, and specifically the “Bynars Exception”. Previously, using the word “card” meant “only look at card title”. This has been removed, so now “card” is merely a generic label for readability. Functionally, this means that Minuet can download 10 and 01 (since they are Bynars by species).

We’ve tweaked the homeworlds entry to remove the references to specific planets. Vulcan still isn’t a homeworld (because neither location says it is).

The “executing orders” entry received a housekeeping change to sync up to earlier changes.

Ban list additions
The following cards are now banned in Official Tournament Format, based on results from tournaments (with particular attention given to Regionals and other championship-level events), and feedback from internal and external groups.

• Beyond the Subatomic
• Jem’Hadar Shrouding
• Smooth as an Android’s Bottom
• Supernova
• Zefram Cochrane’s Telescope

The First Edition Rules Committee is scheduled to release an update on the first Monday of each month. All rules updates, errata, and changes to the ban list take effect immediately unless otherwise noted.