Rules Update, July 2024

by James Heaney, Rules Manager (1E)

1st July 2024

Hey, DaiMons and Majes! The first Monday of the month is a regularly scheduled rules update, and here we are.

We were working pretty hard on card development this month, so we don't have much: a minor new temporary ruling, a minor official ruling from last week on the forums published officially, and a reminder of something introduced a few months ago. As always, substantive changes (or clarifications) are in bold blue text. Here's the RRD: RRD 2024-07-01.

Vidiian Harvester & Stone Knives

Since no one is currently "using" a Vidiian Harvester while its gametext is suspended, a Vidiian Harvester affected by Stone Knives and Bearskins cannot be used to "steal organs" with Organ Theft.

Um... that's it! I really have nothing to add to that very specific ruling about that very specific interaction!

Alpha Missions in Other Quadrants

Back in March, there was a public question about missions like Nebula that can be seeded in any quadrant. Since those missions don't have a quadrant icon, they are legally Alpha Quadrant missions, even when they are in, say, the Gamma Quadrant. This is clearly the correct answer under the current rules, but it is also confusing, unintuitive, and more than a bit dumb. A mission seeded in the Delta Quadrant is not intuitively an Alpha Quadrant mission -- but They Will Be Coming decks might not care.

I announced in March that the Rules Committee planned to fix this weird little loophole, and I decided not to issue a temporary "bluetext" ruling because I thought we would get it fixed before anyone managed to get around to using it. That was my mistake. Rules moved too slow on this, and it came to my attention over the weekend that Kevin Jaeger of South Dakota did manage to use this tech in a deck at a Regional. Kudos to Kevin! His deck found and used a legitimate rules loophole, and that kind of smart play is what you expect from top players!

However, it will surely come as no surprise to him or anyone else that Rules is putting the kibosh on it, since we had already announced our intent to do so. This is a temporary ruling while we continue trying to hammer out final wording in the coming months: a mission is considered to belong to the quadrant in which it is seeded. For example, a mission seeded in the Delta Quadrant is considered a "Delta Quadrant mission" for all purposes, even if it lacks the symbol.

(Kevin, I know you think everything we do that hurts one of your decks is because we are countering you personally, and that usually isn't true, but this time it obviously is. You are free to tally it as such in your Rolodex of Broken Dreams.)

"Report With"

Since a bunch of cards are receiving errata to say "report with" today (instead of "report with crew"), we want to give a quick reminder about what that means. When a card allows a ship to report with certain cards, you may play the ship from your hand with the specified cards (also from your hand) aboard. The cards aboard must be compatible (as usual), but are reporting to a specific destination (the ship) and thus do not need to be in their native quadrant. Each card is reported as a separate sub-action of the report with group action, and may be responded to appropriately.

To report with staffing is to report with cards necessary to staff the ship (and no more).

This is slightly different from the previous "report with crew." In a report-with-crew action, you could report as many personnel and equipment as you wanted (but you always had to report staffing). The "report with" mechanism allow you to report exactly the cards specified, no more and no less, but does not care about staffing the ship (unless it says "report with staffing").

For more details, see report with in the Glossary (linked on the the home page). If you have any questions about this or any of the affected cards, ask away in the forum threads.

See You... Out There

Thanks for reading! As always, please let us know if you see any errors, typos, or obsolete text in the rules documents. We are running behind on ordinary rules document maintenance, and we are trying to catch up over the next couple of months.

And be sure to tell us on the forums what you think of everything we've done this month. Hopefully you're happy, but, if not, we want to hear that, too. Until next month, we'll see you on the spaceline!

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