[Armus]

I was really glad to see Black Hole reintroduced into the wild. It got me thinking about other ban list cards and what to do about them, and I had some thoughts about one in particular.

Palor Toff.

We should bring him back.

But here's the thing: I know he's probably still unbalanced in the modern game so he'll need errata. I think it's doable.

For reference, here's his current gametext:

Exchange this card for any non-Personnel card in your discard pile.

I've always liked that text. Simple. Straightforward. Totally NOT 1E.

However, it's really REALLY strong. Get back ANY non- personnel card at ANY time as much as you want?! Yeah. There's a reason he was used so heavily back in the day and has been camping out on the ban list ever since.

I think there's a way to balance him for the modern game. Something like this:

Once each turn, discard a non-personnel card from hand (or your Gold Pressed Latinum from play) to take a card of the same type into hand.

Now, let's discuss why this is a better fit:

1.) It's rate-limited. By only being able to do it once each turn, you keep it relatively contained. Maybe 7 or 8 exchanges per game, tops?

2.) It's type-contained. By turning Mr. Toff from a commodity into a market-maker, it puts a more balanced cost on the benefit. It's not an auto-include in every deck, but can be very good in some decks. Leading to...

3.) It encourages new deck designs. Free report salad decks might not use this, but maybe other decks will. Battle? Interference? Who knows? But it does open things up for the inclusion of more situational cards, since they can be discarded to get other cards back as the game situation dictates.

4.) It opens up design space. What? How? You may ask. Well, I added the bit about the GPL for two reasons: a) it feels very Trek-sensy that Palor Toff would take cash as well as barter, and b) the heaviest users of GPL, the Ferengi, are really hurting right now and need all of the help they can get. Maybe they can find a reason to use GPL, a card that redirects "spent" GPL from the discard pile to somewhere else. Who knows? But it seems right to me that an alien trader would be on brand for benefiting a deck, and we all know they need some benefit, lest they spend eternity in the vault of 1e destitution.

So there it is. pros, cons, good, bad, have at it! All comments are welcome

I just wanted to offer this up as a possible next step in banning the ban list, or at the very least, help get the creative juices flowing for the 1e Powers that Be.

[AllenGould]

I'd lose the GPL text because it's wordy. (I like the thematic, but it's wordy AF).

But I'd be curious to see what testers thought of it as a 2-for-1 trade. It does cut into the historical power issues. I suspect it might not even need the 1/turn.

[Spectre9]

There's heaps of card draw in 1E. Having to discard a card isn't a huge drawback.

Having such a recursion card will allow decks to play lots of disruption and recurring the ones doing the most damage in the situation.

Though I do guess anything that the powers that be didn't want to be recurred has been given a 0 point box to stop that happening.

Perhaps have a restriction such as having 3x greed at one location or 2x Acquisition. You're really go into new card territory with that much errata though.

[BCSWowbagger]

I know I'm a broken record on this, but:

The bottleneck on errata right now (as with most things) is testing. Errata puts out stuff, but gets little tester feedback, which comes in verrrrrry slowly. (To be fair to testers, it is harder to test errata than to test Block sets. And, as I've stated repeatedly, the handful of testers we have are drinking from a firehose, trying to keep up with tons of cards doing tons of different things without enough bodies to cover it all.) Errata isn't going to put a potentially dangerous card back into circulation without a clear idea of what its revised version actually does, so no testing = no errata.

I like Armus's proposed revision, especially the GPL bit, and I think it shows promise. But what it needs is test data, and there isn't enough errata testing right now to unclog the pipe and make space for Toff.

So, if you want Toff back (along with many other old pals from the ban list), please sign up to test! You can test on Lackey. You can test with people outside your local group. Anyone can test!

(If you are already a tester, Armus -- and you may well be; I can see the tester forum because of my current Design role but don't have a full roster -- then please disregard this. But then also please file a report on the December banlist errata batch. 90% of that batch has still only been tested and reported on by one psuedo-group, which makes me sad, because there's four or five banlist cards in there that I think are real close and just need a tad more data.)

EDIT: I'm speaking for myself here based on what I see, not on behalf of Design as a whole (I'm just an assistant designer!) and certainly not on behalf of Errata. I don't know who all is on Errata or even how large their team is.

[Worf Son of Mogh]

What exactly is sooooo strong about exchanging onecard in hand for one in your discard pile... it's an even exchange just as if you had just had another copy in your deck. It just allows a bit more flexibility in deck ratios. It's one card for one card. Imo I see no reason it could not receive the same treatment as black hole.
If anything the one area it may have been too good with was the counterspells Kevin's etc. However since they revived errata 53856353 years ago now they don't end up in The discard pile any more when used, so not targets for toff.

[Professor Scott]

What exactly is sooooo strong about exchanging onecard in hand for one in your discard pile... it's an even exchange just as if you had just had another copy in your deck. It just allows a bit more flexibility in deck ratios. It's one card for one card. Imo I see no reason it could not receive the same treatment as black hole.
If anything the one area it may have been too good with was the counterspells Kevin's etc. However since they revived errata 53856353 years ago now they don't end up in The discard pile any more when used, so not targets for toff.

I tend to agree. In the Decipher era, Palor Toff was cheaper and easier to come by than rares; so it saw a lot of play. In the print-what-you-need Trekcc era, this is no longer an issue.

[KazonPADD]

I agree with Ken.

[AllenGould]

What exactly is sooooo strong about exchanging onecard in hand for one in your discard pile... it's an even exchange just as if you had just had another copy in your deck. It just allows a bit more flexibility in deck ratios. It's one card for one card.

It's because it's not another copy of one card in your deck - it's another copy of *every* non-Personnel card in your discard pile. (Or specifically, the *best* card in your discard pile). And since we've been pretty generous with letting people dump cards in there - and Hexany making it trivial to put any card you want in there - there's no cost associated with the printed version.

[Hoss-Drone]

"Thrice per game......then place this card in your point box."
[0 points]

Future noun card: "Every palor toff in an opp point box is worth -5 points."

Future version of kivas fajo:" every palor toff in your point box is worth 2 points."

[Kander77]

That card was so good. You could justify including it in nearly every deck back in the day.