Persistent Individuality
In March 2019, a new version of the Organized Play Guide was circulated to me for revisions, because Kris knows I love revising rules documents. (It's a weakness!) There are dozens, maybe hundreds of changes, major and minor. One thing I noticed was that the paragraph about promo cards had been revised:
Promo cards distributed by the Continuing Committee in prize kits are legal for play as soon as they have been won. This includes White-Border Preview cards (those bearing a “P” rarity) that have not yet been released in a virtual expansion.
At the time, the only 1E white-border preview card in the wild was
Centurion Kirk, and there were no more in the pipeline, to my knowledge. (I had seen Persistent Individuality but had not been informed it was a WB Preview.) I verbally confirmed with Kris that this seemed okay to me as long as white-border preview cards continued to be low-powered personnel who didn't work very well outside their chosen factions. Kris agreed. He wasn't aware of Persistent Individuality, either. He circulated the information about WB previews to various departments, including 1E and Shipping.
Charlie was aware of Persistent Individuality and the WB change but didn't connect the dots. I know somebody else in 1E was aware of both things, but I'm not sure whether he didn't connect the dots or if he thought it was a good idea.
So the updated OPG goes up in late March as planned, with changes to white-border playability across all games. This is not much noticed, because there are
lots of other changes in the OPG and very few players read updated rules documents anyway. A few months after that,
Persistent Individuality goes out in promo packs. This isn't a low-powered personnel tied to a specific more-or-less unplayable faction; it's a pretty strong anti-Borg dilemma that a ton of decks would like to get their hands on.
I don't actually have any idea when PI reached players and became technically legal, but Dan Hamman
teased it in September, sparking concerns about unknowable and inaccessible cards in the environment.
A thread started shortly after on the topic. The idea of legal WB previews was controversial, with supporters and opponents, but the idea of a strong anti-Borg dilemma existing as a legal WB preview nobody else could was quite unpopular.
At the infamous
September Board Meeting, where nobody could hear each other and the recording was lost, P.I. was on the agenda, but I don't know that it was discussed. The
minutes for October mention it obliquely, and I didn't find much about it in the recording -- seemed like the decision had already been made.
My
impression is that the 1E Department
wanted Organized Play to change the white-border preview rule back to what it was in order to "fix" P.I.. Organized Play, however, tries to do only annual updates of the OPG, and, like, hey, y'all had plenty of warning and signed off on this and we're not going to change the whole OPG for three games because of one card you could just ban. So, come November, 1E finally pulled the trigger and banned the card to get it out of the environment.
Centurion Kirk, the other WB preview, remains legal.
It's not clear right now what the future will be on the overall issue. In the meeting, 1E reported that they may limit future WB previews to more restricted personnel, and OP signaled that it will reconsider whether to revert this change next April, during the OPG's regular pre-regionals update window.
But the future of Persistent Individuality is very clear: it will remained banned until it is released as a regular black-border card in a real set, and then it will be released without changes. It's kind of a pseudo-ban, because it seems nobody expected it to be legal right now anyway. It could be released tomorrow; it could be released in five years. But Errata and Playtesting aren't looking at it and won't need to sign off on changes, which is good news for PI. It's banned strictly for accessibility reasons, not power-level reasons.
Q's Planet - Not much on this one. Q's Planet was considered disruptive enough that Decipher pseudo-banned it with
Strategema. It went onto the banlist without much discussion, as did every other card named on Strategema.
I... wasn't really around back in the day, as I've noted before, so I don't know what the deal was with Q's Planet. To my eyes now, it looks so obviously broken that I can't believe there weren't more counters against it much earlier, but... I dunno! Hopefully Rachmaninoff (or somebody else) will write another post explaining the history here.
Quantum Incursions - I actually can't explain this better than
Charlie did the day it was banned. Read his article. (Then read the thread linked to the article if you want even more.)
It was controversial: a
public poll shortly before the ban showed and
exact 50/50 split in the community (with 58 votes!) between banning and keeping it. The split
within the 1E department was nearly identical.
But, as that poll showed, even half of the people who wanted to keep QI agreed it needed changes, and the 1E Department had tried and failed for over two years (by that point) to come up with workable changes that would make most people happy. So it's banned until Errata comes up with a better idea than any ideas Design had.
Raise The Stakes - This is banned because all cards named in the "Special Cards" section of the
Premiere Rulebook are banned.
Nah, just kidding. This is the only card that is banned in both OTF and Open. It is the only card Decipher banned. It's banned for the same reason Magic The Gathering's ante mechanic is banned: first, players had
strong reactions to the possibility that they would lose some of their very valuable cards just for losing; second, ante mechanics arguably (in the opinion of Decipher and Wizards of the Coast lawyers, anyway) count as gambling, creating all manner of legal hassles for players, venues, and manufacturers. Is that true? I suspect so, but it never really mattered, because DECIPHER thought it was true, and they're the ones who counted.