I think my argument's been misunderstood. I'm not saying that a unique card becomes a mis-seed if there's another copy in play. I agree with you all that that's silly.
I'm saying that:
1. Introducing a card to the game state, by whatever means, always involves a legality check. For card plays and other actions, this happens during initiation, before targets are chosen or conditions met. This has always been floating around the rules as an assumption, but was formally clarified in the March 2009 CRD.
(For example, if you try to play
M-5 Computer, but already have another copy of it in play, the play fails
ab initio, your normal card play is not spent, and it can never even be Kevin Uxbridge'd, because the play was illegal from the start.)
2. There are many legality checks. One legality check is the uniqueness check. Another legality check is the mis-seed check.
3. The rules do not clearly state when legality checks for dilemmas occur: during the reveal step? Or at the start of the encounter step? The rules are genuinely ambiguous on this point.
4. ...but the rules
do tell us when
one of the legality checks occurs: mis-seeds are checked during the revealed step.
5. Therefore, it is reasonable to think that, because the uniqueness check is
analogous to the mis-seed check (because they are both legality checks), it is
most likely that the uniqueness check occurs at the same time, and in the same way, as the mis-seed check.
That's my argument. It's not that uniqueness violation turns a card into a mis-seed. It's that the rules have a hole. They don't tell us when dilemma legality checks are
in general... but they
do tell us, very clearly, when one type of legality check occurs. It is therefore probable that other legality checks occur at the same time (which is the reveal step).
A few other points:
A. We
know that uniqueness is not checked at resolution (when placed on the mission), as a couple comments have suggested. If that were true, then Dead End would have its effect before uniqueness violation causes it to be discarded -- it wouldn't stay on the mission, but would stop the away team. This, I think, we can definitely rule out.
B. Allen notes a passage in the Glossary where the rules refer to uniqueness being checked at encounter-time rather than reveal-time. I think that's the strongest argument against my position. However, it is worth remembering that the "dilemmas revealed" step was only formally defined in 2018, and we hadn't even clarified that uniqueness checking is a legality check until that March 2009 CRD. The passage Allen quotes was written in 1999 (I'm not looking up the month). I think it's reasonable to surmise that Decipher wrote "encountered" here because they literally lacked the vocabulary or the understanding of the timing rules to write anything else, and nobody thought to update it.
C. It would be at least a little bit odd to do legality checks for dilemmas at different times, wouldn't it? Legality checks for normal cards all happen at the same time.
D. Actions - Step 1: Initiation is divided into four sub-steps: declaration, legality, targets, costs. Dilemma Reveal unambiguously corresponds to the declaration step. Dilemma Encounter unambiguously corresponds to the targets & costs step. It's unclear whether legality checks are part of Reveals or Encounters... but, even leaving aside everything about mis-seeds, reading over the steps again, doesn't it just feel like the Reveals step is the "cleaner" place to check legality?
P.S. With Worlds two weeks away, should Rules bluetext this? (One way or the other?)
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