As a matter of fact, I believe it is meant to shuffle blessings into your own discards - for one thing, shuffling the hourglass discards is rare.
Think of failing to defeat the Cultist as them inducting you into their cult or forcing you - willing or otherwise - to complete or participate in some ritual. As a result, you lose time and/or are impeded from completing your objective, but you're rewarded with some god's attention or otherwise gain some dark power from it, perhaps.
It provides an interesting little option for players with time on their hands.
Don't know if intentional but I agree with Yewstance if may end up having fun side effects.
Yep, Cultists are intended to be scary in terms of killing the hourglass, but very occasionally tempting ;)
Thank you, Keith, for the confirmation it is working as intended. I just thought it was counter-intuitive that failing to defeat would have positive consequences, which is very rare - and shuffling into the character's discards seemed even weirder to me. Why shuffle it if discards is open information and I do not know a card that concerns with the card's positions.
While as a rule we don't make cards that care about the position of cards in your discards, we did do it once that I know of: the location Apothecary in Rise of the Runelords. In organized play, we also did that trick with the henchman Lamia Cultist in Season of the Runelords. And if you've played through Apocrypha, you know we made the entire Deathless chapter care about the order of your discards.
So since we might do something like that again, we care that a card like Cultist doesn't let you do something crazy with your discards, because that would give you an advantage we don't want you to have. That is, if we ever did it. Which we probably won't. Maybe.
Never say never on something that may end up being a good idea :-)
Yep, Cultists are intended to be scary in terms of killing the hourglass, but very occasionally tempting ;)Thank you, Keith, for the confirmation it is working as intended. I just thought it was counter-intuitive that failing to defeat would have positive consequences, which is very rare - and shuffling into the character's discards seemed even weirder to me. Why shuffle it if discards is open information and I do not know a card that concerns with the card's positions. Yewstance probably does if there is such power/card :)
Thank you once again
Good point about shuffling your discard pile being supposedly non-meaningful (but Mike's already covered that), I wasn't thinking of that at the time.
However, banes with positive effects when undefeated have existed quite a lot in PACG, especially Mummy's Mask. Mummy's Mask had a few banes that forced you to reset your hand if you failed to defeat them (usually "recharge your hand, reset your hand, then discard one card" or some variant, as it was a Sphinx-like effect) which I almost always considered far more positive than negative. There were also banes like Baited Jewel Box that would do damage do you but also let you draw more boons if you rolled a slightly lower result for it.
There's also some Wrath of the Righteous cards that would "force" you to draw a ton of cards if you failed to defeat them, I think (in order to try to kill you suddenly by decking yourself), which could be highly positive in some cases. There were the 'temptation' barriers that would give you a benefit in some sense if you chose to leave them undefeated (though you'd still banish them).
It's not common, certainly, but not entirely new design space either.