Finally a new way to play Arueshalae in OP!

[Dulcee]

I just read my email and saw that Adventure #1-3 was updated with a new reward. I've been waiting for this day! Time to go try her out with her new deck!

[Vic Wertz]

We'll be talking a bit more about this in the Paizo blog on Friday.

Some people are wondering if you're allowed to use her Level 3 cohort right away, or if you have to wait until you reach Tier 3. Guide 6.1, which should be out next month, will replace the rule "If the back of your character card lists a specific card, that card must be in your Class Deck box" with the more specific "If the back of your character card lists a specific card, that card must be in your deck." So yes, she can use her cohort from the start.

[Yewstance]

This makes me wonder about the other Adventure Rewards that have outdated/negated rewards; such as Adventure 0-3 (presumably) and Adventure 4-5, which enables the use of Darago with HV2 (now a default capability for all players under the new Card Guild Guide rules).

I'll wait for further speculation until the Friday blog, though. Looking forward to guide 6.1; I hope it covers some questions and topics I'd previously raised that v6.0 didn't cover.

[Vic Wertz]

We addressed this particular reward because the ENTIRE reward was rendered meaningless. The other rewards you mentioned still provide some value.

6.1 changes so far are fairly small:

• Correcting the "taking one for the team" example.
• Clarifying that any cards listed on the back of your character card must be in your deck, not just your Class Deck box.
• Clarifying that the rules regarding adding Ultimate Add-On Decks to other decks (or vice versa) is dependent on the deck you start with, not the character you're using.

Depending on some timing issues, it may also have a redesigned Event Reporting Sheet.

We concluded that at least one of the issues you raised needs to be dealt with via scenario reward revisions rather than Guide changes. What else do you have in mind?

[Yewstance]

Vic Wertz wrote:

We concluded that at least one of the issues you raised needs to be dealt with via scenario reward revisions rather than Guide changes. What else do you have in mind?

Thanks for the updates, Vic!

Pulling together some of my thoughts, I found that I had surprisingly few changes I wanted to see in the Guide - a lot are PACS queries that were never answered in previous threads on the topics which seemed like oversights or missed questions, but would be solved with scenario reward rewords more than Guide updates, for the most part.

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Regarding negated Adventure Rewards...

4-5 Adventure Reward provides no value whatsoever; it lets you play Darago (Wizard Class Deck) with the Hell's Vengeance 2 Character Deck. As of Card Guild Guide 6.0, any Wizard (Class Deck or Base Set) can be played with Hell's Vengeance 2, because it features a Wizard. Previous to Guide v6, that rule only applied to base set characters, so the reward made sense.

I cannot actually comment on the 0-3 Adventure Reward - I do not own the PDF nor have I played it. But I would have assumed (perhaps wrongly) that it simply read "Gain a role card and a power feat", which is the same text as the 1-3 reward that was just updated. (Such a reward has been made redundant since Guide v3, to my knowledge.)

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Regarding unclear PACS issues that come to mind, that may or may not be feasible to solve in the Guide.

I've mentioned some possible guide oversights or blind spots before - but most have been handled as of Guide v6.0 (besides minutiae about "what happens if I make an illegal deck in X way?") or would be better served by amending scenario/season text rather than Guide Decks, upon further reflection.

Some of the bigger remaining examples include...

Season 4-P1 and 4-P2 Rewards (giving you the ability to substitute in Hell's Vengeance characters) do not conclusively answer a variety of questions. These are, however, almost certainly more suited to amending the scenario reward rather than the Guide.

Even so, some of the remaining issues I'll list in a spoiler.

4-P1 and 4-P2 unanswered questions:

These questions were brought up in more depth before in their own thread, and while they never got an 'official' response I did get some opinions from cartmanbeck.

Some questions have been conclusively answered (or I've discovered answers to) since then, but remaining questions include...

* Is it possible to 'strip' a Deck Upgrade from your Chronicle Sheet, or are you free to banish cards with your temporary character and then re-add them after each scenario?
* Note that these character decks feature extremely powerful 'banish on use' cards, so this gives you a big advantage to substitute one character over and over rather than actually picking that character to play in Season 4.
* Cartmanbeck's answer was, to paraphrase "no, banishing a card is supposed to be a penalty", presumably meaning that you could not reference that Deck Upgrade again when substituting a character. That may be the intent, but has no RAW support. Keep in mind this reward doesn't TRADE cards from your deck - it just inherits all Deck Upgrades you've ever earned.

* If you take a substitute character, do you get a Redemption Card from their Character Deck? If so, does it 'remember' when you've redeemed cards? If you're playing a Hell's Vengeance character yourself, do you 'pass on' your Redemption Card to your substitute character (whether or not they're using the same Hell's Vengeance Deck)?
* This is a pretty big question, since the Redemption Card is a key mechanic in Hell's Vengeance 1, which offers methods of redemption too. (Less so in HV2, where all of the characters can get around Corrupted penalties and cannot redeem cards outside of Season of the Righteous.)

* Not actually a question about this reward, but Mike Selinker in a Blog post explicitly claimed that The Asmodean Disciplines could redeem itself... but doesn't it have to be banished before you choose what to redeem, and so it would no longer be one of 'your' cards, making it an illegal target?

* Note that these substitute characters can be 'rebuilt' every time you pick them, even choosing all of their feats to match the scenario you're doing (plus the character themselves). Combined with the facet before, it seems MUCH MORE POWERFUL to use these substitute characters in Season 4 instead of ever playing them 'normally', since you get all of the feat and even deckbuilding respecs you want and all 'banish' costs become 'buries' and you can pick up to 6 extra characters to pull from in the process.

The Card Guild Guide prescribes no order-of-events for Traders and Loot replacements for Seasons 3 and 4, and so it's haphazard what tables actually do in these situations, and I've personally seen (and can be visibly recorded in looking at PbPs) tables seemingly rule randomly on this, even among the most veteran of Box Runners.

Can you trade an item for a spell at Sunburst Market, then trade that spell for a Spell Loot, for example? Can you replace a Level 0 card for a Level 4 Loot card, then trade away that Loot at a Trader? Or do you have to do all of your Trades and your Loot choices 'at once', in a single step?

If you get to choose the order - when do you PICK Traders, relative to Loot? What if different players - potentially going to the same Trader - want to do things in different orders? Is this an issue?

Whilst this may be something to be solved in the Season 3 and 4 PDFs rather than the actual Guide, this may come up with any and all future rewards that instruct you to make decisions/swaps when setting up a scenario before or after putting out locations (which occasionally turn up). So having a clear sentence in the Guide that would presumably say "you must make all decisions simultaneously" or "you may choose the order of any such effects" would be desirable, in my opinion.

If your opinion is that it's clearly defined that "in PACG, when multiple things happen at once then you get to choose the order"; then I note that this statement is not sufficiently compelling for some veteran Box Runners, so I'd at least like an official forum statement to link to in the future, if not a Guide clarification.

And finally, there's this, which is more me just saying "my opinion is that this feels wrong, but it doesn't seem to cause any real rules or gameplay damage besides giving some characters access to a very powerful ally from the start of the game", rather than "this is an unclear rule or unclear reward" like the above points.

I can't say I'm happy that any character using Occult Adventures 1 can take "Honaire" as an Ally 0 deck upgrade (since it's just a Loot card - no different to any AP reward promo card being put in your Class Deck) but I don't really see a way to prevent that without making it a special case. It does make Estra feel less special that the "Reload to add 1d6+# to Str/Dex/Con/Combat checks" isn't in any way unique to her, though.

But this isn't really a Guide issue, it's just the oddity that PACS has been designed to not prevent players from putting Loot into their Class Deck and earning it like any other Deck Upgrade, and Honaire is a Loot card that reflects design space more common for Cohorts.

[Parody]

Yewstance wrote:

I cannot actually comment on the 0-3 Adventure Reward - I do not own the PDF nor have I played it. But I would have assumed (perhaps wrongly) that it simply read "Gain a role card and a power feat", which is the same text as the 1-3 reward that was just updated.

Adventure 0-3, in addition to your Role card, gives you an adventure deck 3 boon of any type from the box and lets you treat that card as a bonus deck upgrade.

[Yewstance]

Parody wrote:

Yewstance wrote:

I cannot actually comment on the 0-3 Adventure Reward - I do not own the PDF nor have I played it. But I would have assumed (perhaps wrongly) that it simply read "Gain a role card and a power feat", which is the same text as the 1-3 reward that was just updated.

Adventure 0-3, in addition to your Role card, gives you an adventure deck 3 boon of any type from the box and lets you treat that card as a bonus deck upgrade.

Thanks! Nevermind that, then; it does something. :)

[Vic Wertz]

Yewstance wrote:

4-5 Adventure Reward provides no value whatsoever; it lets you play Darago (Wizard Class Deck) with the Hell's Vengeance 2 Character Deck. As of Card Guild Guide 6.0, any Wizard (Class Deck or Base Set) can be played with Hell's Vengeance 2, because it features a Wizard. Previous to Guide v6, that rule only applied to base set characters, so the reward made sense.

4-5 gives you a power feat in addition to the unlock.

[Yewstance]

Ack, really? My apologies; I'm doubly wrong.

I was looking at some PDFs side-by-side, and I just mentally removed the 'power feat' text mentally because I was still in the headspace of "new role card + power feat is outdated, so the entire block of text means nothing". Got some signals crossed when I was no longer even looking at Role Card rewards.

Also, any official word on the Honaire in PACS play issue? Can non-Estra characters take it like any other Ally 0 Deck Upgrade? It's explicit that you can claim Loot in your Class Decks, because that's how most Season Adventure Path rewards work (Councilor's Ring, Blessing of the Sages, Lamashtu's Bauble, etc), which all have the Loot type and can obviously be taken from your Class Deck as deck upgrades.

[Vic Wertz]

Yewstance wrote:

Also, any official word on the Honaire in PACS play issue? Can non-Estra characters take it like any other Ally 0 Deck Upgrade?

We decided the right place to solve this is on Honaire himself. (The link is to the Occult Adventures Deck 1 FAQ, but there's a matching entry for Mummy's Mask.)

[Yewstance]

Vic Wertz wrote:

Yewstance wrote:

Also, any official word on the Honaire in PACS play issue? Can non-Estra characters take it like any other Ally 0 Deck Upgrade?

We decided the right place to solve this is on Honaire himself. (The link is to the Occult Adventures Deck 1 FAQ, but there's a matching entry for Mummy's Mask.)

Woohoo! Thank you for the resolution!