Defiance says Your plot deck must contain exactly 10 plot cards. .

Betrayal at the wall says Increase the size of your plot deck by 1.

In my meta it created some friction.

My opinion is that I can have 11 plots if I include Betrayal at the wall. And my reasoning is that Defiance does not forbid to have more (there is no "cannot" in the wording) and all cards can overrule the normal rules in the game.

So what would it be?

The word "exactly" on Defiance carries the absolute. Putting Betrayal in your plot deck doesn't "turn off" the "exactly 10 plot cards" text of Defiance. That text still has to be followed. So you get 10 plots, not 11.

This is similar to FFG's ruling/clarification that the text "to a minimum of 10" power needed to win the game on the Treaty agendas ("...with the North," "...with the South," etc.) remains active and applicable, even if other "needs fewer power to win" effects - that would reduced the amount of power a player needs to win below 10 - are played.

As for your reasoning that card text overrules the normal game rules, that is true -- but the question here is about a card vs. a card, not a card vs. the normal game rules.

Thanks.

I was wondering about this myself a couple weeks back (and I had very similar notions to Miklos'), but forgot about it...

Thanks to Miklos for bringing up the topic, and thanks as always to Ktom for the response!

The question came up over on agotcards, and I sent it in to FFG (before I'd looked up this thread, incidentally). The answer just came in:

My question:

The Agenda "Defiance" says: Your plot deck must contain exactly 10 plot cards.
The plot "Betrayal at the Wall" says: Increase the size of your plot deck by 1.
If I run Defiance and BatW, can I increase my plot deck to 11 cards total? If not, why?

The answer:

You can increase the size of the plot deck to 11 cards with Defiance and Betrayal at the Wall.
The core rules say, “Your plot deck must contain exactly 7 cards.” (Rule book, page 24.)
Defiance adjusts the above line, to “Your plot deck must contain exactly 10 cards.”
Betrayal at the Wall increases the size by 1 in each case.

I must say this is reasonable. Ktom's earlier answer was certainly reasonable too, seeing the "to a minimum of 10" on the Treaty Agendas as setting a precedence for "exactly 10 cards" on Defiance was certainly valid, absent an official ruling.

The "to a minimum of 10" on the Treaties sets a hard lower limit, in the same way "to a maximum of 2" on Blood-Crazed Screamer sets a hard upper limit. OTOH, "exactly 10" does not set a hard limit in any way, it just replaces the CS Rules' "exactly 7", and can thus be modified in the same way. I can get behind that.

Fair enough. I was concentrating too much on the fact that cards take precedence over rules, but not over each other, so the "card vs. card" interaction would work differently from the "card vs. rule text" interaction.

"Increase your plot deck by 3 cards." would have been sufficient as well then. I didn't even consider looking at how the core set rules define your plot deck size.

I figured there was a specific reason this text is exactly the way it is printed.