I know you need to keep a seperate pile for discarded and dead. My confusion comes from cards like the Pentoshi Guildmaster. He says you can take him out of the discard pile, but what if he is dead. Is dead just dead and his whole coming back thing pointless and won't work from the dead. ie no zombie guildmasters.

The reason I ask is because there are several cards, I can't recall the names, but they allow you to get stuff out of the discard pile. However I have not been able to see the utility because most of the things in our games don't hit the discard pile they are dead.

Does dead only count for uniques? Are the armies and whatnot able to come back, they are the same only different?

It is very simple.

Killed characters go to Dead pile, discarded characters and all other cards go to Discard pile.

Some effects discard characters instead of killing them (Westeros Bleed, Too proud to bow…) + when you lose an Intrigue Challenge (or by a card effect have to discard a card) and discard a character it goes in the Discard pile too.

So some effects are from the Dead pile, some are from the Discard pile. None of them are better since you cannot know in which pile your character will end (hopefully in none ).

So all you have to do is to respect what is written on the card. If it says "from the discard pile", you can only use it from there. In the case of the Pentoshi Guildmaster, it may won't happen a lot (but you may have a card that let you choose which card to discard so he can be useful in this case), it may happens a lot… Depends of your deck and of your opponent cards. I personnaly don't play him in my Targ decks.

jugglingfool said:

Depends on what you mean by "counts."

It is the rules for unique cards, not anything specific about the dead pile itself, that does not let you play a second copy of a unique card that you already have in the dead pile. For non-unique cards, there is no such rule. If one of your non-unique armies goes to the dead pile, you can play a second copy.

Keep in mind that an effect that brings something back from the dead pile will work on any card in the dead pile. If it wouldn't work on uniques, the effect itself would tell you.

I'm a little surprised that most of the cards end up in your dead pile instead of your discard pile. Between lost intrigue challenges, played events, "discard this card to..." effects, attachments that were on characters when they die and non-character cards acting as characters (think the "Reinforcement" events), our discard piles almost always seem larger than our dead piles. There are a lot fewer mechanics and effects that send things to the dead pile, I think. Of course, there are some very aggressive decks out there in terms of military challenges and kill effects, so it's certainly possible.

But the moral of the story really is as fabest says: follow what is written on the card. Only the pile (dead or discard) referenced in the recursion effect will work.