Quote

Each time you defeat a monster, place 1 Heart on this card. Each time you recover Heart, discard 1 Heart from this card.
Surge: Pierce X, where X is the Heart on this card.

Question: Do you clear the card of hearts between encounters? I hope so because a mage with rune armor on is really hard to damage and therefore gets healed very little resulting in a ton of hearts on this thing. Pretty much ignore your monsters' armor dice whenever she attacks. I would hate to be stuck only playing monsters with ironskin the rest of the game just to stay competetive.

According to the unoficcial rulebook on page 14 :

Quote

Heroes keep all damage, conditions, valor tokens, elixir tokens and the insight token they had at the end of the previous encounter.

So in my interpretation, the hero does NOT recover any [heart] and as such you don't discard any [heart]s from the Soulstone item .

You do not clear it between Encounters, you DO clear it between Quests I believe.

I would say all tokens stay while it is equipped, this includes between enc 1 and enc 2.
But a more tricky one is do they stay if you trade or unequip hit ? for me in this case they shouldn't ...

About .. armour being ignored... unfortunately IronSkin is always the best answer.. but there must be others with Pierce if it's only the Mage even with Pierce 15 he can't kill all the monsters either he can do little damage or mass of damages to one only monster.
And even with the Rune Plate he is not invincible !
But above all... most of the time the goal is not to kill them... just to slow them.
Even if he as some possibility of blast attacks, there are always maps where you can flood them with mass little monsters speard in the map so will have to kill them nearly one by one!
Reinforcements are also important once I use them to kill such a mage... 2 dragons in from on my heroes, easy meat they destroyed the first but not the second... but the one killed reinforced at the begining of my turn.. just on their back !!!
This all to say two thing :
- not all is already writen, your not doomed nor to loose nor to use the same tactics
- it's in conditions like these that the OL must think the most and will learn the more .. and be the most proud of himself to make lie the pronostics ! ;-P

If you unequip it, it would lose everything- reset.

Between encounters it would probably stay, but if an errata cleared it, I wouldn't be surprised. It would likely follow the same rules as Valorous Strike.

Sorry for necro-post, but why would the tokens be discarded if it is unequipped? Which rule are you citing? This question just came up on BGG and I am trying to search the web and CRRG and other resources to find a rule for this.

Any citations woulk be helpful!

The rules state on page 7 and page 11 that equipment that is not equipped is "flipped facedown or put under a hero sheet" and "cannot be used until equipped". I take that to mean the card text is essentially blank while unequipped, no tokens would remain (total reset).

Unfortuantely, some items can be abused by leaving tokens on when unequipping (Soulstone, Gauntlets of Power) and some can be abused by clearing them (Workman's Ring). To my knowledge, no specific ruling has been made.

That's just the citation I was looking for. Thanks!