A question came up in a bigger thread about the new preview article, and I thought the question deserved some consideration outside that context. Torani Kulda's pilot ability reads:

The question is: what happens when one of the enemy ships inside the firing arc does not have a focus or an evade token? The possible answers seem to be:

A) That ship cannot choose to remove tokens, so it must choose to suffer 1 damage.

or

B) That ship may choose to remove all of it's focus and evade tokens (which happens to be zero) and avoid suffering 1 damage.

I tend to think that a strict reading of the card supports B. The card does not say "If the enemy ship has any focus or evade tokens, it must choose..." it says simply that the ship "must choose" and gives two options. One option removes any focus or evade tokens, and the other option causes the ship to suffer one damage. When you're in Torani's bullseye firing arc after he attacks, you've got to open one of those two doors, but you get to choose which one.

In your opinion, am I interpreting this correctly? Any important things I've left out or misunderstood?

(asking for a friend.... a friend who is a wookiee with Expertise and Reinforce and never has focus or evade tokens)

Needs an FAQ, but for now: yes, you can choose to remove zero tokens if you do not have any.

They'll probably FAQ to clarify, but given the most recent one the intent of the game seems to be if you don't have the stuff you can't do the thing, though that's recovery so it's kind of inverted. But what I mean is PRS and the focus-mech don't let you take their penalties (spend token/receive ion) if you can't recover shields, so you can't gain if you're not missing. It would follow You can't discard what you don't have, so you cannot choose to remove them.

Sounds like you better have a token or its automatic damage. Or don't let Kimogila catch you in arc.

In before "Crying crying, these automatic flowers won't do"

knowing ffg they'll probably magically rule this as "you cant select 0 tokens" despite there are several instances in this game where 0 is a valid number.

**** this is the basis in Destiny for like 10? cards to be 100% useless because you can select 0.

As of right now though, yes you can just remove 0 tokens if you have none to take no damage. Had they worded it "...or if they have any focus and evade tokens, remove all of them instead" then you wouldnt be able to dodge that bad wordage.

What if a pilot had an ability that, when triggered, caused an enemy to remove all focus and evade tokens. If that enemy ship had no tokens, nothing would happen, right? Torani Kulda's ability is like that, only he gives his enemy a choice of which of two fists to get punched with. Choose the right fist and suffer 1 damage, choose the left fist and discard all focus and evade tokens. The fact that I have no focus or evade tokens does not seem to prevent me from choosing the left fist. If anyone thinks I'm wrong, I'd like to discuss it and see if we can figure it out.

@Incard Rules as written, you are correct.

However, I won’t be surprise when the next FAQ erratas Torani to read “After you perform an attack, each enemy ship in your bullseye arc at range 1-3 may choose to remove all of its focus and evade tokens. Each ship in your bullseye arc at range 1-3 that does not remove at least 1 token in this way suffers 1 damage.”

The language is actually pretty clear. Because it specifies "all" of your tokens, I see no reason within the rules and precedents as they currently stand that zero tokens would not qualify as all your tokens.

54 minutes ago, Vineheart01 said:

knowing ffg they'll probably magically rule this as "you cant select 0 tokens" despite there are several instances in this game where 0 is a valid number.

**** this is the basis in Destiny for like 10? cards to be 100% useless because you can select 0.

As of right now though, yes you can just remove 0 tokens if you have none to take no damage. Had they worded it "...or if they have any focus and evade tokens, remove all of them instead" then you wouldnt be able to dodge that bad wordage.

So, in Destiny, most of those cards would be stupid OP broken if they were only one or the other and that’s why FFG rules them that way - part of using them is that you have to find that perfect moment when either option is really painful to your opponent. It’s very, very important from a game design perspective that FFG rules them that way.

That being said, X-Wing is not Destiny, and very few rules carry over. For example, “immediately” is just flavor text in X-Wing, but it means a lot in Destiny. And I don’t think that this card would really be that broken if you can’t choose zero as an option, because it’s so difficult to line up and you’re paying top dollar for a ship that is still only PS8, which means nothing in today’s PS11 meta.

But as far as we know now, you can remove zero tokens, because that fits other X-Wing rulings: you can focus or target lock to change/reroll zero dice, for example.

But it definitely needs FAQ clarification, although they are going to most likely want to wait until they get Disney’s approval on nerfing other stuff (TLT comes to mind) before making a new FAQ. Kind of like how the Jabba and Minefield Mapper clarifications were in a holding pattern forever while we waited for Disney to let them nerf AdvSlam, Genius, Biggs, and Jumpmasters.

Language wise, you just need to make a choice. I see nothing stopping you from chosing the option of discarding all focus and evade tokens even if you have none. There is quite litterally nothing in the text of that card to that effect. This seems to be an instance of "do what the card says".

On 11/3/2017 at 1:46 PM, gamblertuba said:

The language is actually pretty clear. Because it specifies "all" of your tokens, I see no reason within the rules and precedents as they currently stand that zero tokens would not qualify as all your tokens.

Lets talk literal. How can someone remove something they dont have? It doesnt make sense. if you dont have any children, are you going to say, "I'm going to take all of my children to school today", and then proceed to drop off zero children at school, driving through the drop off line, and the little school lady aide opens your door to find zero children.... hopefully the FAQ will fix this for people trying to dodge the system that they made but managed to put in horrible wording.

4 minutes ago, Atacus said:

Lets talk literal. How can someone remove something they dont have? It doesnt make sense. if you dont have any children, are you going to say, "I'm going to take all of my children to school today", and then proceed to drop off zero children at school, driving through the drop off line, and the little school lady aide opens your door to find zero children.... hopefully the FAQ will fix this for people trying to dodge the system that they made but managed to put in horrible wording.

I get what you mean. From a certain point of view it's easy to say that the victim cannot chose the option of removing tokens, because you cannot perform the verb of removing on a non-entity. There are plenty of cases in real life and (more relevantly) in X-Wing where zero is the number of something. In the history of philosophy, the idea of zero has confounded people, and it will continue to do so, I'm sure.

I'm going to quote myself from earlier in the thread here: " What if a pilot had an ability that, when triggered, caused an enemy to remove all focus and evade tokens?" Imagine that scenario. If the opponent had no tokens to remove, we just move along, right? I read Torani Kulda's ability in a similar way. Or rather, I read one branch of his two-part ability in that way. His ability, when triggered forces the enemy to select which branch. Once the branch is selected, that effect is applied. There are no conditions, criteria, or prerequisites in the card text which force the victim to choose one branch over the other. If it feels like the ship got off the hook and suffered no negative effect from Torani's pilot ability, then so be it. Many pilot abilities have conditions under which they provide no benefit.

The zero theorem! haha. I understand your point. But again, i hope they FAQ it, soley because of that fact that there are many pilot abiliities that never seem to get the effect they deserve, and i think this specific one would grant users to more properly plan, and strategize how they fly offensively and defensively.

I was initially in the camp of feeling robbed if the opponent had no tokens to discard and using that to dodge the damage...

... but on further consideration - they've got no tokens! - if you've got another shot on them, they're in no-mod pain already.

( plus, one less source of guaranteed auto-damage suits me )

My only complaint is Torani, Wes, Carnor, and maybe others need to affect reinforce tokens. Reinforce is more than good enough already. Making it immune to all this stuff is just silly.

Just now, gamblertuba said:

My only complaint is Torani, Wes, Carnor, and maybe others need to affect reinforce tokens. Reinforce is more than good enough already. Making it immune to all this stuff is just silly.

One thousand times this. The wording does need to be done carefully, however. We don't want Wes able to remove any token. If he could do that, he might decide to remove a shield token. Also, Electronic Baffles should be updated to work on Jam tokens.

14 minutes ago, Incard said:

One thousand times this. The wording does need to be done carefully, however. We don't want Wes able to remove any token. If he could do that, he might decide to remove a shield token. Also, Electronic Baffles should be updated to work on Jam tokens.

Good luck getting buffs to old abilities like this

If anything wants buffing it's most of waves 1-4. I want Daredevil to actually be worth running.

On 3.11.2017 at 6:59 PM, Incard said:

I suppose they wanted it to be read like this:

"After you perform an attack, each enemy ship inside your bullseye firing arc at Range 1-3 suffers one damage. If a ship has focus or evade tokens assigned to it, it may instead choose do discard all focus and evade tokens."

So yeah, I'm pretty sure they tried to make it option 1. But they didn't, and RAW, you can of course remove zero tokens.

FFG at least has a history of acknowledging errors such as these and allowing players to use rules as written until they FAQ it. They are good sports in that regard, they just need better proof reading at times.

@DampfGecko The only thing we have to go on regarding the intention of the designers here is the text on the card. I'm not sure I'd be comfortable saying they had some intention other than what's actually on there.

@Incard Fair point. Sure, there are precedents for this, but you're correct, of course. I'm a bit more comfortable here actually than I was for other cards, since there is almost no reason to ever take the damage over doing nothing, and the text makes it sound like discarding tokens "prevents" taking damage.

With the text as it is, the few times you'll take the damage it's going to be the exact opposite, you preventing to lose tokens.

it is literal

You choose to take 1 damage, or you choose to remove all tokens.

I chose the latter. The fact it has no clause about actually having tokens to remove is irrelevant.

FFG across their games allow selecting 0 to be a thing, this game does it too with targetlocks letting you reroll nothing.

However given how difficult it is to get this ability to go off to begin with i suspect they'll faq it to say you have to have tokens. because ffg likes to rule things one way for this thing and another way for that thing.

On 11/3/2017 at 2:46 PM, gamblertuba said:

The language is actually pretty clear. Because it specifies "all" of your tokens, I see no reason within the rules and precedents as they currently stand that zero tokens would not qualify as all your tokens.

This.

On 11/3/2017 at 3:37 PM, dotswarlock said:

Language wise, you just need to make a choice. I see nothing stopping you from choosing the option of discarding all focus and evade tokens even if you have none.

Logic.

On 11/3/2017 at 1:59 PM, Incard said:

It doesn't need an FAQ, zero is a numeral expressing somethings value, albeit a value of none. Therefore, the card is written correctly. Where Torani's ability shines is when he gets a lower pilot skill ship with tokens in his bullseye and he forces a hard choice post attack, it's a real bonus and neat ability on a fairly cheap chassis.

I really don't see the issue at all.

The purpose of this ability isn't to do damage. Its to strip tokens, or let your opponent take damage to keep them. It doing nothing vs a token-less ship seems like a perfectly valid option.

The thing is though, how often will he actually have a bullseye arc at PS10 on someone that DOESNT have tokens?

Unless they bumped someone and didnt have banked tokens from something else, theyre gonna have tokens most of the time.

4 hours ago, DampfGecko said:

since there is almost no reason to ever take the damage over doing nothing, and the text makes it sound like discarding tokens "prevents" taking damage.

Maybe Quickdraw would like that one shield damage to keep his tokens, and to return fire if he hasnt already. just a thought haha

But then Torani would have to VI up to 10, and Quickdraw stay at 9 yada yada yada