A thought: EMP and "Droid"

By Vineheart01, in Star Wars: Destiny

1 hour ago, Buhallin said:

This has been covered ad nauseum, not going to go around on it again.

Okay, but I’ll chalk up the belief that “ Discard a droid or vehicle from play.” doesn’t explicitly mean you can discard a droid from play as a sign that FFG needs to rule prior to Battle Droid becoming tournament legal. Because as far as I can tell, there’s no RAW reason that EMP Grenades can’t target this one specific Droid.

1 hour ago, GooeyChewie said:

Okay, but I’ll chalk up the belief that “ Discard a droid or vehicle from play.” doesn’t explicitly mean you can discard a droid from play as a sign that FFG needs to rule prior to Battle Droid becoming tournament legal. Because as far as I can tell, there’s no RAW reason that EMP Grenades can’t target this one specific Droid.

Can you Cunning an opponent's Holocron? It says to swap a card from your hand. The general rule says you can't have an opponent's card in your hand, and the Holocron doesn't override it. So you can't. There are any number of examples here - resolving dice doesn't let you resolve modifiers alone unless it explicitly tells you to, rerolling a die not in your pool (like from Poe) doesn't work because the general rule still limits what you can reroll.

Again, same thing here - unless an ability specifically overrides a general rule, it still functions within the framework of that general rule. Just telling you to do something doesn't automatically mean you can break whatever rule happens to be in the way.

On 1/5/2018 at 5:22 PM, Buhallin said:

Can you Cunning an opponent's Holocron? It says to swap a card from your hand. The general rule says you can't have an opponent's card in your hand, and the Holocron doesn't override it. So you can't. There are any number of examples here - resolving dice doesn't let you resolve modifiers alone unless it explicitly tells you to, rerolling a die not in your pool (like from Poe) doesn't work because the general rule still limits what you can reroll.

Again, same thing here - unless an ability specifically overrides a general rule, it still functions within the framework of that general rule. Just telling you to do something doesn't automatically mean you can break whatever rule happens to be in the way.

I'm not sure that logic follows here. With Cunning, you actually CAN use it on your opponent's Holocron..it just won't do anything other than resolve you Cunning dice back to the card. But you are correct in that the interaction doesn't override the rule that you cannot have an opponent's card in your hand. Of course, I'm not sure that's actually a rule, because I can't find in in the RRG outside of the FAQ entry, so it's more of a ruling, and one that was not clear until the RRG FAQ was updated.

According to the rules as of 1.6, characters stay in play until defeated. There's no "can't" rule against getting the discarded. So we don't have "can't beats can" to fall back on, and there's no specific rule that otherwise positively addresses the situation. Under RRG 1.6, EMP grenade will allow you to discard a character droid, where it is neither in play nor defeated. It remains for the most part unplayable, but so long as it's out of play, the only way for the owning player to lose is through mill.

Of course, there's more than enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that characters cannot be placed in the discard. Most telling I think is the OP requirement that characters and battlefields be sleeved differently from your deck. But that doesn't relieve FFG from the responsibility of clearing up the issue with an additional rule or ruling.

22 minutes ago, kingbobb said:

So we don't have "can't beats can" to fall back on, and there's no specific rule that otherwise positively addresses the situation.

"Can't beats can" rules are not the only ones which fall under this. They're an exception in that they will always win out over card abilities, but that doesn't mean the sort of implicit rules steamroller exists everywhere else.

1 minute ago, Buhallin said:

"Can't beats can" rules are not the only ones which fall under this. They're an exception in that they will always win out over card abilities, but that doesn't mean the sort of implicit rules steamroller exists everywhere else.

If there are other rules in play here, I can't find them. I'm left with the Golden Rule that says card beats rules when in conflict, and then a gaping void of situations that are unresolvable.

18 hours ago, kingbobb said:

I'm left with the Golden Rule that says card beats rules when in conflict

That's not actually what the Golden Rule says. What it says is:

If the text of a card directly contradicts the rules of the game,

That "directly" is important.

Edited by FFGSysops

This is still a thing??

IG and K2 are droids but are not labeled as so so you cannot remove them, Battle Droids though...

On 1/8/2018 at 4:05 PM, Buhallin said:

That's not actually what the Golden Rule says. What it says is:

If the text of a card directly contradicts the rules of the game,

That "directly" is important.

In what way is the Golden Rule not implicated? You have the rules that say characters stay in play until they are defeated, and a card that says to discard a droid. The card contradicts the rules, or at least begs the question "is a character defeated if it gets discarded by a card effect?"

This is why I call it a rules void. There's no clear answer within the rules. Just like with Holocron and Cunning, there was no clear answer within the rules for that interaction until the FAQ was updated. Prior to that FAQ update, you couldn't tell from the rules what the result would be. Would the Holocron end up in the Cunning player's hand? It's owner's? Could the Cunning player play an upgrade from their hand? Or maybe the Holocron owner's hand? There was no clear answer based on the rules....a rules void. The FAQ clears up that issue without question. We need that same kind of clarity here.

I like to speculate a much as anyone but at this point all that can be done is to submit the question to FFG and hope for a response. No one here can accurately say what FFG intends on anything they do.

Okay, so to summarize:

Cunning can target an opponent's Sith Holocron, but it return to the opponent's hand and you can only use it on Blue Ability Upgrades from your hand. Otherwise it just returns to their hand. Can't imagine there will be another thread arguing over the definition of the Golden Rule, what qualifies as logic, and the value of speculation.

9 minutes ago, HaphazardNinja said:

Okay, so to summarize:

Cunning can target an opponent's Sith Holocron, but it return to the opponent's hand and you can only use it on Blue Ability Upgrades from your hand. Otherwise it just returns to their hand. Can't imagine there will be another thread arguing over the definition of the Golden Rule, what qualifies as logic, and the value of speculation.

No, using Cunning on an opponent's Holocron does nothing. p30 of RRG 1.6. Since you can't have the Holocron in your hand, you can't complete the first part of the ability, which is to switch. If it had been worded differently, it might work, but what happens if you use Cunning in this case is your Cunning dice returns to it's card, and nothing else.

1 hour ago, kingbobb said:

No, using Cunning on an opponent's Holocron does nothing. p30 of RRG 1.6. Since you can't have the Holocron in your hand, you can't complete the first part of the ability, which is to switch. If it had been worded differently, it might work, but what happens if you use Cunning in this case is your Cunning dice returns to it's card, and nothing else.

Correct. However, that ruling wasn't always there. December 2016 was a wild frontier of threads like this. We also wondered if there would be another rules question as decisive as that one. Seems like this was the droid we were looking for.

FFG has change the rules numerous times. At one point using disarm on your opponent's upgrade meant if they had two of the same upgrade, the owner got to choose which dice was removed, now it is the player using the effect gets to choose. Flip flopping is a thing for them. Ask the question, get the ruling, play under that ruling until they change it and pray they don't further alter the deal.