4 hours ago, MikeGracey said:It is a question that has been answered in multiple places (for example, the new hero smeagol has rules that say he can't be used in the shadows of Mirkwood cycle due to... You guessed it. Uniqueness clashes).
I understand the Smeagol case, and you keep seeming to reference it as
the
rule in this situation, which is: "Players are not allowed to run a unique character that appears in the encounter deck as an objective ally." But, to be technical (as one probably should with any rules question), this is
not
the general rule, as the Smeagol case is a particular exception to that. The general rule that has long existed is that if the Encounter deck reveals a unique card that is already in play as a player card, that player card is discarded.
The rules completely allow (as far as I've always been aware) for a player to run Grimbeorn the Old during the Conflict at the Carrock, even though Grimbeorn the Old also exists as an Objective-Ally in that Quest's encounter deck. There's just a risk that, IF Grimbeorn the Old reveals form the Encounter deck--which isn't terribly likely in 1-Handed and can be avoided entirely through effects that scrye the Encounter deck like Firyal, Lorethor, Scout Ahead, etc.--the player must discard Grimbeorn the hero. This is how it has always worked for these sorts of cases (Smeagol's special rules in
ASITE
exist presumably because he's especially thematically weird to have running around as a primary hero in the Mirkwood cycle since the players are supposed to be trying to find him during the entire Mirkwood cycle, and he already starts in play in 33% of the quests as an Encounter card). So the Smeagol ruling you keep referring as the "answer" to this question is not, in fact, the answer to this question. It's only an answer to the question "Can I run Smeagol in Mirkwood?" It has no bearing on the general form of this question: "What happens if the encounter deck reveals a unique card that is already in play as a player card?" And we already
know
the answer to that question.
We
know
how the rules work with unique objective-ally cards like Grimbeorn: If the character enters play from the Encounter Deck, it discards any other player card copy of the character (hero or ally). So if Objective-Ally Gwaihir character enters play, Gwaihir Hero or Ally would be discarded immediately. But Gwaihir is an odd case, because his
When Revealed
effect has an option that immediately discards him for an effect ... and the big question is if the players choose that option, does Objective-Ally Gwaihir Character enter play? Or does the character not enter play? Subtle timing of things, especially those involving "revealing" cards, is not a clear-cut issue.