If a player wins the influence bid for The Sacred Portals: "He may take any of his unactivated units from any areas and place them in the chosen area." What if you attacked the previous turn, but lost so all your units retreated and thus are NOT in an area with an activated token. Does this mean if you win the bid you are able to move them around? The new "turn" for the player has not happened yet since the season card is still resolving.

In other words, if your units are not in an area with an activation token regardless of the circumstances that brought them to their current locationthey are considered unactivated?

That's a very good question, actually. Part of me wants to say "routed units can't be moved" - which is the general rule - but the other part of me is thinking this card might just get around that limitation. I'm not sure.

Since the card does not explicitly allow you to move routed units, I would say the standard rule applies. I know there are exceptions to this general rule (such as the Grey diplomacy result for Neutrals allows neutrals to retreat, and Tactical Retreat allows your routed units to retreat), but I think unless an official clarification were to come along that says otherwise, I think the regular rule would be in force.

I am sorry to contradict!

My opinion:

As routed units are not excluded explicitly, you can move them.

Anyway, the move with Sacred Portals is not a regular move, hence the normal rules should not be applied.

Luxis said:

Fair enough So what you are saying is that the rule about routed units not being allowed to move doesn't really mean that

In any case, I've sent the question to Corey. We'll see what the official response is

Luxis said:

The more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to agree with Sigma. There is a general rule that says routed units cannot move. Unless a more specific rule (such as a card) specifically breaks that rule then it should still apply. This makes more sense to me than asking the card to explicitly re-state rules that are already in the book and assuming I can break those rules if it doesn't.

It should be noted, though, that neither the Tactical Retreat card nor the rules for Neutrals specifically allow the exception in those cases; it's only because of Corey's previous rulings on intent that it is such. (Both those topics are in my list of rulings)

So it IS possible that this was meant as an exception as well. However, in the absence of a ruling of such, I will continue to be of the opinion that since it doesn't exempt the regular rules, the regular rules apply.

I got an answer from Corey:

"Routed units may not move with the Sacred Portals."

Does the ability of The Sacred Portals Summer Season card allow units to be moved if they are in an area that has not been activated by the owner of the units but activated by another player ?

Activation tokens only affect units belonging to the faction whose tokens they are. They never have any effect on any other faction. So a Daqan activation token would never have any effect on a Waiqar unit.

So the answer to your question is "yes" - as long as the area the units are in don't have an activation token for their own faction, they are "unactivated".

Thanks for these precisions Sigmazero13.