Plaza of Purification text: During the marshalling phase, you may pay any amount of the gold cost of Army characters using influence instead.

Val text: Any Phase: Reveal and draw the top card of your deck. Play that card as your next response or action,if able. Otherwise,discard it.

If you were using Val's ability would influence need to be knelt before you use it to pay for any Army characters you draw? I know that's the case with normal cost reducers but influence can't normally be knelt without an effect requiring it.

If it does need to be pre-knelt, say I have an Eastern Fiefdoms. I kneel it before I use Val, should I announce whether I'm using it for the House Targ reduction or the Influence Army reduction?

Thanks.

Alando said:

I am pretty certain that upon entering the initiation window of playing a card, you pay its gold cost while marshaling it.

If you had to pay for its gold cost before marshaling it, then Val would be useless because you'll never know how much it costs to marshal cards that are drawn and revealed. I would treat the kneeling of influence from Plaza of Purification the same way as its really an optional replacement effect on gold spent. The knelt influence from Plaza of Purification is not a lasting effect, it just replaces any amount of gold cost with that amount in influence.

So, you make the decision when you see what card is drawn and revealed.

If it is an Army, I would think that if you do have enough influence + gold to pay for its cost, then I don't think it is an option to not kneel some or all influence in order for you to pay for the marshaling of that Army revealed. I think that if you can pay for it with influence and you don't have the gold, you must use the influence. I could be wrong though!

Ah, I think you're right. I was thinking of the Plaza as making influence locations into cost reducers, but it changes how you can pay for it instead. Thanks.

To make sure everyone is seeing this:

1. Plaza of Purification allows you to pay any or all of the gold cost by kneeling influence. You would need to pay the influence at the same time you would normally need to pay the gold to play the Army card.

2. Kneeling influence to pay a cost is not a separate action in and of itself, kneeling the influence does not become the "next action." Playing the Army is the next action - you're just paying for it with influence instead of gold.

Imagine you get the event card "Confession" with Val. You have to play the event as your next action if you can. To do so, you have to pay the cost of 3 influence (or kneeling a Holy character). You kneel stuff to pay that influence cost as part of playing the event, not as some separate action.

The really interesting thing in this situation is that if you have Plaza of Purification out, you get an Army character with Val, and you can pay its cost through some combination of influence and gold, you HAVE to play it. You cannot say "I don't have enough gold and don't want to kneel the influence, so I'll discard it." If you can pay the cost for it somehow as your very next action, you have to do it. Just like if you get Confession and don't have the influence, you must kneel the Holy character to play the event if you've got one.