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Am I right in thinking that providing I have the leaf resource, I can add the war paint into a weapon bumping the durability up, remove it with her ability (stealth card goes to discard pile), then immediately re-collect it (an aggressiveness card), then repeat?

Seems really strong. I guess you need the resource, but free durability on weapons is amazing.

Not sure if you can do it with the tempo. Do you discard then choose an aggressiveness card in the discard pile or do you choose an aggressiveness
car in the discard pile and discard a stealth card to collect it ?

Could be a combo but not so broken as it can only fix some kind of item and not all, only on some spots.

Maybe the actions are simultaneous, which would make it weaker.

In any case I just got another dual keyword item with the same 2 attributes, so now it's definitely allowed! I can discard one, draw the other, build it, discard from item to draw the other one. Then repeat.

same resource to build the second one ?

Don't need to build the second one, can just discard the war paint to draw it, then discard the to draw the war paint back. Then build and the loop is ready. Does require the other card to be in outside of the action deck though.

Pretty sure you just do things in the order it says to do them. This game doesn't have any concept of requiring a target to use an ability or anything. There's no intermediate "being-discarded" zone the card you discard sits in for the rest of the ability where it can't see itself. As I see it, you can loop it forever with just one card. It's weird but I think it works.

This ability is actually insane. I'm now running with 3 stacks all with an aggressive keyword on top, and just bouncing the war paint around them every time I run into a leaf. It's so overpowered haha! Refreshing the walking stick stack has never been easier!

My take: the ability allows you to discard a stealth card in order to retrieve an aggressiveness card from the discard pile. You need to know what card you are retrieving to use the ability, therefore the card you retrieve has to be in the discard pile before you use the ability.

In other words:
You need to have a targeted stealth card in hand or inventory and a targeted aggressiveness in discard pile to use the ability.

That's a reasonable take, but:

There's no rules support for the notion of things requiring targets in this game. When an effect tells you to do something you can't do, you just do as much of the effect as you can.

For example, if an effect tells you to return your Tired state and return a card with the Vigilance keyword from the discard from your hand:

-You still get the Vigilance card back even if you aren't Tired.
-You can still drop your Tired even if there are no Vigilance cards in the discard.
-You can take the action, or draw the card, or otherwise activate the effect even if you can't do either part of it. You just do nothing.

So I'm pretty much sure you don't have to have an aggressiveness card to target at all. You can use the ability just to discard stealth cards, to free up space in a stack or whatever. You don't need a target to use the ability.

That wouldn't automatically mean that the card you discarded is a valid card to get back, but I think the wording on Anjika's ability is clear. First you discard the card, then you choose something to get back. You pay the cost, then you choose the target. And the card you discarded will be in the discard pile when you choose the target.

Slightly weird? Perhaps. Certainly not the most gamebreaking thing you can do in this game. (Not even close.) But, I think, unambiguous under the rules.

My point is the ability is one sentence. You have to finish the actions in one step.
If there is no aggressiveness card to retrieve, you can't discard the stealth card.
The results you were talking about are listed as 2 steps, not 1.

Here is a rewriting of her ability. This sentence has the same meaning, but the actions are listed in the opposite order:
You may take a card with the keyword aggressiveness from the discard pile to your hand by discarding a card with the stealth keyword from your hand or inventory.

Would you say that you could use that reworded ability to pick up War Paint from the discard and pay for it by discarding War Paint from your hand?
Could you take an aggressiveness card even if you have no stealth card (doing as much as possible)?

I should preface this by saying that you should absolutely play 7C however you like. The best answer I've ever seen for how to make rulings (on any 7c rules question) was to simply choose whichever ruling made the situation cooler in the moment, like you would in D&D. If you're not into this tech, don't use it, don't allow it at your table. Playing by The Rules isn't really the best way per se. But that's not really who I am. I'm a rules lawyer, I like to talk about The Rules, and I'm gonna do it some more.


Things don't always break down neatly into "2 steps" and "1 step" like that. The rule about doing as much of an ability as you can isn't that formal, it isn't, like, if a sentence tells you to do something impossible, ignore exactly that one sentence. It's more of a guiding principle/golden rule type thing, and it requires some interpretation. My interpretation is that it definitely applies to cost:effect clauses, at least insofar as you can pay costs without being able to use the benefit. Trying to rule the other way turns into a real muddy mess real fast, because "being able to use the benefit" is quite ill-defined.

-Lovecraft: Does he need to draw at least one curse to use his ability? Can he only use it if it turns a success into a failure or otherwise affects the results? It doesn't require a target, in your terminology -- can you use it and say "look at all 0 stars I got from these 0 curses" just to free up space in your serenity stack?
-Frankenstein: Does he need to have one of his face cards to get back to use his ability? If he can't and lovecraft can, why? Is it because his ability "targets" a specific card? Because that's a Magic thing, this game doesn't have that rule. It also doesn't have a stack. You wish it did, but here we are.
-Mary: If Lovecraft can't use his ability for no reason, why can Mary? Obviously, she needs to be able to use her ability without knowing whether it will work to use it at all. But there are plenty of circumstances where it can be known that it will not be able able to help you. Can Mary use her ability if the deck doesn't have any 7's left?
-Perhaps most absurdly, many effects in this game have you take cards you've never seen before by number. You have no way of knowing, when you use the ability, whether you'll be able to use the effect. Arguably just by taking the card you've used the effect of your action, of course, but the point is, things like missing targets don't fizzle whole actions or make them illegal to take. Things like missing targets fail in situ and recover as immediately as possible.

(If you would like to think of things in steps, Pay the cost, Get the effect is much more obviously and formally 2 steps than most -- you pay the cost, then you get the effect. Most of the time what would count as 2 steps vs 1 step comes down to an interpretation of commas and periods, this one has clear rules-important gameplay steps. In my opinion, that's about as explicit as anything gets without formally referring to the steps of an action.)



I'm only like 90% sure that rewrite actually is the same in meaning. By listing the cost after the action, the timing on it becomes confusing, because the cost still has to be paid before you can get back the card. There's a reason costs are always listed first, and this wording (somewhat misleadingly?) suggests that it requires an aggressiveness card to bring back to initiate the action. (I'm pretty sure even with this wording it does not, but it's far more ambiguous here than with the original.) I think my stance is that this reworded ability would still work in the same way I describe Anjika's ability working, but if it said that it would certainly be much less clear.

So, by this interpretation, no, you could not pick up an aggro card and then discard it to pay for it's own cost. The cost still happens first, even if it's printed second -- the new wording of the card doesn't actually change the order those things happen. You can still pay the cost without a target, you can still find targets that weren't in the discard before you paid the cost. I'd be much less confident in this position if your wording were the actual wording, but it would still be my position. (It is fortunate that SP did a pretty good job of not messing around with more complicated timings like this. There are certainly exceptions to "everything just happens in the order it's printed on the card" but they did a good job of keeping it simple.)

Both the original wording and your rewording have something making it very clear that the cost must be paid in order to get back the thing. "To" in the original, "By" in the rewrite. So you're not getting the aggressiveness card for nothing if you have no stealth cards to discard. Without those words you could. (If it said "Discard a card with the keyword stealth from you inventory and return a card with the keyword aggressiveness from the discard to you hand." for example.)



There seems to be a natural impulse upon discovering tricks like this to think they're cheats and want to fix them. That's a fine impulse, you should play with as much or as little scumminess as makes you happy. You don't need a rules reason to do it, and you shouldn't look for one, because you usually won't find one. The rules aren't that tight. There's a lot of infinite combos and stuff. This tech is very good but it's honestly nothing compared to what's out there, once you start looking for tricks they're rampant. All the really busted stuff works under the rules, often much less ambiguously than this. As you discover them, you will have to police yourself a bit, decide how much to use, which tricks make the game more fun, which ones make it boring, maybe make some house rules. That has to be the attitude though -- the rules are pretty loose and a lot of stuff like this definitely works under the rules, but you don't have to allow it if you don't want to. Trying to find rules against them will not usually work out great, but you don't need a rule against them to take them out of your game. Just saying "that doesn't make sense so you can't do it" should probably be good enough, assuming your group's all on the same page.

Fingers crossed for an official ruling on this!

Firebird? Any chance?

Hello,

Anjika’s ability was not meant to allow players to take from the discard pile the card that was just discarded.

That being said, since there is no simple way to express that in a sentence without raising new questions or interpretations, we are considering deleting the “or your inventory” part of the sentence to change it into:

You may discard 1 card with the keyword stealth from your hand to choose 1 card with the keyword aggressiveness in the Discard Pile and add it to your hand.

Bruno

That sounds way less powerful, I approve!

This is a situation where the construction:

Choose 1 card with the keyword aggressiveness in the Discard Pile. If you discard a card with the keyword stealth from your hand, you may add the chosen card to your hand.

...seems like it gets the intention across?

That was pretty much the phrasing I came up with on bgg :)

eg. Choose a card from the discard pile, then discard a card from an item to place it into your hand.

I'd advise against this change.

1. It guts a bunch of other, fair uses of Anjika's ability. Being able to discard cards from your inventory is as significant a source of power in character abilities as what the ability actually does. Having a keyword you can keep alive indefinitely is huge, and characters that don't have that (Fogg & Passepartout, most notably) it's a noticeable loss.

2. The new ability discourages Anjika from ever building stealth cards. Stealth has a bit of a problem in this game. It's commonly perceived to be the weakest keyword, most people rarely if ever build stealth stacks. The original version of her ability encourages you to build stealth cards into your inventory for durability and keep them around for a little bit saving them for her ability. The result of this is that you actually have and use some stealth cards. The new ability makes her discard them from hand, which instead of giving her a reason to use Stealth cards, doubles down on Stealth's identity as something you shouldn't use by giving you a good alternative thing to do with them.

3. Compared to other infinite combos (Terracokus/Scholar, Dark Side, save abuses, arguably even regular old infinite rests) this is pretty weak and narrow. It's simple and requires relatively little setup, which is in it's favor, but it's infinite durability on Anjika's own stacks, which have to have aggressiveness or stealth toppers and empty space. Other combos can get you infinite durability on every stack in the whole party, regardless of keyword, while also getting infinite XP, all advanced skills, all notes, and cards back from the discard. This is low on the totem pole as far as really gamebreaking things you can do in this game.

4. You can't patch all those things without significant effort and collateral damage, but patching this while not patching Dark Side and everything else sets a bad precedent. It is easy, right now, to say "Infinites exist. Lots of busted stuff exists, it's up to you to police yourself." If you patch some of them, it strongly implies that anything that isn't patched is an intentional and desirable part of the game. Confirming that this trick is not an intended part of the ability is good enough.

5. It contributes to the fun of the game that there are combos to discover, broadly speaking. As players explore they are looking for cards and strategies to make themselves more powerful, it is best that there are some good ones to discover -- even if, in the end, they have to decide not to use some of them.

6. This change makes Anjika even more of a one trick pony. She's decently flexible right now, in spite of being on relatively few icons -- she's encouraged to build both Stealth and Aggressiveness, she's got her bottomless stack on an an easy-to-hybridize keyword (stealth) or if you take advantage of this infinite combo both stealth and aggressiveness, she makes really good use of Protective cover, she has an infinite supply of Bolas and some mediocre hunt stuff. I feel like the proposed change just makes her a Bolas-bot.



The only good reason I can think of to patch this combo when so many others exist is that it's low hanging fruit. Dark Side combo's full of elaborate loops, it relies on some technical rules knowledge and an infinite rest spot and a bunch of things. Terracokus combo makes you find a specific botany card. They require a good bit of discovery. This one just needs a literal mind and a resource.



If we're talking rewordings to fix this: HikariSunshine's works, I think, but I have a better one:

"You may discard 1 card with the keyword stealth from your hand or inventory to choose a different card with the keyword aggressiveness in the Discard Pile and add it to your hand."

This is just her existing ability with "1" changed to "a different".

To expand on one of Brisingre's points, one-trick pony is an accurate description. Anjika's identity as a hunt-specialist is already redundant to the wide variety of hunt/fight support available to other characters as a matter of necessity -- and in terms of utility, Anjika's options for stealth-for-aggressiveness swaps are unusually limited.

Stealth cards in the skill deck eligible for this discard are the following:

• Camouflage outfit (hunt, sneak)
  
• War paint (fight, hunt, sneak)
  
• Fire-making kit (firestarter, no bonus)
  
• Forewarned is forearmed (ALL)
  
• On the hunt (no bonus)
  
• Knowledge is power (EXP, no bonus)

These can be exchanged for:

• Club (fight, lockpick)
  
• Rudimentary flint (firestarter, no bonus)
  
• Deadfall trap (hunt, rest)
  
• Bolas (fight, hunt)
  
• Net (fight, hunt)
  
• Knowledge is power (EXP, no bonus)

Three things I mean to point out here:
Under the proposed change the choice to reserve a stealth card in hand gives Anjika access to bonuses toward (at most) two extra Action types, rest and lockpick. These are both more common than sneak checks on the stealth items from this list. Many sneak checks are surprise/mandatory and do not give an opportunity to craft in preparation, so this would indeed further depress the value of actually crafting/using stealth items.

It is only situationally useful to recur the cards which give no stars/discounts, and the fact that both lists contain a fire-starter and a knowledge is power weakens the value of those swaps.

Finally, I do not believe it would be worthwhile for Anjika to discard Forewarned is forearmed for any of these options.

In general, the exchange from stealth to aggressiveness cards gives very little extra utility. Bolas is the most powerful and frequently used card available, and indeed in my one game with Anjika so far her most potent contribution to the party was her bolas recall. I do not believe an errata need be issued in her case to protect against the War Paint durability loop.

Actually it would be much easier in my opinion to simply state, that in cases where you may discard a card to retrieve a card from the discard, those two cards may not be the same. That would be a general rule and would allow further similar abilities without having to go through all cards to see whether there might be a problematic card or not.

Also, the correction you suggest seems a little like overkill and would make Anjika much weaker instead of just eliminating this one minor issue.

I think it should be against the rules to discard a war paint card and redraw a war paint card.
Obviously this goes against the theme of the game and how its mean to be played.

I don't think it needs to be changed because i believe you discard the card and choose the card at the same time, so the discarded card doesn't become part of the discard pile until you finish the action, and choose your card.

However, because this has been made confusing, the text could be changed.

Best result in my opinion is change the text to say :

You may discard 1 card with the keyword stealth from your inventory or hand to choose 1 different card with the keyword aggressiveness in the Discard Pile and add it to your hand.

Solves the problem. Doesn't ruin her ability.