Card Preview – Lost Papers

Today, thanks to FFG, we have a preview from the upcoming pack Pursuit of Truth. See below for some hot takes.

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Hot Takes

Baz – Rally cards are strong, and a Rally event that costs 0 and has the potential to bow out an opposing character is fantastic! As more important characters typically are brought into play with more fate, there’s a good chance it’ll hit your opponent’s most important character.

As a reaction, it doesn’t even cost you passing fate! I think this is really good and I wouldn’t be shocked if you players pick up two or more copies of this pack so they’ll have enough for extra decks!

Eoin – So the Rally keyword is very deliberately worded to avoid combos. The Rally effect states (After this card is revealed in a province, add the top card of your dynasty deck to the province faceup). Revealed means, when you flip a card from facedown to faceup in a province, you trigger Rally. Not when you place the card faceup in a province.

So if I flip A Season of War, then rally the next card in my deck into the province, if its another A Season of War, it doesn’t trigger Rally again, because the first card was revealed, the second card was only added to the province faceup. This also means the action of a Season of War won’t trigger Rally or another effect like Our Foe Does Not Wait. Staging Grounds works but a ton of other effects don’t. The same constraints apply to Lost Papers.

You basically need to flip this at the start of your dynasty phase to trigger it. So it doesn’t play well with other Rally cards, so it needs to be the best effect for your deck. That’s a big ask. There are decks which mostly don’t tower or plop a lot of fate on one target and don’t want to use any other Rally cards that might get some value from this, it is a free bow. But it’s a free bow at the start of the turn, and you’ll find it challenging to trigger otherwise. 

Might be ok, but its random.

Jon – This is a potentially powerful effect, especially in an environment where decks focusing on a single character with lots of attachments and Fate are common. And has been discussed previously, Rally is a very strong keyword.

However, there is very little control over the timing of the effect- if you reveal it in your opening flip on turn 1 it does nothing, if you reveal it off of another Rally effect you can’t trigger it and if you reveal it during another phase of the game you can’t trigger it. And even if you can trigger it, you may not be able to hit the target you want to bow.

The Rally keyword helps mitigate the negative impact if you don’t get to resolve, whilst making it feel even stronger if you do, but my feeling is that if you want to play this you have to pass on playing other Rally effects or putting significant Fate on your characters, and I think those are too high an opportunity cost for most decks. Some archetypes may still play it, but I don’t believe it’s as powerful a card as it appears on first blush.

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Relevant rules

• As Lost Papers is a Dynasty event, you can only trigger it if it is revealed in a province during the Dynasty phase. If it is revealed by an effect during another phase (such as Sound the Alarm) you cannot use its reaction, though its Rally will still trigger.
  • “Event cards played from a player’s provinces cannot be played outside of the dynasty phase.” Events, Rules Reference Guide v13, pg.8
• Lost Papers will be discarded as normal after being played.
• The Rally effect will trigger on the card being revealed before you can activate the Reaction. This will generally result in the Province being left with one face-up card.
  • “Keywords that resolve based on the occurrence of a triggering condition (such as a character leaving play) resolve immediately after the triggering condition occurs, before triggering any reaction abilities.” Rules Reference Guide v13, pg.11 Keywords
• If Lost Papers is added to a Province by the Rally effect of another card, neither its own Rally ability nor its Reaction will be triggered, because cards added to a Province by Rally are done so faceup, and thus aren’t revealed.
  • “When a province is refilled faceup, or when a card is added to a province faceup, that card is not revealed and the rally keyword on it does not trigger.” Rules Reference Guide v13, pg.15, Rally

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