Serenity in Air's Action Phase Cost (L5R rules board)

A topic from AEG's L5R CCG Rules forum, copied for Oracle of the Void from a copy of the forum saved in October 2015, so pages it didn't save are missing. Players' names are left out; the rules officials are named. Rulings are as they stood on these dates; later rulings, the rulebooks and the Rules Archive may differ.

A player, 25 October 2012

Hi Rules Team,

I believe this should be a rather straightforward question but I'm still trying to understand how rules & constraints work re: grammer & syntax so I'm having a bit of trouble (you'll see what I mean). Thus, my question:

Serenity in Air reads:

Limited: Put this card into play. Discard all your other Kata in play. Battle/Open: If this card is in play, target your Personality and, if this is the Action Phase, discard a card: Straighten him.

Given what I think is the Card's intent, I take this wording to mean that during battle I can target a personality and straighten him. Alternatively, I have to discard a card to do this same thing if its the Actions Phase.

Now, the problem I'm having is that since the "Actions Phase" reference is a dependent clause you're able to remove it (in English) and the rest of the sentence is still valid. Hence, the core of this card reads:

Battle/Open: If this card is in play, target your Personality and discard a card: Straighten him.

Yes, I know I'm being something of a grammar nazi here (I'm an SAT English teacher) but in all honesty this wording is slightly confusing to me even without my background and I know wording is critical to how some cards work. Costs, constraints, and the like are concepts whose complexities still escape me sometimes, given that I lost one round of a Kotei last year because I misunderstood the wording on a particular card my opponent played. Hence my question:

Are we supposed to always be discarding a card when we use Serenity's effect? Or is my logic correct in trumping grammar and we're only supposed to be discarding a card if its the Action Phase?

Thank you very much in advance!

Alex Jones (rules official), 28 October 2012

Given what I think is the Card's intent, I take this wording to mean that during battle I can target a personality and straighten him. Alternatively, I have to discard a card to do this same thing if its the Actions Phase.

Correct.

Now, the problem I'm having is that since the "Actions Phase" reference is a dependent clause you're able to remove it (in English) and the rest of the sentence is still valid.

Grammatically valid, yes, but in removing this clause you've drastically changed the sentence's meaning. The clause "if this is the Action Phase" is no more removable than "if this card is in play."

See Dependent Clause, emphasis mine: In linguistics, a dependent clause (sometimes called a subordinate clause) is a clause that augments an independent clause with additional information, but which cannot stand alone as a sentence. Dependent clauses modify the independent clause of a sentence or serve as a component of it.