Unseemly Alliance

L5R CCG Rules board, 30 November 2013

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, 30 November 2013

I play Unseemly Alliance. My opponent attacks with 3 Lion Clan personalities at the same place. Are they -3F each, or -1F each?

Argument: Unseemly Alliance specifies each clan alignment, not each different clan alignment. Lion Clan is a clan alignment, there are 3 people with a clan alignment at the battlefield. That would mean each of them has -3F.

Counterpoint: It means each DIFFERENT clan alignment.

Argument: Already Ivory legal precedence in Chaos of Battle that specifies "different Clan alignments" and not just "clan alignments".

Argument: A card that would (hypothetically) say "Send home each dishonoured personality" (whatever similar wording) would refer to every instance of dishonoured personality. "Each clan alignment" would therefore refer to every instance of a clan alignment.

I can only assume that Unseemly Alliance, while quite probably overlooked as missing the word "different" and not intent, has to give -1F for each Personality there with a clan alignment, regardless of similar or different alignments. Is there any proper rules reason why this isn't the case?

Unseemly Alliance Political Open: Bow your target unbowed Courtier. All Personalities have -1F for each Clan Alignment in their army (this turn).

Chaos of Battle Battle: Give one or two target opposed Personalities a Force bonus equal to the number of different Clan alignments on Personalities at the current battlefield.

A player, 30 November 2013

One Lion Clan Personality has one Clan Alignment. Three Lion Clan Personalities have one Clan Alignment, even if thrice. It may be present multiple times, but it's always one Clan Alignment.

"Different" isn't explicitly written there because adding it would be needlessly wordy, and we're in a process of trimming down wordings there where the intent is clear. Nobody reading Unseemly Alliance would think it's meant to give a penalty for each and every aligned Personality unless they want actively to find a loophole for card abuse. I understand players may have grown accustomed to having extra-explicit wordings, but we're fixing that in IvE.