A question about the legality of Experienced Personalities

Hello. I have been playing the L5R CCG, off and on, for about 8 years now. I truly love the game and am very happy with a lot of the things I am seeing in Ivory edition (I am especially happy about the return of the Kabuki Theater, being an honor-running player ). Recently, I have begun convincing a lot of my friends to start playing the game as well and, with these new sets of eyes pouring over the rule books, a few questions have arisen from what I previously remember or have been taught and what the newer players are reading and interpreting from the rule book. Therefore, I come to you knowledgeable folks for clarification!

The one rule that we are having a really hard time finding any concrete evidence one way or the other on is the legality of previous version of Experienced Personalities. I have done a search here, on the wiki, and on the web in general, but nothing has quelled this debate.

When I was first taught the game, I was told that Personalities follow the "previous printing" rule, just like all other cards. This rule, as printed in the Ivory Edition Advanced Rulebook, is as follows:

All cards in the play deck (including the Stronghold and Sensei) must be Ivory Edition legal, having the Ivory Edition symbol in the lower left hand corner of their most recent printing (MRP). Older printings of the cards may be used ... but in all L5R formats, cards are considered to have the stats and text of their MRP. If you use older cards, you're responsible for knowing these differences and communicating them to your opponent.

From my understanding, the way that you determine whether or not a previously printed card is the same as the currently printed card is to check the card title, which the Ivory Rulebook denotes as follows:

Card Title: At the top of every card is its title bar. All L5R cards have a title in this bar, except for created cards.

Subtitles in smaller font inside the title bar, and the comma that separates them from the card title, are not part of the card title (For example, Hiruma Nikaru, The Flesh Eater is titled “Hiruma Nikaru” for play purposes.)

In the example, they state directly that the card title for the Personality, Hiruma Nikaru, is "Hiruma Nikaru". Therefore, by combining those two rules, one could use any card with the title "Hiruma Nikaru" as an Ivory legal card.

Combining this with Experienced Personalities has the added benefit that you could play with a Personality who had a previous Experience version. This also makes sense when we take into account that the only two benefits, really, of playing with Experienced Personalities is that you can a) have more than 3 of that Card Title in your deck as long as you obeyed the other rules of Uniqueness and did not have more than the allotted number per level of Experience (ie you could have 3 non-Experienced version as well as 1 Experience (1) version, meaning 4 total cards with the same title in the deck) and b) that you can use the overlay mechanic to replace a Personality with a lower Experience level with one that had a higher Experience level without needing to pay the Gold cost or meet the Honor Requirement.

What a friend of mine is arguing is that, due to the current rulebook and the way that he reads it, only those Experience versions that have actually been printed in the current edition of the game are legal - all their previous Experience levels are not. To me, this doesn't make sense as, for one, that is not how I was taught and secondly, this would remove both of the benefits of having the Experienced Personality at all. At that point, it might as well be an entirely different card because there will never be a lower Experience level released in the new set for the overlay mechanic and you cannot have multiple cards with the same name (but different Experience levels) if all the other versions are now illegal.

The example I personally have is Shiba Tsukimi. I play a Phoenix deck and have been using Tsukimi since she was released in Lotus. In Ivory, Tsukimi has gotten her Experience 5 version. By my understanding, this would mean that I could put in all of her previous Experience levels into my Ivory deck (following the "previous printing" rules from above). This would mean that I could, legally, have 3 non-Experienced (Lotus), 1 Experienced (Diamond), 1 Experienced 2 (Samurai), 1 Experience 3 (Celestial), 1 Experience 3.5 (Emperor), 1 Experience 4 (Emperor), and 3 Experience 5 (Ivory - 3 because the card specifically states that it is not Unique). I could, then, in effect run a dynasty deck with 11 Shiba Tsukimi-titled cards contained within it. If they came up in order, I could overlay each Experience level on top of the one previous all the way from the first non-Experienced version all the way up to the new Experience 5. This has always been the way that I was taught and understood what Experienced meant.

Per what my friend is reading, this would not be the case. I would only be allowed the 3 Experience 5 versions of Tsukimi that have been released specifically in Ivory. The only versions of her that would have ever been allowed to employ the overlay function would have been her Experience 3.5 and Experience 4, since those are the only two which were released in the same edition. I would not benefit from either of the Experience benefits as outlined above.

Obviously, I hope that you will tell me that my understanding of the rules is correct - I will be pretty sad if I have to only use one version of my favorite Personality that has ever been printed! - but in the end we are looking towards having a tournament at our local store and we really just need to know the answer to this question. If you say that I am wrong and he is right, I will eat my humble pie and tell him so and we will play with those rules from hear on. I really hope that you don't, though.

So, my original question was answered in a secondary thread here, and I wanted to say thank you to Palmer for addressing this issue. However, I find that the brevity of the answer leaves me with some more questions, so I hope that it is alright that I made another thread to ask for further clarification.

In regards to Card Titles and Previous Printings - is the Card Title how one determines if a previously printed card is legal? Or is there another way? As far as I can tell, most cards which are reprinted use the same Card Title and so I had assumed (queue Samuel L. Jackson here, I know ) that this was the method of checking a previously printed card's legality. Or is it merely that the word "Experience (x)" not only changes the Uniqueness for deck construction, but also for the Previous Printing rule? I just want to make sure that I completely understand all the logistical permutations of the rules so that, should another issue arise, I will have a full understanding in how to address it.

My second question applies to the Experienced Personalities themselves. In my original post, I had mentioned that I was under the impression that there were basically two benefits to having an Experienced Personality - the ability to contain more than 3 cards of a given Card Title in your deck and the ability to use the Overlay function. With the ruling from the above linked post, any Experienced Personality which does not have a lower Experienced version in their current set would be unable to utilize either of those two advantages. I am left wondering, then, what the purpose of printing the Experienced version is? As in my original post, my example is Shiba Tsukimi. With the current ruling, now, Shiba Tsukimi Experience 5 (which is the one that is Ivory legal), is unable to have any other Experienced levels of herself in her deck (as all the other ones are not Ivory legal) and therefore we are not able to utilize the benefit of either the alteration to the Uniqueness rule that the Experienced rules apply nor the benefit of being able to Overlay, as you must have a lower Experience level to utilize that ability. Is there another feature of Experienced Personalities that I have overlooked? Or are they merely being reprinted for flavor and storyline and were never intended to be able to utilize the Experienced Personality rules?

I thank you all again for your attention to this matter and I really appreciate your help in understanding these things. Again, I mostly want to help get my own head around the rules so that, if something were to come up in the future, I would be better able to address it as I would fully understand the logic behind how the rules interplay with the various cards.

Edit: My original thread was also answered by Daidoji Ryushi. Thank you as well for your consideration of my questions! From your response, I do have a question.

You stated:

Experience levels have nothing to do with a card's legality in any particular format.

The only things that determine a card's legality are the Legality markings (commonly called "bugs") found in the lower right and left hand corners of a card's text box, and if a card has been banned from the format in question. Banned cards can be searched for using the Banned filter under the advanced search function of the Oracle of the Void card database.

For the current format (Ivory Edition) all cards with the purple Ivory bug in the lower left hand corner of the card are legal, with the exception of Well-Defended Farm and Exotic Farmlands, which have been hit with a recent ban.

I hope this helps explain format legality.

My question about this is that it doesn't seem to address the Previous Printing or Soul Of... rules that are listed in the rulebook. If the only cards which are legal have the Ivory Bug on them, then does this mean that cards which contain Soul Of... are no longer legal in this edition? For example, [url=http://imperialassembly.com/oracle#cardid=11206,#hashid=4376cb93bc7f3c1612bbf39a262c6400,#cardcount=0]Shiba Eraki[/url] has Soul Of Shiba Yoma. Now, it was my understanding that I could use my Shiba Yoma cards, even though they do not have the Ivory Bug, in place of Shiba Eraki as long as I adhered to the MRP rule. I also understood that this was true of Previously Printed cards, such as the Kabuki Theater Troupe. I have some rather old versions of the Kabuki Theater Troupe which do not have the Ivory Bug, but their MRP does. Does this mean that I cannot use my older cards and need to replace them with Ivory cards?

Again, I want to thank you for taking the time and consideration to answer my questions. I know that all of the people that work in this thread so that we can better understand the rules are taking time out of their own busy schedules to help us understand and enjoy the game better and I want you to know that it is appreciated.