post for 16 July 2002

Isawa Izumi related question

If a personality card says it "will only attach Fire Spells", is that purely a limitation of the traits of Spells it will attach, or does that mean it can't attach anything other than Fire Spells, ie, no Items, Ancestors, Followers, etc?

Purely a limitation of the traits of Spells it will attach.

Rules and Comments for 15 July 2002

Important point: [Rise From the Ashes] also stopped honor gains, too. By buying turns against both dominant victory conditions, it made alternate victory conditions (or alternate strategies for achieving military or honor wins) more viable. Something many players had advocated, I might add.

Ayuh, no arguments there. For whatever reason, though, it was never played much as meta against honor decks. (That I experienced, anyway.) In any case, the point I was making was that it was fine by itself. It became "broken" in combination with later cards. That one card became such a point of contention in the community that we were having magic bullets thrown at it (Imperial Edicts, for instance), redefining the rules of what's political and what's not,

The definition of "Political" did not change. What happened is that someone noticed the very tricky fact that Rise From the Ashes met the definition.

and even redefining game terms in ways that nullified the recycling of Rise at the cost of neutering a whole class of cards. Anyone use Tao of Shinsei after "discard from play" became "remove from the game"?

That definition change was in large part due to the number of cards in the production pipeline that were written under the belief that those two terms were equivalent. It was not a one- card-balancing sledgehammer.

Koku

For how long can we order Spirit Wars for koku?

As long as that list is on our website. At any given time, the only cards that we officially have available for koku are the ones on our website and in the latest edition of the Imperial Herald.