Icathian Rain

The Origins FAQ impacted these two Origins cards in ways that ultimately went beyond our original intentions for them, and we haven’t been happy with the result. We’ll turn over the mic to Riftbound Game Director Dave Guskin to talk about two prominent Origins cards that are receiving errata:

Hey all, Dave here! As we developed more and more designs that needed to perform effects after an initial effect resolved, we added in a new type of trigger called a reflexive trigger. These triggers are the way that a spell or ability can use information from a first effect, and still allow other players to respond now knowing that information before the second effect resolves.

We used a straightforward template (or formal wording) to identify reflexive triggers, the "then do this:" template. And because Icathian Rain and Falling Star were already using a similar template, I ended up pushing forward with changing those cards to reflexive triggers even though they didn't have a first effect -> information -> second effect kind of flow.

This was a mistake, and we shouldn't have done this—it has a lot of weird unintuitive consequences for gameplay that make these two cards play different than one might expect, and also worse.

For those reasons, we're changing these two cards to work the way other spells work and the way we think players want them to work—that is, you pick all the targets up front, the other player can react before any of it resolves, and then each of the units affected take the damage on resolution. You can still choose the same unit or different units for each choice.

In addition to these card changes, we have a small rules change to make. We’ve realized that our design team and rules team weren’t in agreement about how Deflect was supposed to work. In the rules, a target’s Deflect cost was paid once for each spell or ability. In the design team’s playtesting, it was paid once for each time that target was chosen. That misalignment didn’t actually matter—Icathian Rain and Falling Star had reflexive triggers, so they worked as intended, and there were no other cards (that we could find) that can choose the same unit multiple times. Now that difference does matter, both because of the above errata and the existence of the Repeat ability, and we want the cards to play as the design team intended. To that end, we’re taking the unusual step of issuing errata for the rules themselves:

Rule 735.1.c (revised text)

It is functionally short for "Spells and abilities an opponent controls that choose me cost an amount of Power equal to [Deflect Value] more to play as an additional cost for each time they choose me."

Erratas & Clarifications