I've recently begun working on the large set of SotM accessories that I'll be posting to my site once OblivAeon finally gets into people's hands and the wiki has been a fantastic resource for that effort. I didn't get the Giant Box o' Heroes, so it's been great to see the stats, powers, and incap abilities of the various alternate versions of heroes when I don't have the physical cards to work with.
However, because I'm paying such close attention to those things, every now and then I see inconsistencies. The most common one is the use of the word "now" in incap abilities. For example, one Dr. Medico incap ability is "One player may draw a card now". Benchmark uses the "now" too, as do others. But one of Akash'Thriya's Spirit of the Void incap abilities is just "One player may draw a card" (no "now"). Harpy doesn't use the "now" either.
I wasn't going to let it bother me until I saw the Dr. Medico incap ability which is "Destroy 1 target with only 1 hp". That just doesn't sound right. Tiny Sky-Scraper has the same incap ability and on her card it's worded "Destroy a target with 1 hp". So, I need to ask if the wording of the incap abilities on the cards themselves is actually that inconsistent, or if it's just been transcribed inconsistently onto the wiki. Can someone with the physical cards confirm where the inconsistency lies?
From what I can tell the problem is a combo of transcript errors nobody's yet caught and that the wiki has old playtest versions of OblivAeon and foil-only heroes not yet in the digital game.
Lynkfox keeps swearing they'll get update art from GTG at some point, but who knows when. And while I do want to go through and copycheck anything that's in the digital game, I can't do a thing with anything that's currently print-only.
How accurate are wikis, in general? :B This one seems pretty actively updated.
That said, I always thought the 'now' was unnecessary. I mean, so's the 'may', you're not gonna give someone a power use when they can't use it, right? Table talk!
As for “may”, I can see the potential for an odd corner case or two where, based on turn order/the incap options available to you, you might prefer to skip the incap turn this time around. Have an option that you can trigger without effect might be helpful in that scenario.
As to Spiff’s original question, unless someone beats me to it, I’ll sit down with my foil cards and the wiki this weekend and see if I note any discrepancies in the wording.
IIRC, the images are incorrect, but the text versions of the powers on the side of each hero profile are the up-to-date versions. The video game also uses these versions of the powers.
Now was removed during proofing of the foil cards since, as others said, it was redundant and some heroes had it while others didn't.
Looking at the digital version, it's "One hero destroys one of their equipment cards. If they do, they deal 1 target 2 lightning and 2 fire damage." So it's a little typoed in places (I really need to finish that proofreading project), but the overall idea is correct.
That's dismayingly vague then. Making the sentence read "Redirect the next damage dealt by that Target to a target of your choice." would have been much more precise.
That's great intel, dprcooke, but it represents a new problem for the wiki. Some of those discrepancies aren't discrepancies between the wiki and card wording, they're discrepancies between the wording on different versions of the cards themselves. For example, I'm looking at my copy of the original Young Legacy card (go ahead, be jelly) and it says "Select a hero. That hero may use a power now." So both wordings are technically correct. Which one goes on the wiki?
That's why I specify the comparison is to the foil card.
My guess would be that the foil card is "correct" since it's the most up to date. Since the "now" word on most cards (the most frequent wording difference) seems superfluous anyway, my guess is that it was cut. Though perhaps this could be solved be simply checking with Christopher?
And yes, I'm definitely jelly. (Strawberry void jelly, to be specific).
Wasn’t part of the intent of the foil cards to clarify wording discrepancies, especially on the early hero releases? I remember that Tachyon’s base power was a prominent example; they reworded it to clarify some effects on the foil edition.
So I’d take the foil card wordings as the most up to date official rulings.
The Vengeance update of the Fireside chats talks about the foil pack for 1) a couple of major errata changes, and 2) says that when there is any text discrepancy, the foil pack is the correct version to go by.
The video game also has all of the correct text on variants released thus far, so either is a valid resource to compare against.