Rank: Advanced Bloo Milk Member
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Joined: 7/9/2008
Posts: 4,729
Location: Chicago
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A recent squad got the gears turning in my brain.
Chain of Command (Characters in your squad are not subject to commander effects of allies with a lower cost)
and a "negative" CE such as:
Brainiac (Droid and Savage characters are subject to these effects: All characters do not gain any bonuses to Attack or Damage when making attacks outside of their own turn. All characters lose Twin Attack when making attacks from farther than 6 squares away.)
Does that mean characters that cost more than Brainiac in the squad with Chain of Command could be shooting twin farther than 6 squares away and gaining bonuses outside their turn?
As written, it seems yes.
But there is a quirky precedent that might gum up the works.
It was ruled that Droid Coordinator (Non-Unique Droid allies gain Speed 8) on K-3PO does NOT make GONK Droids (speed 2) go speed 8. The reasoning is that Speed 2 was considered a penalty (speed less than 6) and penalties override a bonus.
I know it's slightly different, but - what would be the ruling here?
Do we have a sneaky loophole that could be abused (and may need an errata?), or are we already covered by the Droid Coordinator/GONK Droid precedent?
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Rank: Moderator
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Joined: 4/30/2017
Posts: 955
Location: Lower Hutt, New Zealand
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Yes, that is a sneaky loophole. It doesn't seem to me like the Speed X precedent applies here, because the situation is not quite the same. With GONK Droids and K-3PO, the character simultaneously has both Speed 2 and Speed 8, and you use the lower one because that's what the WOTC rules guys decided as a specific ruling for that scenario. In this case, you aren't gaining two contradictory abilities, but you have one ability which stops you from being subject to certain commander effects. I would rule that with Chain of Command, you can get around "bad" commander effects affecting characters in your squad like that of Brainiac. It's a similar situation to Droids not being subject to the negative commander effect of Nute Gunray.
As a designer on v21, I liked the idea of Chain of Command, but I don't think we thought it through sufficiently. That said, I don't think it needs an errata off the top of my head. Gideon does take away Twin from NUs regardless. He also costs enough that it's not going to be efficient to have him and Brainiac in your squad to deny your opponent Twin/boosts on cannon shots while keeping your own. Maybe there is a decent squad somewhere with Death Troopers getting cannoned by Imperial Officers, but I'm not worried about it. There's certainly enough anti-synergy between Gideon and Thrawn that Morrigan doesn't get any worse.
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Rank: Advanced Bloo Milk Member
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Joined: 10/14/2008
Posts: 1,410
Location: Chokio, MN
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when i thought about this weird interaction, i felt that the negative aspect of Gideon's Chain of command would counteract the negative aspect of Brainiac's CE. Gideon is kinda hard to build around. Brainiac is a very interesting and very underutilized piece in this game. You'd be surprised how many top squads rely of Twin attack and cannon shots, so I thought it'd be interesting to bring him into my Imperial squad with Gideon to see if it gives me a shot in this GE tournament. I brought him in purely as a reaction (which is the beauty of an Escalation tournament) to seeing what people were running in round 1 and completely revamped my build strategy for my squad in rounds 2-4. My original goal was to bring in characters like General Weir and Sarkli in but that ain't gonna happen now. My squad looks like a weird mess as a result lol, but maybe it'll work? 
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