This past regional weekend seems to have come and gone in a flash and over the course of the weekend there still seemed to be a TON of confusion still as to how exactly Coercion works. My previous posts about it just weren’t good enough so today I’ll go further in depth with case by case scenarios. We’ll also be talking about “Turning a Die” and what that means which is a very important part of cards like Vader’s Fist (when you can Spot Vader) and Emperor’s Throne Room.

Coercion

Until End of Round

Here is the card so you can read the effect text. So we’ll start off with a part that most people don’t know and isn’t written on the card. It only last through the end of the round. If you play the card, then it lasting through the end of the round doesn’t matter, but it does for the next part.

Passing

You are allowed to choose to “pass” instead of taking your action. Passing does NOT remove the stipulation of you having to play the card, but it can give you some much needed time in specific scenarios. Let’s say that Jon is playing 3-wide and Larry is playing 2-wide and had control of the Battlefield to start the round and starts of with a Coercion hitting Jon’s Outnumber.

Jon then decides to “Pass”. Larry activates his Han and rolls out. Jon can now decide to take his action and plays Outnumber to remove one of Han’s dice. That was an example of choosing to pass that worked in Jon’s favor because he was able to wait until Larry activated a character and had a die that he wanted to remove. For reference, Jon had the ability to just play Outnumber instead of passing even though a die wasn’t in the pool and the effect would end up with no effect due to there not being a legal option.

The common scenario that happens in major events right now is where Price of Failure gets hit and your opponent weeps. If you only have one character left, you pretty much get forced to Pass for the entire round unless you want to lose the game OR some effect happens that gets it out of your hand. Examples being that an opponent resolves a discard and it randomly gets chosen or you have someone like Dooku1 which has a triggered effect that allows you pitch it from your hand. Most of the time this never happens or is available, but you can hope!

If you don’t have the available resources to play the event chosen, it also lifts the restriction since you are unable to play it. This will matter if someone picks an event that costs 1 or more and then later decided to disrupt your resources.

Play Restriction

Some cards have “Play Restrictions” which (if i’m not mistaken) all say “Play Only” (in reference to events, not counting other card types which write it differently). Outnumber has the restriction of an opponent having fewer character’s in play than you. If we go back to the previous example and Coercion chooses Outnumber, but Jon has equal or less characters in play than Larry, then Jon is NOT stuck having to play Outnumber because he is not able to and the effect then falls off as if it didn’t exist. I’ve had some people mention playing it and picking out cards with play restrictions and then thinking the opponent had to pass for the whole round, but that is WRONG.

Spotting itself is NOT a Play Restriction. What I mean by that is this:

If someone Coercions your Easy Pickings, whether there aren’t two dice in play with the same symbol and value or you don’t have a yellow character, you can still play it and are forced to play it or pass. I have been forced to Easy Pick my own dice which showed the same symbol and value and i’ll tell you right now, it felt bad, but i needed to do other stuff that round so i picked the lesser of two evils. The picture of Maz Goggles is just to show you how there would be a play restriction that used Spot and it is all based around “Play”.

I hope this helps to clear out things for any of you that were still having difficulties with Coercion. More often than not it’s good at forcing people to burn mitigation or cards that they’d want to hold for a while. When people are “passing” to avoid playing the card, you’ll often want to take advantage of any actions you can take that would be considered “free”. Example, if you Coercion mitigation and the opponent wants to wait until you roll out so that they can eat a die, then you can start doing things like using Theed’s Power Action or playing all of your upgrades that you wanted so that you’ll be ahead on action tempo to be able to claim first at the end of the round. This is a very relevant thing since most games are currently played on Theed.

Turning a Die

Most of us are familiar with the evil incarnate that is Vader’s Fist. The thing is scary and amazing. The thing that most of us don’t know is this. Is you use Vader’s Fist Power Action and you have Vader in play to spot, you HAVE to roll the die into your pool and change it to a different side than what it lands on. I’ve watched many a Regional Match where people just PA the Fist and then put the die on the side the wanted and that is wrong. If you wanted the 3 ranged (for free) and it unfortunately rolled out onto that side, you have to change it to one of the other 5 sides and you don’t get a choice in the matter. You don’t get to decide that you don’t want to spot and you don’t get to decide that you don’t want to do the effect. We have to do “as much as we can” as the player with the effect. Very seldom does it actually matter, but 16% of the time you’ll hit your preferred side and be sad that you HAVE to change it. Below are cut outs from the rule book for proof in case judges and opponents don’t believe you and you point them to this article.

This rule has been around for a very long time now and really made itself well known back during the days of Poe Maz because people tried to claim Throne Room when Poe was already showing a Special and wouldn’t get to resolve the die because they never turned it. Keep in mind that in regards to Throne Room, if the character has 2 special sides, then they can obviously turn from one special side to the other special side. Turning dice also came up later when Aayla was seeing a lot of play.

She had to turn an opponent’s die so if you only had a die out that was on a blank, she would have to change it for you which was great. In regards to changing one of her player’s dice, she is actually able to choose her same die that was already resolving the special effect and change the side because dice stay in the pool until the effect is finished resolving in which case it would remove itself right after. It seldom came up but if you were already happy with the sides all of your other dice were showing but wanted to change an opponent’s then that was the work around.

Until Next Time

Hopefully this helps you and others at better understanding how this all works or potentially prevents screw ups at a regional and the feel bads from bad judge rulings. Comment and let us know if anything doesn’t make sense to you and i’ll try hard to address it. Thanks for reading! Actually, one other thing before we part. Vader’s Saber players has to pay the 1 AND roll one of the attached character’s character dice into the pool in order to get the 1 damage if it’s on Darth Vader. It is a THEN effect and you needed to complete everything before it. I also watched someone get screwed over by that on stream too.

~HonestlySarcastc

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