A Desperate Path

Event. Cost: 2.

Response: At the end of the staging step, discard cards from the top of the encounter deck until you discard a treachery. Resolve its 'when revealed' effects to ready each of your questing characters. Each of your questing characters gets +1 until the end of the phase.

Aleksander Karcz

The Fortress of Nurn #145. Spirit.

A Desperate Path
Reviews

It's a card that is both simple and subtle, flexible enough to pursue multiple goals and fit into varied sets of decks and scenarios.

This event has three notable interests which can be combined :

1) Granting a willpower bonus to all characters (heroes or allies, unique or not) engaged in the quest, just before the quest resolution step.

2) Readying the questing characters to take advantage of their possible versatility (an action triggerable during this phase 3 or later, or good stats usable in combat).

3) Discarding many encounter cards that bother us.

For 2-cost, there are two conditions to be able to take full advantage of it :

  • Treacheries must be manageable, obsolete or painless for our deck and our cards in play (which also depends a lot on the scenario, of course)

  • We must be able to scry and manipulate the encounter deck. A few steps before playing A Desperate Path we can for example trigger Far-sighted, Interrogation, or Risk Some Light. Another interesting card to play before A Desperate Path is Shadow of the Past if some treachery without serious consequences sits at the top of the encounter discard pile.

Poète du troglo 31
I am sorry to say that, as written, this event does not allow you the flexibility to choose if you want to resolve the When Revealed effect of the treachery or not. There is no "you may" or similar wording that implies a choice on that matter. — Alonewolf87 2396

This isn't a review but a question: If I play this card with a nearly empty encounter deck so no treachery is revealed, I assume I will not get the readying. However, the questing boost seems to be a separate effect. Will it still trigger?

NERD 866
within the questphase the encouterdeck will be reshuffled if necessary, standartrule. — doomguard 2156
As doomguard stated, during the Quest phase you always reshuffle the discard to form a new encounter deck when it runs out of cards. But hypothetically, if the encounter deck contained no treacheries (e.g. they were all moved to the victory display by effects like Out Of The Wild or Weep No More), then yes your interpretation is correct. Since the readying effect is preceded by "to" and its cost didn't resolve, it wouldn't resolve either. Since the willpower effect does not start with "then", it resolves independently of the previous text. — 3ric 147