Asset. Weakness

Item. Evidence.

Cost: –.

Neutral

Foundation Intel cannot leave your hand.

This dossier, while filled with important findings, isn't related to your situation in the slightest. You should probably drop it off at the sanctum Taylor indicated at your earliest convenience.
Rafał Hrynkiewicz
The Scarlet Keys Campaign Expansion #266. Globetrotting #5-8.
Foundation Intel

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Reviews

This really messes up with Patrice, once you find this, you will draw 1 less card for the remainder of the scenario. 200CharactersMinimum 200CharactersMinimum 200CharactersMinimum 200CharactersMinimum

trepicado · 2

This card is clearly a dead draw, as well as unhelpful hand clutter, but is is also an opening-hand killer, like The Tower • XVI? The Tower explicitly says that it has to stay in your opening hand:

"If The Tower • XVI is drawn in your opening hand during setup (before or after taking a mulligan), you cannot replace it. It must stay in your opening hand."

This direction overrides the general rule that you discard and replace weaknesses during the drawing of the opening hand without resolving them. But Foundation Intel is trickier. It just says flatly that it can't leave your hand. Is that text ever "resolved" (and thus ignorable according to the opening hand rule), or does is it just there? After all, it isn't part of a revelation or forced ability.

Overall, my best reading is that you CAN discard this card during opening hand draw. There's plenty of space on it for more text, so if the designers meant it to apply to that step, they could have easily said so. And since we have the example of the Tower as a card that must stay in your hand during opening hand draw, it seems likely (though hardly clear) that this card, which lacks the specialized text, also lacks the ability.

That's a really good question. I think I'd probably come down on the other side than you if I were playing a live game and just had to make a decision. "Cannot" is absolute so Foundation Intel absolutely can't leave your hand no matter what the circumstances are. That's that. But the Tower needs the extra text because it behaves differently if it's drawn under one specific circumstance and it needs to explain on-card what that is. But I agree, it's not clear at all that either of us are reading it correctly and it might be worth shooting a question to the rules team so we can at least get a sense of what they intended to happen here.. — bee123 · 31
Oh very nice catch, speaking as someone who sort of enjoys sticky rules-resolution puzzles. All told, I'd agree with your take that it CAN be discarded, based on the rules reading for setup: "...Each weakness card drawn during this step is ignored...". If The Tower didn't exist, I doubt we'd even think for a moment that Intel could stick during setup... and because The Tower does exist, I think it demonstrates that you do in fact need additional text (such as is on The Tower) to make the weakness override the base rules. — HanoverFist · 711