The Rules Lawyer: Thrawn dials and clearing raid tokens

UPDATE: DOOM AND GLOOM!

Seems we all missed this little baby from the recent FAQ:

Q: Do abilities or card effects that resolve when a ship reveals its command dial resolve when a command dial placed on an upgrade card equipped to that ship is revealed?

A: No. Effects that resolve when a ship reveals its command dial only resolve when a ship reveals a command dial from the stack assigned to its ship card as part of its activation.

That basically kills my entire line of reasoning. I was too caught up in the FAQ entry for Thrawn --> the surprising ruling you could tokenize the Thrawn dial.

Turns out tokenization is a SPECIFIC EXCEPTION TO THE RULE, rather than a precedent to make further rulings based on it.

So move along, these are not the rulings you're looking for!

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We had an interesting rules discussion over on the Discord, regarding Thrawn dials and what you can and cannot do with them.

To begin with some people had missed the FAQ ruling that you CAN spend the Thrawn dial for a token. 

"When a friendly ship gains a command dial as part of Grand Admiral Thrawn’s effect, that ship can spend that dial to gain a matching command token."

This ruling is important, since it sets a mild precedence for getting rid of: Raid tokens.

The actual discussion was related to Raid tokens, and whether or not you can discard the Thrawn dial to discard all raid tokens.

It seemed consensus was NO, because of the wording on raid:

"While a ship has a raid token, it cannot resolve the command matching that raid token. When a ship with a raid token reveals a command dial, it may discard that dial to discard all of its raid tokens, or it may discard a command token to discard matching raid token. A ship cannot have more than one raid token of each type."

It was argued that since you don't REVEAL the Thrawn dial, but GAIN it, there is no trigger for clearing tokens:

"After deploying fleets, place 3 facedown command dials on this card. At the start of each Ship Phase, you may reveal and discard 1 of those dials. If you do, until the end of the round, before each friendly ship activates, it gains 1 additional dial matching that discarded dial."

This seemed very odd to me, as the timing for gaining a command token from a dial is EXACTLY THE SAME:

"When a ship’s command dial is revealed, that dial can be spent to assign the corresponding command token to that ship. Command tokens can be spent at the appropriate time to resolve the lesser effect of that command."

My conclusion is that we cannot 100% KNOW that you can discard the Thrawn dial to clear raid tokens, but it would be DAMN ODD if you can't, based on the OK to tokenize Thrawn dials in the FAQ.

The question is mostly academic: you can tokenize the Thrawn and clear a matching raid token, or spend the ship's dial to clear all raid tokens. But it COULD come up, and then I would strongly suggest TOs allow a Thrawn dial to be spent to clear raid.