A few intersting topics, ill start with DBS:
The Corp does not have to tell the Runner whether he or she
kept the first or second card drawn. The Corp must keep the
two cards discrete from the rest of his or her hand, though,
when deciding; the Corp can shuffle the two cards together to
obscure which card was taken.
How do we feel about this? It strikes me as odd and why doesn’t it apply to architect as well
I think the answer to this is simple: with Architect you don’t actually draw the cards (into shuffleable HQ), you just look at them (in place in R&D).
granted, but it’s still information the runner could know(RDI,TME), and that information goes out of the window when you draw instead of peek?
Yes, because drawing them removes them from R&D and places them in HQ. The Corp is not under any obligation to retain the order of HQ. As soon as the cards are drawn (i.e. before you decide which to discard), they are in HQ and can be shuffled around.
And just to add, you don’t add them physically to HQ, because then you could cheat and put another card at the bottom. But they are both in HQ the moment after the draw.
Yep, but to be clear that convention is just to assure the opponent that no cheating is going on, it’s not strictly necessary to fulfil the conditions of DBS. There isn’t a game reason why you can’t shuffle the DBS draw in with HQ before you discard one of the drawn cards, only a social reason.
I think that is well put, and there should be more rules defining the aspect of the game that deals with hidden information. I’d imagine this is the most insane game to design for
Also in there: Knight, Rook, and Bishop can now be hosted on pieces of ICE even if they are already hosted on non-ICE cards!
Though I’m really glad about the new Caissa ruling, I’m a little disappointed about what Lukas did regarding the host rules.
When the Glenngate came up he gave us a perfect and general ruling :
If a card tells you how to host on it, then that is a hosting restriction and you cannot host on it another way.
Why didn’t he stick to it in this FaQ instead of giving us an individual clarification for each cards ?
We think it made an already strong card even stronger.
I wonder if the FAQ revisions were done without Lukas involved, or at least with other people making the final decisions, given that he’s shifting games.
Well there is the conspiracy theory that the next FAQ after Lukas announces his leaving of ANR that the new head designer’s pet project gets a buff 
/sarcasm
So the “Triggering Actions and Abilities” section clears some things up, but the ruling that you can’t trash Street Peddler without installing anything is still contradictory, right?
FAQ sez:
A player can only trigger an action or ability if its effect has the potential to change the game state. This potential is assessed without taking into account the consequences of paying play, install, or rez costs or triggering any further abilities.
But as far as I can tell trashing Street Peddler just to drop events stuck on it into the heap does change the game state without taking any of those things into account. It only takes into account the fundamental game rule that hosted stuff is trashed when its host leaves play, which isn’t a triggered ability. (And if you can’t even take that into account, then it means that stuff like SMCing for Clot with 3 credits as Kate is also illegal, because you can’t take her discount into account.)
No, the ability itself does not change the game state. The ability is:
“Install 1 card hosted on Street Peddler, lowering its install cost by 1.”
Trashing the other cards on Street Peddler is not part of Street Peddler’s effect per se, but rather a triggered effect from paying the cost (it is the triggered effect of the game trashing a hostee when it’s host gets trashed).
The key point is that it is the effect itself that must be able to change the game state. You obviously cannot have a change in the game state due to the effect tiself without resolving any part of the effect, so maybe rather than the quoted part of the FAQ, it may be slightly more enlightening to remember the corollary of that which is:
“A player can only trigger an action or ability if there is the potential to resolve at least some part of the action of ability itself.”
Clearly in the case of a Street Peddler laden with events, that isn’t the case: you’re never going to be able to resolve any installation.
Kate’s ability is static, the new rule demands that no triggered abilities (conditional + paid) be taken into account when determining if you can use the ability or not.
Well, with regard to SMC the effect is:
“Search your stack for a program and install it (paying the install cost). Shuffle your stack.”
So it seems as though it is always possible to use it in cases where you have more than one card in your stack, since shuffling your stack has the potential to change the game state and you can always resolve that bit.
There is a question of what non-open information is taken into account when assessing the “potential” though. The cards on Street Peddler, which are not open information but which the Runner can check, are deemed to form part of the information when assessing “potential”. But can you play Test Run in a deck with no programs left in the stack/heap? Or use SMC’s ability when you don’t have enough credits to pay for any programs in your stack? I don’t think this can be the case, since it requires you to remember all the cards in your deck! That doesn’t seem like a practical approach at all.
So while you obviously try to remember what cards are left in your stack for tactical purposes, I would imagine that the potential for an effect to resolve cannot rely on that knowledge. If you have a stack, you could always have a zero cost program in it, in theory at least.
At least no-one plays Docklands Crackdown so in practice we don’t have to worry whether its acceptable or not to trigger SMC with:
no credits left (after paying the cost);
exactly one card left in the stack (so resolving the shuffle won’t change the game state, but there’s still a potential for it to contain a zero-cost program);
and a token on Docklands Crackdown!
Is this conformed? It sounds terrible…
I think so, since you can do something similar with The Foundry.
I’m think it was Lukas with some amount of help from @jakodrako:
I’m sure other people were involved as well, but pretty sure that Lukas gets the final say all the way through the Mumbad cycle.
I am not at liberty to discuss current or future plans or processes for the FAQ. I can confirm however that Lukas is still in charge of rules management for the forseeable future.