What's in a Variant? (Completionist Guise Power Question)

This may seem like a silly question.  Particularly since this is my first time posting a thread to this site, and my first time even logging back on since the ARG back at the beginning of the year (Ah, good times~).

But alas, I do have a question about the new Completionist Guise power:  Is there an official ruling on the difference, or lack thereof, between a variant and a base hero card?

My understanding of it is that a variant is an alternate version of the base hero character card.  Therefore if Completionist Guise were to use his power on, say, Dark Watch Mr. Fixer (who only has two characters cards, one the base hero and the other the variant currently in play), the power's effect wouldn't trigger because Guise can't swap the variant character card for something other than a variant card (and since the base character card isn't a variant, he has no other variants to replace it with).

I may be totally off-base here.  It may very well be that, for purposes of Completionist Guise's power, all hero character cards are considered variants.  But given that we don't have anything but speculation to go on (as far as I'm aware of, at any rate), I feel my interpretation is the correct one.  As such, until such a time as an official ruling on what the definition of a "variant" is in game terms, the power seems to be more than a little confusing.

Variant includes base hero cards. They are all variants on the character. It does not include the same card with different art, so if you have a foil Young Legacy and are lucky enough to have the origianl Young Legacy, they are not separate variants. This was asked during playtesting and is Christopher's response.

How it interacts with characters like Skyscraper or the Sentinels who have multiple character cards within one identity is unclear at the moment.

That was stated as if it were fact.  I think it's probably true, but do we have evidence that this is the actual rule intended by the game designers?

In the playtesting forum, yes. Outside it, no.

Unless I'm completely misremembering. However, if it's not, then Guise's power breaks down almost immediately if he's teamed with only base heroes.

I assume using multiple copies of the same base hero or varient card would be where the line is drawn?

Wraith would be a variant of Rook City Wraith.

Look no farther than the definition of Variant:  A different or distinct form or version of something.

The original character card of a deck is a different form of the other character cards for that deck.  Yet they are both the character card of the same deck, so they are the same something.

In the above example, because your current version of the deck is using the Rook City Wraith character card, any Wraith Character Card other than Rook City Wraith would be a Variant of your current character card.

You're not misremembering: All character cards for a character are variants of the other character cards of that character.

In talking to Jeremy at Gen Con, that was something he mentioned came out of analysis they did for the computer game.

Awesome, thanks.  It's not always easy to tell what's personal opinion and what's established fact.  That sounds like fact.

So it can't go into the same name... But what if you have multiple copies and choices? Can one start as Young Legacy, get swapped into Grandpa Legacy, and then get swapped into FOIL Young Legacy? I don't really see a point, just asking.

I believe we've been told that Foil and Regular count as the same card, but you can also swap out a card underneath Guise so you'd be able to return to Young Legacy anyway.

If Completionist Guise gets incapped, the more cards under him, the better. So, no, you can't do that. But like Ario said, you can swap out for a card under Guise. (Source: Christopher's answers during playtesting.)

So what happens when Guise swaps someone in with a Max HP lower than the Hero's current HP?  Such as Legacy -> Grandpa?  Is it considered damage?  What type?

I'm pretty it's just "Their hit points are reduced", not "damage is dealt".

We still don't have an official ruling on that. Because the actual rules only say a hero can't be healed to a HP total higher than their max HP, we've been playing that their HP is not changed at all by changing the character card with Completionist Guise. There were some discussions about what should happen if they go to a higher-HP cards and haven't taken damage, too, and we felt that just not changing the HP made for the simplest approach.

Looking forward to seeing how the computer implements it, though!

In the video game, currently, if you end up with more than max HP then you can't gain health, but you stay at whatever your health is and lose it normally.  Of course, the only way to get more than max HP at the moment is to roll under from the negatives, so I don't think we can count that as intentional behavior.  

Shocking Animation and Imbued Vitality could be in play at the same time.

... I have no idea what happens =)

This happens?

Rocket punch was under shocking animation with a max hp of 5 and now has no hp bar at all, even with the environment card in play.