Do you reshuffle a deck? If so, when?

 When you run out of a deck, do you ever reshuffle?  I didn't see anything in the rulebook, but an unofficial faq i read indicated that the answer is yes.

Yep. You do indeed reshuffle.

Edit - When you have to /draw/ a card. Revealing a card does not force a shuffle. Good to know for Tachyon who may not want it and Nightmist who wouldnt be able to use a spell in that case.

As soon as you try to draw a card, play a card from the top of a deck or discard the top card of a deck and there is not a card to draw/play/discard you shuffle the trash to reform the deck.

Woo 2nd!

Traffic is crazy right now.

Yes, you reshuffle a deck when you need to either draw, discard, or play a card from the top of it and there are no cards left. You don't reshuffle just because the deck has run out - you only do so when you need to do something with a card. You do not reshuffle if you are told to "reveal" a card, and if an effect tells you to reveal multiple cards and there aren't enough left (eg using Arcane Cadence when there are only two cards left), you reveal what you can and follow the instructions for as many cards as you have.

You reshuffle when you would need to draw or play a card from that deck.  "Draw" and "Play" effects force a reshuffle, but "reveal" and "search" do not.  You also don't reshuffle just because it's empty, only when you need to "draw" or "play" and there isn't anything there.

Edit: Right, like Ameena said, "discard" effects as well.

Also good to know for Tachyon that drawing a card during your draw phase is optional.

Wow, managed a three-way simul-post there, lol :D. There had been no replies when I first started typing mine.

Thanks for the quick response.  I just read over the rules again.  Maybe I'm being blind, but where in the rules does it address the reshuffling?  Can i get a page number?  I didn't see it in the FAQs either.

I think this has been brought up before and isn't actually mentioned in the rules for some reason (possibly it was omitted by accident).

Page 8 of Spiff's FAQ

Since we're already talking about this, what happens when Self Destruct Sequence is the last card of the Environment deck? Does it shuffle the trash and then place the top 2 under it or does it just end the game because no cards would go under it?

Forget if this had been answered before but it came up in a game recently.

I had that exact same Self-Destruct Sequence question earlier and the consensus was that despite not saying the magic words of play/draw/discard, SDS does in fact force a reshuffle of the environment deck if there's less than two cards remaining when it comes into play.  It will manage to put two cards into the countdown pile no matter what...

Unless, of course, every enviroment card is already in play, in which case shame on you!

And yep, it is indeed a glaring omission from the rulebook.

This is especially important to know when fighting Apostate on advanced (or when he draws or Summons the Tome of the Unknowable at a time when you can't immediately kill it).  Also true, though substantially less so, with Omnitron's Interpolation Beams.

Spiff faq is where i first heard of this.  But he isn't a dev, and that entry doesn't have a forum post link.  A game I just played we won against the corportion because they ran out of a deck.  The dev's have printed 7 rulebooks with it not included in any of them.  How do we know this isn't just spiff's houserule?

I hope this doesn't come off as confrontational, I appreciate his FAQ, its just that as a scientist I'm super skeptical of unsourced claims.

If you didn't automatically reshuffle the deck, a significant percentage of games in The Block would go like this.

Round 1:  play Prison Riot, discard cards from top of deck until Char, Time-Crazed Prisoner, Imprisoned Rogue, and maybe a duplicate of one of the last two are put in play.

Round 2:  Play another Prison Riot, get the last Inmate and discard the entire Environment deck.

Round 3:  Once Inmates are dead, ignore the Environment forever.

You really are supposed to reshuffle.

We know we're meant to reshuffle the decks because it WAS included in the first rule book, but was accidentally left out of subsequent ones.

Also you can read it on page 8 of the gameplay section of the Sentinels of the Multiverse site.

Edit: Also Christopher posts here talking about reshuffling.

FYI: Spiff only includes information in the FAQ that is official - i.e., that one of the >G folks has confirmed / provided. His homerule stuff he puts into other things.

Can I request a descriptive title change again please, for future searching clarity?

Also note the text of Akash'Bhuta and the Matriarch. If there were no reshuffles, then their powers wouldn't work...

Done!

Thank you!

How do we know this isn't just spiff's houserule?

Spiff doesn't put any houserules in that FAQ at all.  Even the stuff without a reference link in the FAQ actually does have a reference link somewhere on the forum or BGG, but by the time I started adding them to the FAQ, I couldn't go back and find them all.  If anyone cared enough, they should be able to dig up references for everything in there (if you do this, please send them to me so I can add them to the FAQ).

Yeah, that should be clarified somewhere in a sticky post.  Spiff's FAQ is all stuff that's been verified by one of The Three at some point in time.  Spiff isn't just some guy that made an FAQ, he's the guy that made THE FAQ, you can take pretty much anything in there as gospel.

It's clarified at the top of the first page of the FAQ itself, but maybe if you're already wondering about the veracity of the stuff in the FAQ, maybe that's not completely convincing either.

Thanks a ton matchstick man and others, I super appreciate it.  I know my other scientist buddies that I play with would demand a source.

This actually does appear in one of the rulebooks!  In my version of the Enhanced Edition rulebook, the reshuffle rule appears in Quick Reference quide on the inside cover/first page, in the final paragraph.  "If a card needs to be drawn or discarded from an empty deck, shuffle that deck's trash to recreate that deck and continue to play as normal."  I see that this rule is missing from the EE rulebook that appears on the Downloads page, so I guess this is either only in some versions of the EE rulebook, or there is a mistake in the PDF, I really couldn't say which.  But as far as wanting an official source to spell this out somewhere, there you go.

@HeroComplex, did you get a copy of the 2013 reprint of the Enhanced Edition? (Does your box say copyright 2011-2013 on it?) If so, I know they fixed a few cards, and it looks like they took the opportunity to fix the rulebook as well.

Yes, it appears to have 2013 in the copyright notice, and it also refers to itself as Second Printing right near the price.  Makes sense, as it was a gift this past holiday season and so is a very new purchase.