I'm actually surprised not to see the 24 card penalty applied to recruit a replacement. I imagined that the generals should have factored in the reliability of their chosen team members.
Of course, given that I belong to another team, I am probably showing a little negative bias here.
I thought about this thing and how to deal with it a lot yesterday.
My final decision was that before round 1 starts, teams have a chance to replace inactive members free of any additional charge (so it's
not the Rule 3.4.2). Let me explain why.
The reliability of chosen team members is not that easy to predict. Real life stuff can come up with even the most active member, and I think it would suck big time if a team was penalized for that before the event even started.
Lets take Team
as an example. Unfortunately vrt is unable to join War. Now we are not talking about some cheap 1 card newbie who disappeared, we are talking about a player who cost
27 cards! Kael is now forced to replace vrt with someone who applied to War but didn't get enough bids. This most likely means that the replacement is not that active and/or experienced. If you also threw in the 24 card penalty you talked about, that would mean a total cost of
51 cards for one non-veteran player. I think that is way too much, and I don't think it would be fair to give the whole team that kind of penalty for something they had zero control over.
Of course we can't keep letting teams replace players as much as they want free of charge. There has to be a "point-of-no-return". I think that the start of round 1 is perfect for this because it's when War
really starts.
Best part about this is that teams who replace players before round 1 don't really get any advantages. They lose one player, gain one player. Replacing doesn't affect other teams so I don't see it as a big deal which is also why I don't think a penalty is needed.
I will write official rules about this for War #3.