1. Can you place presence on lands with blight? I know blight destroys one preexisting presence per player, but does it also stop Spirits from placing presence on that land?
2. Do I have to do all parts of a Spirit's growth option? For example, if I am playing Vital Strength of the Earth, and I choose to reclaim my power cards, do I have to add a presence to the board (if I have any left), or can I choose to just reclaim the cards?
1) You can totally place presence in lands with blight.
2) I can't think of a reason that you wouldn't want to take all of the actions available to you. At some point the rule was that you do everything in the box in order from left to right. I think we may have dropped the "in order" part at some point, but the question really hasn't come up in my games. Do you have an example of not wanting to use all of the growth actions?
I had a rather long game with Vital Strength of the Earth, but I got to a point where I finally managed to get the board under control. I didn't want to place my last two presence until I needed them, as the VSE sacred sites are so useful as forts.
Does that make sense? Basically, I didn't want to put them in spot A, only to realize two turns later they would have been more usefull in spot B.
I agree that you almost always want to place presence on the board, but just having the option to hold off would be nice.
Agreed on (1), you can place presence in lands with Blight.
(2) has never come up with me, and the situation you describe seems like a reasonable time it might. Good question! In the absence of any guidance, I would say that you do have to do all the options in the growth box.
In terms of order, the growth choices are ordered the way you would want to order them, anyway; eg, gaining a power card before you decide where to put your presence, or adding a presence at range 2 before adding one at range 0.
So, I don't remember if this is printed anywhere in the rules, but if you want to place presence and don't have any more on your spirit panel, you can remove a presence from the island and place that one instead (effectively moving one that's already on the board).
I don't beleive that's in the PnP rulebook, but it makes sense to me.
You are definitely required to do everything in the Growth box, but grysqrl is correct - you can move Presence already on the board. (I think there's a "Moving Presence" sidebar next to the section on Presence on the page with the spirit panel? If not, there should have been.) This mostly crops up when a Spirit has all the Presence on the board that they're legally allowed to place, but might in theory be relevant at other times.
That was dropped for the sake of simplicity - especially since the options were nearly always in the order you'd want to do them anyhow.
Ya, you're right. It is in the Sprits section, right below the Presence section, I wasn't looking low enough. Thank you!