Can I cheat! a steed card and then play another steed sometime later?

[upowlnight]

as the title says, I had a steed on the table. I attached a Cheat! to it just to avoid charity. Seeing that there was nothing illegal about the steed in the first place, my friends asked why I would attach a Cheat! to something that didn't need it.

I thought I could attach a Cheat! to the steed, not have to discard to charity, and in the future, if I were to get another steed be able to play it, thus having two steeds.

The argument against me was that it's still a steed, and counts towards my number of steeds, and the only way I could bring a steed out is to have a Cheat! card to play with it at the time I play it.

Originally Posted by Andrew Hackard

Here is the simplest way I can think of to explain Cheat!: when you are looking at your cards to make sure you have a legal setup, ignore any Item with Cheat! attached to it.

That's it.

Cheat! doesn't remove any properties of an Item or change its fundamental nature; it just means it doesn't count toward a legal or illegal setup.

There are nuances here that are not appropriate for the 101 forum, but if you apply the guideline above, you'll be right 97.3% of the time. (It has a decimal point, so you know it's a precise figure.)

This is the best explanation of Cheat! I've seen, but my friends were saying that this explanation is only to verify your setup is legal, not to do with if you can play cards or not.

[Mister Ed]

You are correct. The Cheat!ed Steed does not count toward your limit of Steeds. When you Cheat! an item, you simply ignore it (as your quote says) when determining if your setup is legal. That is at ANY time you check whether your setup is legal, not just at the very moment you play the Cheat! So if you Cheat a Big item, you can play another Big item later because when you check whether you already have a Big item in play you ignore the Cheat!ed Big item. Same thing for a Steed.

It seems like your friends think that Cheat! only bypasses any restrictions at the moment you play it, and that after that point all its properties still could interfere with playing further cards. This is not the case.

[Andrew Hackard]

The Cheat! card says explicitly that you may play it with an Item card from your hand or an Item card already in play. That includes a Steed. Your friends are wrong.

[MunchkinMan]

I am going to put the official recognition to Mister Ed's answer, saying that he's correct here on this issue. Your interpretation of Andrew's statement is correct, and matches your situation perfectly.

For future reference, should your friends choose to argue with the official stance that you were in the right, there's a detailed treatise on the Cheat! card here.