"Disposable" Knacks

[The Undying]

I think my long stumbling with Hold Thread is done and put to bed, hopefully with some number refinement from the community. However, between that and some of my more recent posts, a thought occurred to me: there may be a design space for "disposable" knacks. "Disposable" Knacks are knacks that provide a very watered-down or limited version of Talents available later in the Discipline progression. Mainly, the potential for this is new thanks to ED4's idea of focusing High Circle more on layering/building Talents on old Talents rather than providing replacement Talents.

The Knack I propose a part of the replacement for Hold Thread can be seen as "disposable." Once an Adept hits Circle 15 and gets access to Spliced Weave, the value of this Knack ultimately disappears. The cost disparity is significant, and the time saving is essentially lost since Spliced Weave is a series of Simple Action tests in the same turn. However, there's a 7 Circle difference between when you get access to this Knack and when you get access to Spliced Weave.

In the same vein, I asked in a different post if the focus on High Circle system stuff (like Discipline progression) is high value given that very few tables are likely to ever reach it (especially Master tier). Like the old saying "if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound," the same can be said about Master Talents - if no one ever actually reaches these, do they really need to exist (other than for world-building)? Looking at the system through this lens, the idea of "disposable" knacks is a way of giving either reduced power or high-costed access to awesome late-game stuff in a way that basically makes them useless if/when they get access to the later stuff.

At this point, I'm risking confusion since the text for the High Circle Talents is available to backers and I'm just theory-crafting without personal access to it, so if I'm wrong, just roll with it, see the essence of the example, this isn't necessarily meant to be a perfect and ready-to-use example:

Let's take Wood Skin & Vine Armor. According to preview material, Vine Armor adds its Rank to the Wood Skin test while also adding Mystic Armor. Let's assume that Vine Armor adds RANK Mystic Armor. That could eventually add a pretty attractive Mystic Armor - but, we're looking at double-digit circle before that becomes accessible. However, since Vine Armor explicitly builds on Wood Skin, we could create a "disposable" knack that provides a light-weight Vine Armor effect at a much lower circle. Bear in mind that the wording on this is very rudimentary, and the Circle and Strain cost are all up for grabs, but we could do something like this:

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<Knack>
Rugged Bark
Talent: Wood Skin
Circle: 5
Strain: 2

In addition to the standard effects of the Wood Skin Talent, the adept compares the test against a Difficulty 6. For each success, the Adept gains 1 point of Mystic Armor for the duration of the Talent.
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The wording becomes important, though, if we want to make this truly disposable. For example, if Vine Armor is just a Toughness replacement effect to Wood Skin, then we haven't really made this disposable - the base test is still Wood Skin, this Knack is still available, and given that Wood Skin requires a Recovery Test and most Disciplines with access to Wood Skin have health to burn a few Strain, continued use of this Knack is still A Good Idea. However, if Vine Armor instead becomes the base test (would require some elegant wording), then this Knack seamlessly fades into the background - technically, they could just do a Wood Skin test to continue using the Knack, but why would you when you can get something better via the Vine Armor test?

So, again, "disposable" knacks give you early access to some of these neat High Circle stuff, just at a a vastly reduced and higher cost, all with a crafted power/cost/text that makes them completely obsolete when the full-featured Talent actually becomes available. Some players may look at them and say that they're paying LP for something that becomes useless, but others may look at it as a way to access things that they'll otherwise never get to (meaning that whether they theoretically become useless later doesn't really matter).

Thoughts?

(Extra note: There are some cheesy ways to get around how some Talents may work with each other in order to force the "disposable" intention. The cheesiest would be "this Knack cannot stack with Y" - year, it works, but it just seems like a sad kick in the teeth for the sake of prevention. Others are equally cheesy but in a difference sense by abusing system rules, like the fact that you can only have one replacement effect.)