So I played two games today and the question of what does “Taunt” specially do came up. If a unit is in the Squad Leader zone do all attacks/abilities/spells have to be targeted at that unit? Or are “attacks” the only thing that “must” target the Squad Leader.
For instance, what happens if the Flag Bearer is in the Resist 1 Zone and I want to spark the Sqaud Leader how would that be resolved?
Taunt for squad leader means that the squad leader must be attacked first, even before other patrollers.
Spells and abilities can be cast on any valid target, but if there’s a flagbearer, any spell or ability must target it first.
Basically, taunt is only for attack.
Taunt is not a proper keyword; it’s just shorthand for the Squad Leader rules explained in the patrol zone section of the rule book.
pengwndude already summed up what that means specifically.
A point of clarity on the Flagbearer question: Flagbearers must be targeted by a spell or ability if and only if they are valid targets for that spell or ability. Resist X means that in order for something to be a valid target the player casting the spell or using the ability must pay X$ (on top of any other restrictions). This means that if a Flagbearer has Resist X, and the opponent doesn’t have enough gold to pay the Resist cost, that Flagbearer is not a valid target and so doesn’t affect targeting choice.
For Spark, for instance, in the same way that a Flagbearer that isn’t in the patrol zone doesn’t affect what you target (since Spark only targets patrollers), a Flagbearer with more Resist than you can pay for also doesn’t affect what you target.
Thanks all for the clarifications. My interpretation during our play was that a “spell” constituted an “attack”, so we had to target the Patrol Zone with spells and the Squad Leader was the priority target. But its clear to me now…not that I see the rules offer a literal interpretation of “attacks” (i.e., a unit or heroes ATK stat) must target the Patrol Zone/Squad Leader.