Resilients

[thanatos]

Basically, it amounts to, "Game designer said it, so them's the breaks unless you use house rules," but if you want to get more technical than we've been getting, the real difference in what happens as a result of the meat cleaver vs resilient boils down to one of semantics.

For the meat cleaver, the zombie is instantly killed.

If the zombie player were to have a card that said, "Anytime a zombie would be killed/sent to the zombie pool, you may discard this card instead to prevent it," the condition of that card (killed) would work to counteract the effect of the meat cleaver, just like zombie event cards that say a zombie "may not be killed in any way" prevent the meat cleaver's instant kill.

For resilient, the gun is immediately discarded.

Ammo says "Anytime a (Gun) item would be discarded from this hero, you may discard Ammo in its place."

The gun being discarded fulfills Ammo's only condition for activation, but there are no cards currently that have a zombie death as a condition for activation (you never know, a future expansion might bring one). If there WERE a card that said, "Anytime a zombie would be killed, you may discard this card instead," however, it would be valid to use that card to counter the Meat Cleaver

Additionally, note that the Meat Cleaver uses the word instantly, while Resilient uses the word immediately. There is another thread over on Board Game Geek where Jason Hill, one of the game's creators, points out the difference in verbage as being significant (http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/327438/a...n-or-two), and another one where a "counter" for the Meat Cleaver is discussed: http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/654568/b...at-cleaver (essentially, barbed wire also has an instant effect, so both the meat cleaver and the barbed wire take effect at the same time if the hero rolls a 6, causing the zombie to die and the hero to take a wound)

Although, this does raise one question in my mind. One possible "counter" to the Meat Cleaver is "bitten," but its text says "Play this card on a Hero when they kill a Zombie in a fight. The next time the Hero would be wounded, instead they are turned into a Zombie Hero." Since the Meat Cleaver's wording states that it prevents the fight from resolving, I'm not sure if "Bitten" would actually be a legal counter. Methinks there's another question for the rules gurus