Both Brainstorm and Ancient Wisdom resolve “top to bottom”. When you play Brainstorm, then you play Ancient Wisdom, you must play Unleash Potential at that moment. In your case, you’ve moved past Ancient Wisdom and are continuing with Brainstorm, playing System Reboot. It’s now too late to play Unleash Potential with your previous Ancient Wisdom.
The card you’re looking at while Focusing is still the top card of your deck. You must decide to scrap it or not. Only after deciding to scrap it are you allowed to look at the new top card of your deck.
If two or more characters have Brave, the attacking player can choose between them.
Once an Upgrade is legally put into a slot, it stays there, even if the ability that allowed it to be upgraded in the first place no longer applies. In your example, you could keep Mining Pick in Predaking’s Armor slot. Upgrades that are on characters that combine into Combiners are considered to stay in their slots, even though those slots now belong to the Combiner.
Good question! For Character Cards, markings/signatures should not obscure critical card information like rules text or character stats. Otherwise, that should be fine. Ultimately, however, legality of an individual card is up to the Head Judge of the event in question.
If you swap upgrades with Red Heat, you can have a lot of triggers, including another Cog trigger. You choose to resolve each of these triggers one at a time. If you choose Multi-Mission Gear’s trigger to play Brainstorm, you now must finish Brainstorm’s effect before continuing with your remaining triggers caused by Red Heat’s swap.
