All six houses are, for the most part, reasonably balanced once the card pool gets expanded, everyone has a pet hate house (most, i think, would say martell or targ) or build (maesters are considered over powered by a lot of people in various forums it seems, and greyjoy choke can, for me, go die a quiet death in the corner). For example my regular opponent hates playing my stark murder deck and i hate playing his targ burn deck with equal passion. As others have mentioned, get each houses deluxe set as it will provide a lot of good cards for the respective houses AND will let you run duplicates for characters which, with 2 exceptions, you cant do with 1 core set. Duplicates made the world of difference when my group started deckbuilding because you can increase the chances of getting important characters out AND give them some form of generic protection. More core sets are something to add at the individuals discretion as more plot cards is never a bad thing (cards like valar and the power of blood can really help make or break decks, and 1 core set gives you 1 of each, not ideal if everyone wants them), and there are some cards that are considered staple, or near enough, for various deck builds or themes (golden tooth mines for lannister and the lannister weapon smith and money lender are excellent weenies when you can 3 of them each, forever burning, flame kissed and lady dannerys chambers in targ are very popular and the adorable direwolf pup is always useful in stark). Of course buying lots of core sets will give you lots of 'dead' cards that you will probably not use to often so i suggest looking for internet sites that sell singles or house specific core set packs. up to your play group on how much they want them and how deep their pockets are. Chapter packs are more hit and miss and honestly the best advice i can give is to find a website that gives a preview of all the cards in a pack and look at what you think is useful/fun/interesting and buy from there. The kings landing cycle and the time for ravens cycle introduce new mechanics that are quite powerful but you may wish to stay away from them for a bit if your still in the early phases of playing with your group, if 1 player out of 4 can play with seasons and all the effects they will probably have a marked advantage over the other 3 for example.

Khudzlin said: And because it bears repeating: you cannot even try to save a card that leaves play for paying a cost (whether or not "cannot be saved" is specified), because it becomes moribund during step 1 (initiation), so it's too late to save it during step 2 (save/cancel). New i had forgotten to add something!

It will be discarded. The duplicate is a titles textless card (once its a dupe) one the card its duping is removed (and varys will be as part of the cost of his effect) its going the way of the discard pile. If you tried to stop varys going to shadows with the dupe his effect would fail as the cost has not been paid.

Joffrey can choose, BUT he must choose immediately after the opponent plays a character or his response window will be shut. So in this example, if you waited until your stark opponent played a cost 5 character then Joffrey could claim the 5 gold for himself, but if your opponent played the cost 2 character and you opted not to use his response (hoping for a better character to be played) and then your opponent decided not to play any other characters Joffrey gets 0 gold.

With hindsight the killing one is rather obvious but i bamboozeled myself by over thinking and trying to relate it to an in game action. Im awear of the difference between discard hand and discard a card from hand as the laughing storm dose not stop you playing narrow escape, and stalwart obviously dosent stop aegons hill having super fun times but i think more than anything i just took stalwarts text at face value without considering the nature of the discard.

Well. My face is a little red. I hadn't appreciated that a lasting effect that would move a card back to a dead/discard pile would not constitute the actual action of killing/discarding the card and that it wouldnt interact with an in play effect that changes the moribund location. Obviously intrigue challenges and something like aegons hill bypass this as the keyword is not in effect when the card is in hand but the rules text for stalwart blinded me to this. "When a card with the “Stalwart” keyword is killed or discarded from play, it is placed on the top of its owner’s deck instead of being placed in the dead or discard pile" As far as i could see the conditions for this are being met, the card is in play and it IS being discarded, if the effect was something like threat from the north the sentry is top of deck bound so im assuming that this is something to do with the the lasting effect creating an additonal constraint with the word 'move' (likely) OR its something to do with the timing differences of the end of phase windows (unlikely). Hypothetically if this end of phase effect was also being combined with the plot battle of oxcross i assume that the first player gets to make a choice on the order of conflicting passives and if he had the option to kill the sentry and took it he would be heading to the top of his owners deck?

I think the decision to put him back on top of the deck is correct. The lasting effect created, due to timing, does not allow saves or cancels but stalwart acts as a passive replacement effect simply changing the destination of the card (moribund discard become moribund top of deck). Im basing this on the fact that if the sentry had been killed in play before the end of the round he would certainly gone to the top of the deck and i see no limiters on his keyword ability doing the same at the end of round sequence.

Rickon only works with searches that look through the full deck. An faq ruling on galbert Glover and Maester Luwin answered this predicament. "I have Maester Luwin (Forging the Chain F21) and Galbart Glover (Called by the Conclave F41) out at the same time. If I win a challenge with Maester Luwin can I search the top 5 cards of my discard pile? No. Searching the top 5 cards of your deck does not count as searching your entire deck." As Rickon allows you to duplicate a search of your deck it wont work with 'x' card searches in the same way as the faq example, which is a shame as those combos would be amazing to pull off (although recycling no quarter/die by the sword would perhaps be somewhat broken)

ktom said: To expand and truly apply Underworld's answer to this specific situation, you can use Dissension to discard 0 Refugees, but only if there is at least one Refugee on the table to (not) be chosen. If you are going to make the "choose 0 Refugee characters" argument and say that 0 is part of "up to," you run into the fact that "nil" has been defined (through the "printed" entry in the FAQ) to be different from 0. So, if you are going to say that "0 is a number included in 'up to 2'," you have to follow the rule that "nil" is not a number. That means you can play Dissension during the Marshalling phase and choose 0 as the number of refugees to discard - provided that there is an identifiable set of "Refugee characters" to choose from. ****, missed the context of the question. Nothing like jumping to a conclusion to knock you down a peg

Although im hard pressed to think why you would want to do this, outside of thinning your hand for an effect like 'rule by decree', you CANNOT play an event that has a target if there is no valid target. The faq has a section that answers this directly, under the events card section.

While not universally true the general rule of thumb i go by is that if Brienne is participating the player on the receiving end gets to do nothing, zip, nadda etc. The lady of tarth has won me more then a few games and is one of my metas most universally loathed cards (unless your using her, then she is 10/10)

ktom said: So…. by their reasoning, since CS-Renly is immune to opponent's character abilities, too, if he is attacking or defending all of their opposing "House Tully" characters lose their +1 STR from Hoster Tully? Whatever reasoning they come up with that their characters get the +1 STR will apply equally to bypassing Blackfish with "gained" stealth. Did you see the movie "Demolition Man"? The bad guy put a psychological block on Wesley Snipes so that Wesley couldn't hurt him. Whenever Wesley Snipes pointed a gun at the guy, he couldn't make himself pull the trigger. The bad guy was effectively "immune to Wesley Snipes." But that didn't stop Wesley Snipes from tossing his gun to another guy and saying "you shoot him." Bang. That's what is going on here. Guyard is tossing his stealth to the Lord character and saying "you shoot him." An excellent working example. A terrible film

The faq helps answer this situation directly under 3.19 Cards with immunity are immune only to effects that target them directly. The Blackfish is not the target of Guyards ability, so he can be stealthed. It dosent matter how your character gets stealth in this example, only that he has it.

WWDrakey said: n Outwit players starts doing this, only use a portion of the saves you have available. If he passes and you pass, there is no more opportunity to cancel.EDIT: Beaten by ktom. Should've known. But if you both pass then it moves to resolution, yes? If thats the case anyone you havent saved is killed with no save able to help?

Tin link makes expensive attachments (expensive varies player to player but 3 gold qualifies under pretty much any scenario) unpopular with a lot of players, and considering that maesters still seem prevalent those attachments dont see a lot of play.

ktom said: Ah. So it was an "I don't want you to be able to, so there must be a reason you can't" kind of reasoning. The best kind of reasoning

At the time. Its a response, like any other, and it has a window in the player action for the opponent to choose to discard or not, if they pass the window closes and the option dosent come up again (unless it is triggered again, but that would likely be targeting another character so you could respond to the new target having icons removed). Hope that helps

Ratatoskr said: Including six former World Champions, get disqualified from the tournament for collusion, unsportsmanlike conduct and, well, scouting. The collusion and unsportsmanlike conduct i agree with, when i was reading an article on how 2 friends decided ahead of time to divide up the final melee winner i was a little outraged. Its essentially match fixing which has got be a no no in every legit players book. I doubt its good for the health of the game in the long run as well. Scouting im a little more dubious about, researching an opponents tactics and play style are widely done in most competetive sports, its called being prepared. By its very nature watching any one play a game will reveal levels of tactics and build structure, assuming your not changing your deck AT the tourney (which is a no no in itself ) then knowing how your opponent is likely to play can only aid you so much.

ktom said: ~ Have we undertaken a mission here to name every effect that keys off of winning or losing an intrigue challenge? Challenge accepted! ktom said: (And no, that was NOT a challenge!) awwww

Or terminal schemes.

Correct. Traits only interact when mentioned by name, so the red wedding needs a lord AND a lady, 2 lords or 2 ladies alone is no good.

I dont think it is considered a targ or stark attachment; I believe event cards with house x only is a deck building limit, not an actual house affiliation so griff couldnt respond to it. Also im a little fuzzy on the timings but it may lose its attachment definition when it becomes moribund or loses the condition that makes it an attachment, but thats just a gut feeling.

Im 99% sure that im right, but sometimes the language of the game gets a little (a lot) complex and i tend to simplify the language which sometimes can lead to a slight misinterpritation. As ive only been playing for little over a year i always tend to add the 'hope im right' or 'get confirmation' as there are people on the boards who are vastly more experienced then i am and looking like a know-it-all only to get slapped down with multiple corrections is not very high on my to do list

1 very quick and important distinction. The draw cap is 3. The framework action of drawing 2 cards is mandatory, and does not count towards and 'draw cap'. However should this 2 card draw be modified in a positive way by something like knights of the realm or kings of summer then the additonal card counts against the draw cap of 3. Should it be modified in a negative way , by the negative of those 2 agendas for example, your mandatory draw is reduced to 1 but your draw cap of 3 is unmodified meaning you could only draw 4 cards that turn. The only exception that i can think of that modifies your framework draw of 2 in a positive fashion is the master of laws title, as it is not considered a card effect but changes the mandatory draw from 2 to 3. The general rule of thumb is that anything with the word 'draw' counts toward the draw cap of 3, effects that let you search and put into hand are not considered 'draw' and do not count against the draw cap. For example, a stark player could reveal spending the winter stores as his plot to search his deck for an attachment, then draw his basic 2 cards, draw another 1 with knights of the realm as his agenda, another with a bay of ice and his final card with kings landing, BUT should he have 3 winterfell kennels in play (and adequet gold) he could ALSO search for 3 direwolves and put them into his hand. Hope that helps (also hope i got it right!)

Bomb said: That is definitely not the correct interpretation of the 3.39 in the FAQ. If the character enters play at some point while Valar is initiating, being saved/canceled, or resolving, that character becomes eligible to be killed by Valar. If At the Gates or Manning the City Walls resolves AFTER Valar has completely resolved, those characters that entered play are not going to be killed. If they are resolved BEFORE Valar has come into effect, they are going to be affected because they will be in play. Darkstar being discarded with Maester of the Sun is an example where it is possible for a character to enter play after Valar initiates and before it resolves and it is now in the FAQ as an official ruling stating that Darkstar will be killed by Valar. Thank the old gods, thought that i was going mad after i read that. Self doubt is a terrible thing!