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New Tidings from Oldtown

The Updated FAQ for A Game of Thrones: The Card Game is Now Available

Greetings, lords and ladies, sellswords and knights, followers of the Old Gods and the New,

We are swiftly approaching Gen Con Indy 2012 and the A Game of Thrones: The Card Game North American Championship tournament! As you seek to prepare yourself for the tourney, the new FAQ (PDF, 1.3 MB) and Tournament Rules (PDF, 1.3 MB) provide important updates to get you up to speed for the joust and melee. In these documents, you’ll find some minor clarifications on how specific card abilities work or interact with each other, a few important errata, a couple of new additions to the restricted list, and an overhaul to the points system used to determine the overall champion of an A Game of Thrones: The Card Game tournament.

Click the above images to download the A Game of Thrones: The Card Game FAQ version 3.3 (left) and Tournament Rules (right)

Kneeling before the Queen of Love and Beauty

The power of standing a kneeling character is obvious, and characters with the ability to “self-stand” are few and far between. Nonetheless, the card pool has reached a point where players have found numerous means of standing and kneeling their characters for multiple effects. This has prompted us to provide errata for some of those cards in the past, and to that list, we have now added the Killer of the Wounded (Queen of Dragons, 16), limiting its effect to three times per round.

A Storm from the East

The combination of The Laughing Storm (Gates of the Citadel, 5), Rule by Decree (Core Set, 206), Citadel Law (Mask of the Archmaester, 95), and Threat from the East (Queen of Dragons, 55) can, in the first round, force an player into a position where he can find himself holding only a single card. This is a debilitating combo from which most decks cannot recover. This combination also exploits the fact that the wording of Threat from the East has caused it to work slightly differently than originally intended. With this in mind, we have given this card errata:

“When revealed, you choose one:

–Each player draws 3 cards. Each player that drew 3 cards discards 3 random cards from hand.

–Each player discards 3 random cards from hand. Each player that discarded 3 cards draws 3 cards.”

Loyalty Money Can Buy

Griff (Chasing Dragons, 57) has received errata that brings him in line with the other character agendas (a term now defined in the FAQ), making him “House Targaryen only,” and slightly altering the text that causes him to unattach from your House card: this text now triggers only if you control fewer attachments than each opponent. This prevents players from including Griff in their decks as an automatic claim-soak option since he will only jump back into play if your opponents all control more attachments than you.

Sorrowful Choices

A few cards in A Game of Thrones offer a choice to the players they target. Some are intended to be all upside for the player triggering the effect, and some are intended to affect all players equally, either negatively or positively...Then there are cards which are meant to be entirely negative for your opponent. Those cards are intended to allow players to put pressure on their opponents, making them pick between two undesirable effects. The wording on the cards like Shield Islands Dromon (Lions of the Rock, 46) and Sorrowful Man (A Poisoned Spear, 110) allowed for an unintended “out.” Some players would choose an effect they could not fulfill and thereby ignore the effect. These cards have received errata, so the opponent must fulfill one of the effects if possible. The only way to avoid fulfilling the effect is to be unable to fulfill either effect.

Detaining Maesters

Over the course of recent tournaments, two cards have strongly skewed the metagame. The results of multiple Regional Championship events have shown that the cards are appearing in extremely large numbers and causing the metagame to stagnate. Players are ignoring or discarding other choices because of the perceived strength of these cards. As such, these two cards have been added to the Restricted List: The Maester’s Path (Gates of the Citadel, 19) and Search and Detain (Here to Serve, 120).

A Tale of Champions

We have updated the tournament rules to include the newest Chapter Packs that will be legal for Gen Con Indy 2012. We have also clearly marked scouting and collusion as unsportsmanlike conduct and added a new section which clearly states how the overall championship is determined. Only players who have participated in both the Melee and Joust tournaments are eligible for the overall championship, and these players receive points based on their final placement within the individual tournaments. If there is a tie between two players, the one who placed higher in the tournament with the greatest participation will be considered the winner.

We personally really look forward to meeting all of you who will be attending the 2012 A Game of Thrones: The Card Game North American Championship Tournament. Best of luck to all of you!

   –Damon Stone and Nate French

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Source: New Tidings from Oldtown (http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=3466)