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Truths Found in the Fires

An Updated FAQ and Tournament Rules for A Game of Thrones Are Now Available

“The old maester looked at Stannis and saw only a man. You see a king. You are both wrong. He is the Lord’s chosen, the warrior of fire. I have seen him leading the fight against the dark, I have seen it in the flames. The flames do not lie, else you would not be here.”
     –George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

There are plenty of moments for doubt amid the battles, intrigues, and power struggles of A Game of Thrones: The Card Game. A mistimed military maneuver can lead to the slaughter of hundreds of knights. An ill-shaped lie can lead a nation to ruin. The game is played on multiple stages simultaneously, and you never know how your foe may strike at you. The last thing you need is confusion amid the heat of battle.

Fortunately, the game’s updated FAQ (pdf, 2.3 MB) is now available to address your questions and provide new clarity. Along with the updates in the new Tournament Rules document (pdf, 799 KB), the changes made to the A Game of Thrones FAQ also serve to promote the health of the game and its tournament scene.

 Click to download the updated FAQ (left) and Tournament Rules (right).

For a more in-depth overview of the changes you’ll find in the latest A Game of Thrones FAQ, we turn to the game’s developers.

A Word from the Developers

Hello, A Game of Thrones players!

Gen Con Indy 2013 and the National Championship tournaments are just around the corner, and that means the time for a new FAQ and Tourney Rules update is upon us.

The question at the top of most players’ lists after regionals season was probably, “What are we going to do about The Long Voyage (The Pirates of Lys, 60)?” This card was initially dismissed as “interesting but impractical,” but was the target of successful early experimentation by a few strong players, and rapidly progressed to completely dominating the Regional Championship environment. While it did enable some less commonly played themes to thrive with an extremely reliable draw engine, the card unfortunately locked out far too much of the rest of the environment in the process, and players quickly found themselves in a situation where they were either playing this agenda or trying to devise very specific means of playing against it. Such a situation is not healthy for the long-term health of the metagame, so we have added an errata to the card’s text, making it “Neutral Faction House card only.” This option was chosen after we decided that adding it to the Restricted List would not have enough of an impact on the metagame, and that banning the card outright would remove an interesting and compelling idea from the environment. Instead, we chose an option that marries a powerful weapon with the Neutral Faction House card, an older card that has not seen a lot of tournament use, thereby challenging players to explore new deck ideas and promote diversity in the game.

We have also updated the restricted and banned lists, moving the revised and reprinted Jaqen H’ghar (Sacred Bonds, 43) and Compelled by the Rock (Calling the Banners, 106) back into the tournament legal card pool, and adding a small number of cards to the Restricted Lists based on feedback from the Regional Championship season. While the last update to the Restricted List was quite monumental, we took a more minimalist approach this time around, with the feeling the The Long Voyage was the most significant issue in the card pool, and that other concerns regarding overplayed ideas could be addressed with a small number of card restrictions.

Also in this FAQ update, a number of questions and rulings have now been formalized. Among these most significant of these, Blood Magic Ritual (The Captain’s Command, 93) has received errata so that it no longer works with “no attachments” characters, the concepts of “all traits” and “all keywords” have been officially defined, and the timing for bringing cards out of Shadows at the beginning of the phase has been clarified by adding the “Shadows” step to the flow charts in the back of the document.

In addition to the changes in the FAQ, there is also important new content in the Tournament Rules document. For melee scoring, in preliminary rounds, we are eliminating the 10-6-3-0 points system. Now, after awarding the table winner 15 points, we are basing the scores of the second through fourth place finishers at each table upon a formula that takes a player’s effective power at the end of the game and divides it by his or her place at the table. This formula is explained in detail in the Tournament Rules document. This new system more heavily rewards the winners of each table, and gives the rest of the table more incentive to contest each and every power and place. Additionally, this improves the balance of the “three player table,” as the third place player is no longer penalized for being at a shorter table. For these reasons, we feel that this new scoring system is an improvement upon that which was used in the past.

We hope that these updates make your experience with A Game of Thrones: The Card Game even more enjoyable, and we look forward to seeing you all at Gen Con Indy next month!

Nate French
 Damon Stone
 Fantasy Flight Games

Thanks, Nate and Damon!

Whether you’re looking to conquer the Seven Kingdoms at Gen Con Indy or just looking for clarity in friendly games, the new FAQ and Tournament Rules document are now available to lend you greater insight into the battles, intrigues, and power struggles of A Game of Thrones: The Card Game. Download them today, and find answers to your most pressing questions in the flames of R’hllor.

Update: A minor revision to the FAQ was made August 2nd in order to prevent potential abuses of the Hellholt Engineer. Its ability has received errata to read, "Limit 3 times per round."

 

 

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Source: Truths Found in the Fires (http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=4264)