dormouse said:

Ha, I thought that too. Maybe there's still time to get it officially changed to "Princes of the South".

dormouse said:

I was thinking that too....really wish it wasn't out of martell, and really wish the only house that probably uses shadow agenda is lanni right now since if your running shadows why not run the power shadow card and have some in house power grab in lanni w/ tyrion (who OOH is too much of risk if you don;t have the event at the right time). Plus lanni aborbs the 1 gold penalty better.(so i don;t really see it changing the landscape much right now. its still lanni/bara vs lanni/bara MWnK)

I'll wait, but i'm not going to hold my breath. ~Blue isn't my color.

RJM said:

You can't cancel it with Paper Shield. No because of the 2 gold you paid to put it into Shadows, but rather because of the 0 gold you pay to bring it out. Paying 0 gold is still considered to be paying gold. Bringing the card out of Shadows has a gold cost, it just happens to be 0 - the same way that Summer Tax or Gilded Plate has a gold cost that happens to be 0. As we know, Paper Shield cannot cancel events that have a gold cost.

So to needlessly obfuscate the topic:

null=0 (per Prince's Loyalist)

but

0≠null (Per Paper Shield and Shadows events)

How utterly confusing.

Ok, not exactly, but disturbing in the fundamental mathematical rules department.

Kennon said:

If you insist on looking at is as a math equation, than the "null is 0, but 0 is not null" reasoning may be confusing. Math if reflective across equal signs.

But ultimately, this is a logical "equation," not a mathematical one. And reason/logic will not necessarily work in both directions. Otherwise, noting that birds fly (and stopping the definition there) would mean a Boeing 737 is more birdlike than an ostrich.

Remember where this comes from. There is a rule that says "when you need a number value to check play restrictions or resolve a card and no number is specified, use 0." That's the Prince's Loyalist ruling (and many other cards, actually) - and a logical argument, not a mathematical one. The point is that Prince's Loyalist is not looking to see if a gold cost exists, it is looking for the value of the influence cost. Paper Shield does not care what the value of a gold or influence cost is - it only cares if there is one specified. So Paper Shield and Prince's Loyalist are not looking for the same thing. (And, incidentally, why Paper Shield would see a gold cost existing to bring an "s0" event out of Shadows. There is a cost specified to bring it out of Shadows. The 0 is written right there on the card.)

Wow, my humor is really missing the mark these days.

*sigh* And I've been trying so hard too...

Kennon said:

~ Maybe too hard.

Seriously, it wasn't the humor that necessitated the response; it was the choice of topic. This is one that confuses a lot of people, so I wanted to make sure the "joke" didn't start the confusion all over again. Plus, the topic has been off the boards for so long, I didn't think most people would see it as a joke.

i completly agree,Lars.

Still no english text/picture spoiler?

If someone could post spoliers for City of Secrets it would be great. An information explaining the Shadows and shadow phase would also very appreciated. Thank you!

The Chapter Pack only went up on FFG's site on Friday! (JJ is usually the only one who has it this fast!)

The rules for Shadows are already up in the "support" section here.

* Arya Stark (x1) (Stark, Character)

Cost s1

ST 2 Militar. Power Shadow Crest

Lady. House Stark Only.

If it is Winter, Arya Stark gains Stealth and Deadly.

If Arya Stark is killed, put her into Shadows instead of your dead pile.

Hungry Mob (x3) (Stark, Character)

Cost 0

ST 3 Militar

Ally

After you pay 3 or more gold for a card or effect, kneel Hungry Mob

Bound by Duty (x3) (Event)

Challenges: Choose a kneeling Stark Charecter. Until the end of the phase, that character is eligible, while kneeling, to be declared as a defender for any challenge in wich it could normally participate.

Hidden Chambers (x3) (Location, Stark)

Cost 1

King´s Landing

If it is Winter, reduce the cost to bring your cards out of Shadows by 1.

If it is Summer, return Hidden Chambers to your hand.

*Tyrion Lannister (x1)

*Tunnels of the Red Keep (3) (Lannister, Location)

Cost 3

King´s Landing

Your characters gets +1 Str for each card you have in Shadows

City Watch (x3) (Baratheon, Character)

Cost 4

St 4. Militar. Power. War Crest

Army. Ally.

No attachment except Weapon

Response: After you win a challenge in witch Ciy Watch is participating, choose an opponet. At the beginnig of the next phase, that player must randomly choose on of this or her cards in Shadows, and either bring it out of Shadows (paying any necessary cost) or discard it from play

Kingswood Trail (x3) (Baratheon, Location)

Cost S1. Shadow Crest

King´s Landing

House Baratheon Onlue

Response: After you declare attackers during a Power Challenge, put Kingswood Trail into Shadows to choose and kneelt a character with a Power icon controlled by the defending player.

Wharf Rats (x3) (Greyjoy, Character)

Cost S1

St 2. Militar. Shadow Crest

Creature

House Greyjoy only. No attachments. Wharf Rats cannot be killed

After Wharf Rats´s controlleds wins a challenge, discard the top card of its controller´s dec.

Response: After Wharf Rats comes out of Shadows, choose and opponent. That opponent takes control of Wharf Rats.

Kraken Tatoo (x3) (Greyjoy, Attachment)

Cost 1

Condition

Attached character gains the Ironborn trait.

Response: After a card is discarted from a player´s deck, attached characters gets +1 STR and Intimidate until the end of the phase

Tonight I´ll post the other 10 cards (in fact 8, as far as 2 events have been posted on rd journals), now I have no time and must go.

Note that * are unique cards.

Wharf Rats looks interesting... if the Kings of the Sea expansion has some more saves (or ups the number of Ironborn to make Salt Wives more reliable) that could be a fun deck to play... outside of that, giving my opponent a CBK 2 STR MIL is not sounding like such a great idea. I mean if it were 1 STR I'd probably be happier with them... but I'm not going to hate to much on deck discard in LCG.

It says "Response"... meaning you don't have to trigger it.

hence, you can choose to have it yourself as a cbk guy that can survive a valar... should you wish it.

Granted... in standard, this card is rther interesting...

Lets see:

Whirlpool, Here is my Husband, Veteran Looters, ITE Euron and Shield Islands make for an interesting mill deck,

Add in 5KE Asha and that attachment, and some really interesting synergy.

Granted I HATE playing against Milling and still don't think it can be pulled off without those annoying locations in Winter Edition.

bloodycelt said:

Hope you've built in your own recursion if you're going to do that!

Which Winter locations?

Yes I'm aware I can keep him, but then when I lose a challenge I'm also loosing a card off my deck... not precisely what I want out of Greyjoy, though with a couple of Selmys it may be workable, I just think that cbk is not good enough to lose 2-6 cards a turn. I'm wondering now about Martell's revenge mechanic and using those Treaties and making a discard/revenge deck. Assuming it is carried over to LCG with some teeth.

Hmmm...

dormouse said:

Bloody trident

Blazewater coast

Oxcross

The wharf rats seem to be very interesting, i wonder if you can make a deck that makes both variants either keep the charachter as your own or let an opponent take control over it viable. I´be been toying around with a ten towers deck lately and i think that the rats will increase the chance that a good event hits the discard pile at the right time.

dormouse said:

screw waiting for KotS. This goes right into my Lanni Shadow agenda deck, this the bara kneel location and the two events (martell and extra intrigue challenge....) w/ tyrion. blegh....blegh...and more blegh...oh and i have another reason to hold gold after getting MWnK out...

Home again. The last 10 cards:

Treaty with the Isles (x1) (Agenda)

Treaty with the South (x1) (Agenda)

Treaty. Ignore the out of House golf penalty on all Greyjoy (for the Isles Agenda)/Martell (for the South Agenda) cards.

Each opponent without a Treaty agenda needs 5 fewer power (to a minimum of 10) to win the game.

City of Shadows (x1) (Agenda)

You may ignore the House X Only deckbuilding restriction on any card with the shadow crest.

Whenever you bring any card wiht a House X Only restriction that dones not match your House card out of Shadows, pay 1 additional gold.

If you do not have any cards sin Shadows, you cannot claim power for unopposed challenges.

Shadows Politics (1)

The Shadow of the South (x3)

* Ser Barristan Selmy (x1) (Targaryen, Character)

Cost s2

ST 4. Militar. Power. Shadow Crest.

Knight. Kingsguard

House Targarye Only. No attachment except Weapon. Renown.

Response: After Ser Barristan Selmy comes out of Shadows, look at one opponent´s hand. Then, name a non-plot card. No player can play that card during this phase.

Dragon Skull (x1) (Targaryen, Attachment)

Cost S1

Item. Shadow Crest.

Attached character gets -2 Str and is killed if its Str is 0.

Response: After Dragon Skull comes out of Shadows, attach it to an opponent´s character or discard it from play.

Nomadic Trader (x3) (Martell, Character)

Cost 2

St 1 Intrigue. Power.

Merchant

Response: After and opponent plays an event card, take 1 gold from the treasury and add it to your gold pold (~Lars: more gold to MWnK)

* Ser Meryn Trant (x1) (Neutral, Character)

Cost 1

St 2 Militar

Knight. Kingsguard

No attachment except Weapon.

Response: After you win a challenge as the defender, choos and stand a Kingsguard character.

City of Lies (x1) (Plot)

Gold 3 Init 6 Claim 1

City. When revealed, you may put up to 2 cards with the shadow crest into Shadows from your hand without paying any cost.

So how do people like the new chapter pack and/or the shadow mechanic? Finitesquarewell, CaseyVA, and I played with the cards for several hours on Sunday. We didn't play with all of the houses, but my impressions are as follows:

--Shadow Politics is much stronger than I thought...amazing card in Bara rush (just played it as multiplayer, not sure about joust). In fact, with that card and Battle to the Wall (and a bannerman attachment on King Renly), I almost won our multiplayer on round 2 (with only Brienne as the other character with renown)! Bara is going to love the extra challenge, and I've now added three copies to the deck.

--Dragon Skull is OK--not quite what I thought it was going to be. Flame kissed is much faster/more efficient early game, even with the relative lack of influence in the environment. The problem seems to be that gold is hard for Targ to save for the challenge phase. It also hurts that the earliest the attachment kills a character is challenges. I don't mean to say the new burn attachment is bad, it's utility is just a bit different from my original expectations. Dragon Skull still feels good late game, when Targ recursion kicks in and you have enough gold to play attachments repeatedly (but keep in mind its converted cost is 3 gold, so you have to drop a 3-gold character, then have 3 gold leftover to un-shadow the attachment).

--Selmy is a lot of fun, as expected. Of the games I played, the best time I revealed him was when my opponent--playing Lanni--had a hand of ~9 cards. That means there was a whole lot of scary Lanni stuff, so I can't say he saved me that much grief, but he did prevent Castellan of the Rock hitting the board that round Even when the response isn't that strong (opponent has crappy or no cards in hand), he's a solid guy that's nice to have on hand.

--Tyrion is really strong the turn he comes out, and in general I think he's a very promising shadow-based character. I don't think Lanni has enough cards, however, to really get the fullest bang for the buck (though even without repeated responses he's still very cost efficient). After a few more chapter packs are released, he's going to be extremely scary.

--Shadow isn't as fast as I thought it would be. Though I knew cards would be slower due to the "one shadow per phase" limit, the real inertia comes from the gold cost to fuel the cards. It's hard to save gold for shadow cards in the first marshalling phase, so in most cases the shadow cards really began to hit the field on round 2 or 3. The fact that you can "break up" the expense by paying 2 gold at first and the shadow cost later isn't all that great either early in the game. In most cases, it's better to drop a weenie for 2 gold or something that will benefit you immediately. That said, the shadow cards I played were pretty strong when played in later rounds.

That's basically it for now. I also played against Stark, but CaseyVA's Stark deck hadn't added the newest cards yet. There was one moment when he played To Be A Wolf and I thought to myself that if he had played the new Stark event (that allows a knelt character to defend) instead, he would have been in an incredibly strong position. Not that TBAW isn't awesome, just that in the couple of games I played there were several challenge phases in each that would have gone differently if he had that card.

Interesting... With an initiative of 6 City of Lies can get you out from the wrong side of an opening Rule By Decree. I also like how in a Shadow heavy deck it is essentially a 7 gold Plot... coupled with Stark's out of Shadows reducer they may be able to field a nice swarm of cards minimizing their vulnerability to early intrigue challenges.

I suspect if we see more s0 cost SHadow cards we may see more use in the first turn, but that Shadows is a bit on the lsower side working better in the mid and late game makes a certain amount of sense... though the one Shadows card a phase pretty much prevents any Shadows rush.

What I like about Tyrion is that he can act as a deterrent against your opponent bringing out Shadow cards, and forcing him to delay a reveal until dominance, standing, or Taxation (which for non-challenge cards should theoretically be a pretty popular tie to bring out non-character cards), where that STR boost and added keyword is not so helpful.

Thanx a lot Invierno.

Thank you Invierno. I will get my hands the cards on wednesday so it´s nice to know what to expect.

About some of the cards:

• treaty with the isles/south: It looks like these agendas encourage rush decks, it will be hard to establish a control or combo deck with the agendas drawback. I´m not sure if i´m happy about this, in fact at least it limits über-control deck on the one hand which is a good thing, but on the other hand it encourages players to build unnedly Blitzkrieg decks. To offer another perspective "Can you hope to stand a chance against a half dedicated Bara rush deck without playing a rush deck by yourself?" The risk seems to be very high.
• City of shadows agenda: Seems to be very strong, It´s a little bit like the true queen agenda for shadow cards, on top you are allowed to play neutrals and house x only shadow cards. I don´t know if the wording Invierno offered is exact, but is the +1 gold for ooh x only shadow cards considered a gold penalty?!
• City of lies: Awesome. Maybe one of the best plots designed in the past two years.
• Planning ahead (CS): This plot seems to have suddenly become very, very valueable. The shadow mechanic seems to be the no.1 reason that you want gold in the plot and draw phase.