Harry the Riverlands vs Summer/Winter Reserves

By booooooze, in 2. AGoT Rules Discussion

Posted at

Simple question: Can I kneel a Summer/Winter Reserves with my Harry the Riverlands?

Card text: House Lannister only.

Any Phase: Kneel any number of characters with combined printed cost 3 or lower.
Argument for yes: The Reserves are a character, and thus are a valid target. For the purposes of adding up the cost, its cost is 0. (Card doesn't specify that you can only kneel characters that have a printed cost; FAQ (3.1): Further, any card without a cost of the specified type is assumed to have a cost of 0 for purposes of determining how that card interacts with triggered effects that need to count its cost.)
Argument for no: The Reserves do not have a printed cost, and thus are not a valid target. (That the knelt character(s) need to have a printed cost is implied by the wording: "Kneel ... characters with ... printed cost"; Impossible to add up the combined printed cost of the characters when one of the values for printed cost is "null", FAQ (4.19): Printed Any reference made to "printed" be it cost, STR, icons, etc. only refers to the referenced item physically printed on the card itself. A card like Summer Reserves (Scattered ArmiesF119) does not have a printed cost or STR for instance. Any card effect that looked for the printed cost of a card without a printed cost would fail to find any cost and would return a null value, no item that could be referenced.)
I find both arguments have merit (we had no idea how to resolve it). I lean towards yes, but it seems to very much come down to a semantic argument of whether the event thinks it can kneel characters without a printed cost, and the wording is ambiguous at best.
Thanks.
Posted at

FFG rules on this about a year ago. The simple answer is that yes, Harry the Riverlands can kneel characters that do not have a printed cost.

Argument for no: The Reserves do not have a printed cost, and thus are not a valid target.

This ends up being the major flaw in the argument for "no." Harry the Riverlands does not actually "choose" any of the characters it kneels - meaning that it doesn't target anything. Because it does not target the characters it kneels individually, it doesn't look at each character to determine their individual printed costs. It is only looking at the ​total printed cost of all characters knelt. Since we're dealing with a total (as opposed to an identification or a comparison), FAQ 3.12 controls rather than FAQ 4.19.