There quite a lot of characters in House Arryn in the books. But in the game just a couple of cards. It is interesting, if FGG is going to tap this resource and if so - in what form: as neutral characters or maybe as a new house?

No way in **** for a new house. They just don't have enough characters, and they don't have enough interesting/popular characters.

They did have House Arryn in other editions, but I think they've always been pretty low priority. I wouldn't expect them for at least another few cycles, considering they'll likely want to fill out (at least) Maesters/Brotherhood/The Seven due to agendas.

I think there are enough characters for a House Arryn faction in GOT LCG 2nd Edition. You only need approximately 30 characters for a 60-cards deck, and only 10-15 of them have to be unique characters. A Song of Ice and Fire saga allows to get without problem 15 unique characters for Arryn faction, and it is not difficult imagine some non-unique characters more.

I hope FFG may rethink its decision and we can see an Arryn Deluxe Expansion box with this new faction. I have the GOT LCG 1st edition and I am decided to not jump to the 2nd edition until the changes or improvements are worthy enough, because Night's Watch is a faction without sense and Tyrell house does not make enough difference respect of the 1st edition.

I'm not much into this game, I am looking at jumping in with these House Intro packs, but my question about bringing in House Arryn is will it throw off any balance between the other factions and is there a theme yet to be explored? Knights are being used by Tyrell, which was one of the big themes of House Arryn in the books, iirc.

They're probably not going to bring them in right now. Knights theme can overlap since it's a theme shared by Lannister as well (to a lesser extent). I wouldn't worry about it killing balance though. When you already have 8 factions, what would one more be?

On 4/8/2018 at 10:34 PM, Willange said:

When you already have 8 factions, what would one more be?

A logical fallacy.

2 hours ago, Kakita Shiro said:

A logical fallacy.

How so? Adding an extra faction to a game like Starcraft 2 is much more difficult due to the fact that the 3 factions there each have a much larger design space. Adding a new faction would mean finding 33% more design space. Adding a 9th faction to a game only calls for 12.5% of design space. I'm not meaning to say that adding an extra faction would be completely trivial, but relative to many other games it could seem so. That's especially true in a game like this one where cross-faction decks are allowed because the design space isn't as strict (though cross-faction decks also carry the potential for more un-thought-of combos, but this game also mitigates that effect through many of it's deliberate synergies). Granted, this does assume your game doesn't leave obvious massive design space 'holes' where you know more factions have room to be added (for example, x-wing had a lot of relatively obvious mechanical gaps that scum slid in to fill).

I think the most important thing here is to make up the factions identity and themes, like

Stark - family duty and honor, pack mentality, using no tricks and so on

Lannister - abundance of gold, intrigues, clansmen and so on

What could work for Arryn. Their words - As High as Honor.

What strikes me about them in the books is neutrality, they are self-contained, rich enough.

This has to be turned into some playable game mechanic.

The issue with House Arryn as a main faction is this: List your top five House Arryn characters. Remove any of them that are a) not House Arryn (Littlefinger, Sansa, Blackfish etc), or b) dead before the books even begin (Jon). That leaves you with idiot manchild, Cat Stark's crazy sister, and maybe someone like Robar Royce. It's like a faction where your 'main characters' are Lancel Lannister, Rickon Stark and Ser Roderick. Most people aren't going to be interested in it. They just don't have the star power for it. In comparison, both Tyrell and NW absolutely have the 'big names' to sell the faction.

Adding another faction causes issues with Chapter Packs, as it means less cards for everyone. And FFG doesn't seem to be interested in 'minor faction' stuff that gets printed once and then dropped (which IMO is a good thing for several reasons). I think implementing them mechanically is less of an issue than actually fitting them in to the release schedule.

The other thing with Arryn is that they generally make sense as being neutral. Much like the Frey's, their place in the story fits with them being a neutral faction that other houses interact with, rather than being a force in their own right. Honestly, the best thing for them to do is what they did with the Frey's - create a neutral agenda that does x, and design the House Arryn cards in such a way so that they interact well with doing x.

Yes, I also think they will be developed like Freys as neutrals.