It makes Stark immediately stronger and helps push them up the rnakings. It makes people have to consider playing them at competitive events. Its a sepcific push for what was perceived as the weakest House - why let everyone use on of their best tech cards? I'm fine with it.
What if every House had ubiquitous draw or no draw at all?
i'm for a more evolving diverse environment of cards, making stuff house only completely slows that down.
Yeah, making frozen solid house stark only seems to be a poor choice considering the lack of attachment control in the game(which is what I would use this card for more than the location control.) Especially after Compelled by the Rock just got banned. I'm all for houses having in house strengths that they are better at and can do more easily than other houses. I am not for having stuff that really only one or two houses can do.
Staton said:
Yeah, making frozen solid house stark only seems to be a poor choice considering the lack of attachment control in the game(which is what I would use this card for more than the location control.) Especially after Compelled by the Rock just got banned. I'm all for houses having in house strengths that they are better at and can do more easily than other houses. I am not for having stuff that really only one or two houses can do.
I agree completely. If the card pool was bigger I wouldn't mind at all, but we are playing lcg after all and we are very very limited. Why make us more limited than we have to be already.
I would love to have had it available to every house as well, but possibly the fear was that precisely because of the lack of options, it may be a card that shows up in almost every deck? Of course it can be argued whether or not this would have been the case, but it may have been a factor, along with a conscious effort to boost Stark without helping any other house, as Stag said, which is very likely one of the reasons behind the change.
Right now, I don't really like the House Stark only restriction on Frozen Solid. However, I'm sure as the LCG card pool continues to grow, it won't be such a bad thing, and in that context I kind of like it. In a weird way, I think it almost allows for more design space in the other houses as the infinite LCG card pool grows.
Yeah I don't really see why they made it Stark only. If someone really wantd to pay 3 gold for a single rather fragile blanking effect let em. House only stuff makes a lot of sense with things like Ambush and the new Darkstar or shadows where if they didn't have house only there would be no difference in costs to play.
In general in my experience the cost vs benefit of OOH cards almost always ends up being too high once you have enough cards available to choose from.
Freerider said:
In general in my experience the cost vs benefit of OOH cards almost always ends up being too high once you have enough cards available to choose from.
Unless you play Lannister of course, haha.
Lanni wins again! When will it stop???
The solution that I find would work out is that the same house shouldn't have butt loads of gold AND the best card draw, that would balance things out rather nicely I think.
Wrecking Ball said:
i'm for a more evolving diverse environment of cards, making stuff house only completely slows that down.
The only problem w/ this logic is that making it avaialble for all houses actually lessens the diversity of decks. Remember when all houses played Frozen...or Seal of the Lion...?
I am also not buying the limited card pool anymore. There are a lot of choices to be made - obviously like at any time in this game (or any game's) history there are staples, but there are a ton of cards out there now. I agree I wish there was more viable sub-themes, but hopefully Wildlings, NW (not looking good), and Brotherhood can start this back up.
ASoIaFfan said:
I agree with the folks who would like to see "thematic" draw for all houses. I also don't get why Lannister has easy draw. I see gold as their house specialty, not draw. I think draw should not be a specialty of any house, but there should be ways for all houses to increase draw through thematic mechanisms as others have related.
I'd like to see GTM replaced with a location that made/let Lannister buy cards. That would be thematic, and still relatively easy for them to achieve, while making other decisions potentially more difficult.
Ok, but I guess thats where i'm getting confused. Maybe there are enough cards out there at the moment, but then why can't there be more viable subthemes? Is it because the cards you would stick into those subthemes aren't very good or is it that there just aren't enough cards to spread around for those certain subthemes, it has to be one or the other.
Wrecking Ball said:
Ok, but I guess thats where i'm getting confused. Maybe there are enough cards out there at the moment, but then why can't there be more viable subthemes? Is it because the cards you would stick into those subthemes aren't very good or is it that there just aren't enough cards to spread around for those certain subthemes, it has to be one or the other.
I think they are heading the right direction, but it is a hard balance...you make a subtheme with too many good cards and it is the main theme 
Wildlings IMHO look to be a good theme that let's you spash stealth, location control, and some other tricks. I would like to see something similar w/ Brotherhood (returning from the dead? Anti-control?), Clansmen (burning burning burning!), Kingsguard (getting more of them out really scales their power plus King/Queen protection), and Lords/Ladies/Nobles in general.
I saw Frozen Solid out of more houses than I saw it out of Stark, now that was because the only people in my meta that played Stark were the newer players... which of course begs the question why do so few experienced players play Stark? If I had to venture a guess it would be that they are simplistic, not particularly elegant, relatively weak, and not adaptable enough... IOW boring. My impression is that the boxed sets are intended to bring up the competitive level of the Houses and Frozen Solid that is considered worth 3 gold in other Houses raises their competitive level, not Starks...
Which puts us at a point where you think that 3 gold is not worth it in which case the house only restriction is immaterial, or you really do believe that it is worth the 3 gold in which case it is hard to argue about the card raising the competitive level of non-Stark Houses in a set intended to boost Stark. I guess the point to argue then is whether the boxed set would raise Stark enough that the boost an unrestricted Frozen Solid could give to other houses would be negligible.
Of course, that argument could be made for any card then. If any card is ever worth paying the 2 gold penalty on, then it evidently brings up the competitive level of other houses and not the one it was printed for. If we go too far down that road then we just say that everything must be printed as house only in order to avoid other houses potentially wanting to run something from another house.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for cards that come into play other than the standard way getting slapped with House Only or certain key or thematic characters, events, or whatnot, but I suppose the problem in this situation is that the card was originally printed with more possibilites than it now has.
Yeah Kennon - but the LCG game isn't CCG and possibilites are supposed to be more limited. Plus - making an A+ card like Frozen Solid available everywhere means you end up seeing it more OOH than out of satrk - just like dormouse pointed out. For the players looking for a tehmatic feel simialr to teh books - this is a turn off. And again - they're trying to bring stark back: not give everyone a tool for teh box.
A 100% agree with dormouse. Great post.
Of course, from the spoiled cards.... why would I want to buy the box if I'm not all that interested in building a Stark deck myself? Between Frozen Solid, some plots, and maybe neutral stuff, there might've been enough draw for someone that's not Stark enthused to pick up the box. As is.... Well, maybe that's a design flaw of the box's contents, or maybe it was on purpose. I don't know.
A better question I see though, is why should the possibilities be more limited? I don't recall reading any statements to that end from FFG, so that just leaves me trying to figure out how that benefits me as a player. Sadly, I don't see how less possibilities are more fun.
Because you don't play Stark. There is nothing as frustrating as seeing your best card(s) being used just as often and sadly often more effectively by houses not your own.
And the box set serves a specific purpose of advancing a single house. It is intended to also include neutral and cards of other houses for those players to see some worth in owning the box, but it is without a doubt intended to boost the singular house. Cards in a cycle or in the core are intended to strengthen specific themes within the houses ideally without upsetting the balance too much. I'm interested in what Lannister's is going to look like a year or so from now.
dormouse said:
Because you don't play Stark. There is nothing as frustrating as seeing your best card(s) being used just as often and sadly often more effectively by houses not your own.
Kennon, think Cersei's Favor. That's why they made Frozen Solid House Stark Only.
And yet strangely no one ever agreed with me about Cersei's Favor.
That's because we didn't want to replace it in our decks. 
If I remember correctly Cersies favor wasn't the problem card, the problem card was swayed by the light. The only reason cersie's favor made my decks was for that reason and that reason alone. Hell I remember playing bastard on my own characters just because of swayed by the light, so cersie's favor isn't alone. We see the same with frozen solid, because each house can't take of their needs from within their own house or neutral cards we must use cards out of house, and it is worth paying the penalty. If there were more answers for location and attachments there would be no need to play cards like cersies favor or frozen solid out of house.
Kennon said:
A better question I see though, is why should the possibilities be more limited? I don't recall reading any statements to that end from FFG, so that just leaves me trying to figure out how that benefits me as a player. Sadly, I don't see how less possibilities are more fun.
Count me in the group that enjoys more resource management and deck restrictions! I hated seeing Frozen solid in every deck (granted I was an avid Eyrie player). And I did not like the 5KE environment, when between the Vale/Reach/Riverlands and such, it seemed like every turn you had nearly unlimited influence and gold to do whatever you wanted. I realize not everyone agrees with me, but I like tough decisions. And sometimes tough decisions are made because you can't have an answer to every situation in every house and every deck. The metagame starts becoming more important.
Yeah the Vale/Reach/Riverrun days were pretty hectic, I ran 2x Vales and 2x Riverruns in every deck just to get one on the flop. The amount of gold you could produce was just nuts.
Wrecking Ball said:
because each house can't take of their needs from within their own house or neutral cards we must use cards out of house, and it is worth paying the penalty. If there were more answers for location and attachments there would be no need to play cards like cersies favor or frozen solid out of house.
Dobbler said:
I realize not everyone agrees with me, but I like tough decisions. And sometimes tough decisions are made because you can't have an answer to every situation in every house and every deck. The metagame starts becoming more important.
See I don't see these two points as mutual opposing each other. If you take what Wreck says (summed up as if you give stark frozen solid, why not let it be played OOH to help solve the problems with the card pool that effects certain houses over others, i.e. the competitive balance). What I'm hearing from dobs is' no easy choices.' Stark has a really easy choice, plus easy access to the other forms of location control (osha for spikes CbtC, war crest for PoW, attachment control in house to use frozen as location control, etc). Other houses have to stretch to use just one of those forms. Adding frozen still makes for hard choices....do i mess up my gold curve or try to add more intrigue icons/war crest(if able,) etc. I'd buy Dob's argument if resources were as plentiful as they were in 5KE, but there aren't and a 2 gold penalty can be a big cost, at the least its dropping your plot choices down to 6.
They should just reprint high tide.