Meh, been playing for the past two-three months and I have to say- Whenever the "Covert" cards come up, I feel like the design team might as well have said "Okay, this trait means that unless you plan specifically for the Covert cards to come up and hoard your actions just for those occasions, you are the lucky winner of n evening where you get to sit down and watch your opponent play solitaire. You are no longer welcome to act, move, or play cards whatsoever- which is the only possible reason we created this stupid trait that has no drawbacks. Pride? Well, if you lose you're dishonored. All of the others come with a cost, of course... but "Covert"? No, we get to use that every single conflict and there is absolutely NO cost to us at all!" Admittedly, it would have been long to put on a card- but at least it would have been more entertaining to read for the amount of time your opponent will take in playing solitaire against a deck you no longer have to be present to defend. In fact, you were specifically told to stay home, don't bother coming, it's just not worth the trouble. Who cares that you wanted to have fun in the game... the point now is to shut down your opponent so they can't ever do anything and that will determine the fate of an empire. Not who CAN act, but how often you can stop someone from acting.

So many great cards in the game, but every deck is running every cancel effect available to their clan and beyond- I haven't played against a single online player who hasn't run censure. It would be really interesting to see how the environment would actually work if every covert and cancel card were just removed from the game and players had to actually out-think and out-maneuver eachother rather than just robo-playing the same three or four decks ad infinitum.

Covert is why movement effects have such a high priority for many decks. However it should be noted outside of a few clans it is also a very rarely given trait, and most characters with it have a slightly lower stat line relative to their cost to offset.

I don't see the point in promoting so much lack of interactivity among cards. Gain stats, lower stats, remove people, move people- all of that I get during the conflicts. But so much cancellation, pre-conflict denial, and just so many ways in which decks are currently playing where the idea is to pilot a deck that just shuts down options for your opponent seems the exact opposite of the game that I heard being advertised. It's like playing chess and crazy-gluing your opponents pieces to the board... and pretending your still playing. You're not. It's just nonsense.