Hello, I would appreciate a clarification of the following problem:

There are 2 Agenda cards (Treaty with Isles/with South) which bypass need for paying a gold penalty for playing Greyjoy/Martell cards in your deck, when you select another House (than these 2). However, if you use any of it, each of your opponents needs to collect 5 less power to win (but minim. 10).

In a melee game or in a duel, it is clear that the "new pensum" is 10.

But how it is in a team game - 2 team, 2 players in each team. If one player in team A plays one of these 2 agendas, how many power does the team B need to collect? 25 = (30 - 5) or 20 = ( 2 * (15 -5))?

And another question: Are these agendas worth playing? Does not their penalization overweigh their benefit?

Thanks for answer.

Artemis said:

That's a good question about 2 vs 2. My guess would be that the since the victory condition is to count thirty power as a team that the -5 modifier would be applied to the team power count. It's not the case that each player needs to reach 15 - there is only the one combined count, so I would apply the modifier just to that combined count. In the announcement for GenCon, they refer to the "combined victory total (30 power, or more if Agendas are being run)" which is not much help here.

The agendas have seen marginal play in competitive joust. A Baratheon Treaty with the South deck did well in a tournament in New York recently. It was basically a Baratheon rush deck that took advantage of The Red Viper and Lost Oasis to support the power grabbing. The penalty of the treaty is not so much of a liability when your goal is to win as quickly as possible, especially when your deck's strong suit is the power challenge. So in a deck built to mitigate the downsides of the agendas, one of the Treaty agendas can be used to good effect. In general though the penalty is not worth it if you just want to take an average deck and throw in a few cards from a different house.

By the way, in Lords of Winter a third agenda (Treaty with the North) was released.

How about this scenario:

4 player game.

3 people are using treaties.

Does the 4th player automatically win the game?

No, the Treaties can not reduce the power needed to win below 10.

schrecklich said:

Yeah, the effective -5 power is not cumulative. In fact, the Treaty Agendas make certain that your opponent can't win with less than 10 power as they say that non-Treaty decks need a MINIMUM of 10 power to win. For this reason Formal Petition would not bring the victory condition down to 8 power, it would still stay at 10.

FATMOUSE said:

Keep in mind, though, that ALL players need 10 to win in that multiplayer game.

Player A: Treaty #1 (gives B, C & D "-5 to win; minimum of 10")

Player B: Treaty # 2 (gives A, C & D "-5 to win; minimum of 10")

Player C: Treaty #3 (gives A, B & D "-5 to win; minimum of 10")

Player D: No Treaty.

That means A, B and C are all "-10 to win; minimum of 10" and D is "-15 to win; minimum of 10." Everyone is effectively at 10 to win.

The other thing to consider is that all those Treaties are going to counteract "need X additional power to win." For example, if Player D has 3 Deep Freeze attachments played on his House card ("needs 2 additional power to win the game"), he's still only going to need 10 power to win the game because the +6 power to win is compensated for by the cumulative "-15 to win; minimum of 10" from his opponents' Treaties.

Oh, and BTW: Formal Petition would bring the total needed to win down to 8. The "minimum of 10" is a condition put on the -5 from the Treaty Agenda. It does not apply to other effects that lower the number of power to win. The -5 can't take it below 10, but the -2 from Formal Petition can.

ktom said:

Interesting - I didn't realize that the restriction on the Treaties worked that way. Basically, you can choose to apply the treaty modifier before other modifiers, I guess is one way to look at it. ktom, don't forget that first clause in the Treaty reducer text - they do no apply to other players running treaties so in the example given three players would be at -0 and the other would be at -15, minimum of 10."

schrecklich said:

I did forget that. Thanks.

ktom said:

This basically boils down to a "How do you know that?" question, but how do you determine if an effect like the Treaty's is a "global" (affects all cards) or "local" (affects a limited number of cards) restriction. I took the "minimum of 10" to affect everything in the game.

ktom said:

The way we play Formal petition here is that we can't reduce the Treaty's "minimum of 10", considering it as a global effect. How do we know it only applies to those agenda effects?

From Nate:

"The Treaty agenda does enforce a minimum of 10 power to win a game."

Therefore, Formal Petition can't bring the minimum victory count to 8. It can however reduce positive modifiers (i.e. Summer Tax when it's Summer) to 10.

Good to know. To me it seems like the treaties should not be able to reduce the total below 10 - ie if the total would be reduced below 10 in part because of the reduction from the treaty then the total is 10. From Nate's wording there though it sounds like the treaties enforce a minimum 10 even outside of their own effects. So eg if you had six Summer Taxes on your house card during winter and your opponent was running a treaty you would still need 10 power rather than 9. Maybe I'll Nate one day if this kind of situation ever becomes a realistic possibility.

schrecklich said:

Don't you mean 4 power to win, not 9 (if you have 6 Summer taxes on your House card during Winter)? And yes, according to Nate you need AT LEAST 10 power to win if you are facing a non-Treaty deck, regardless of any victory power count reducers (i.e. Formal Petition, Summer Tax, etc.). Another Agenda (i.e. You have X stuff and only need 5 power to win) is probably the only thing that can get around this restriction, but there is currently no such Agenda, so I'm not worried.

So I guess we can say that, without exception, 10 power is currently the "floor"?

~there goes my 15 attachments on King Visereys deck

FATMOUSE said:

No, 9 power because the -5 from the treaty would not be applied if you had already had the total needed reduced to 10 or lower by other effects.

Egg said:

No. That is not what we can say. What Nate said is that a Treaty Agenda enforces a 10-power minimum regardless of other card effects. If you are not facing a Treaty deck, there is no limit being enforced and combinations of Formal Petition. Summer Tax and Viserys can indeed bring the power you need to win below 10.

Said another way, if no one at the table has a Treaty deck, where is the "minimum of 10 power" limit coming from?

schrecklich said:

I'm afraid that interpretation is incorrect. The Treaty Agenda specifically say non-Treaty opponents need 5 fewer power to win. This -5 power effect is constant. The Agenda enforces a minimum of 10 power. Meaning, it doesn't make the victory condition 10 power. It typically happens to be 10 though because of the 5 fewer power effect and the fact that most decks normally only need 15 power to win. However, some decks (i.e. The North) need more than 15 power. A 3x North Agenda deck would need (21-5) 16 power to win against a Treaty deck, but can be further reduced to a minimum of 10. You're suggesting that you would need -6 power modifiers to get down to 15 power when you only need -1 power modifier to get down to 15 power.

There is no reason why if it's Winter and Summer Tax is on the non-Treaty House card that the Treaty Agenda would be altered from 5 fewer power to 4 fewer power; or in your example, from 5 fewer power to 0 fewer power. Additionally (and I'm not certain about this because Adobe won't let me load the FAQ), I'm pretty certain that non-Agenda cards can't alter Agenda cards; ergo, the 5 fewer power will always be constant regardless of what cards you play from your draw or plot deck.

FATMOUSE said:

Sorry, my posts were unclear. It was not my intent to provide *any* interpretation of the way the treaty agendas actually work. Rather, I was simply remarking on the fact that to me the way the treaties work (as specified by the combination of the text on the cards and the ruling you quoted from Nate) runs counter to how I would expect such a card to work in the abstract (and also how the cards *seem* to work, without the clarification from Nate's ruling).

I'll try to make my remark again in a more clear way, but it was really just a tangential comment on what is currently a pretty unlikely scenario in the LCG. My first reading of the treaties (again, without knowing Nate's ruling; I'm not trying to argue this is how the treaties work; I'm just explaining what seemed most sensible to me) was that they could reduce the power needed to win by as much as 5 power but could not reduce the power needed to win below 10. Effectively, I thought that with a treaty controlled by one player the calculation of the opposing players victory total would work by starting with 15 and applying all non-Treaty victory total modifiers. Then, one of three things would happen: if the total were 10 or below, it became the victory total; if it were between 11 and 15, the victory total became 10, and if it were greater than 15, the victory total became that number minus 5.

So I thought that things would work like this:

1 North Agenda + Treaty = 15+2(north)-5(treaty)=12 to win

Treaty+1 Summer Tax in Winter = 15-1(tax)-4(treaty)=10 to win

Treaty+2 Summer Tax in Winter = 15-2(tax)-3(treaty)=10 to win
Treaty+3 Summer Tax in Winter = 15-3(tax)-2(treaty)=10 to win
Treaty+4 Summer Tax in Winter = 15-4(tax)-1(treaty)=10 to win
Treaty+5 Summer Tax in Winter = 15-5(tax)-0(treaty)=10 to win
Treaty+6 Summer Tax in Winter = 15-6(tax)-0(treaty)=9 to win

Basically, my point was just that the paranthetical "to a minimum of 10" reads to me more like a restriction to the Treaties' effects rather than a global modifier to all opponents' victory conditions. The discrepancy between my interpretation and the actual ruling not likely to have much of an impact in a game in the near future, but it is interesting to note that if more cards like KotS Viserys get printed running a Treaty could become an "answer" to stopping any sort of combo strategy based off of reducing the victory total since the Treaties enforce a global minimum on all modifiers to the victory total.

Hopefully, we are on the same page now : ) If not, maybe you can clarify this statement: "There is no reason why if it's Winter and Summer Tax is on the non-Treaty House card that the Treaty Agenda would be altered from 5 fewer power to 4 fewer power." The player would need 5 less because of the agenda and 1 less because of the Tax, but the total would be still be 10. Are you just making a semantic point here? The agenda is effectively only reducing the total 4 in this case. There are of course different ways of phrasing it (Summer Tax has no effect, one reduces by 5 and the other by 1 but then the agenda makes the total be 10, etc.).

schrecklich said:

Oh, ok. Everything makes much more sense now. I thought you were providing an interpretation.

schrecklich said:

In the case I described I would say that all the negative modifiers effectively reduce the total victory condition to 10. Not the Agenda -4 and Summer Tax -1 or any combination. That was part of the point of my post. I can't/couldn't see a real reason why adding negative modifiers would make them "disappear" and then "reappear" if that negative modifier was removed or a positive modifier was added. Those modifiers are constant, it's just that they don't "work" when trying to go below 10. It's the same thing as burning a 1 STR character with Flame-Kissed. Flame-Kissed decreases its STR by 2, but it only goes down to 0 despite 1-2= -1. That doesn't mean Flame-Kissed STR modifier becomes -1. It's still -2, it just can't bring it below 0. If there was a location that said, "Kneel to this card to save a character and give it +1 STR the character until the end of phase." the character would still immediately die from Flame-Kissed as it's STR would still be 0, 1-2+1=0. What you were implying with the how the Agenda worked is that situation would go from 1-1= 0 to 1-2-1= 0. I didn't/don't see how the "voodoo" math could ever happen. However if there was some weird phrasing on the Treaty Agenda that did say the Treaty itself can't reduce below 10 power, then I suppose it would happen. I didn't interpret it that way, but I can understand why others, including yourself did. It's why I sent a question to Nate for clarification.

If I'm wrong about how Flame-Kissed (or any other burn effect) technically works, please let me know.

FATMOUSE said:

You're not wrong about Flame-Kissed. The difference compared to the treaty agendas though is that the 0 STR minimum is imposed by the rules of the game rather than by Flame-Kissed itself, whereas the treaty agendas are imposing a new minimum different from the default imposed by the rules of the game. Random other consequence of this ruling: if you are using the Kings of Winter agenda and it's Summer, you will always draw 1 one card, no matter what other draw reducers are in play : ) (though probably it's unlikely there will ever be a draw reducer that doesn't specify a minimum of 1 any way).

schrecklich said:

if you are using the Kings of Summer agenda and it's Winter, you will always draw 1 one card

schrecklich said:

Knights of the Realm

Rogue30 said:

That's what I meant : )

Rogue30 said:

Hmm, but you can't run both agendas at the same time. I was thinking of a character that had something like "Each player draws 1 less card during the draw step," but a card like that would probably always have the minimum of 1 specification; otherwise the game could get totally locked down by multiples.

schrecklich said:

Yes, but if they did it once, then maybe they will do more ...and then we would need errata