Hello and Welcome Back, Loyal A Game of Thrones Fans!

This week we continue our look at the upcoming A Song of Silence Chapter Pack from the Brotherhood Without Banners expansion cycle. Last time we took a closer look at the developing Raider theme of House Greyjoy that will be featured in this pack, but this time out we thought we would examine the overarching Brotherhood theme of this cycle by looking at a card that will make it a little more interesting, Hollow Hill.

A Game of Thrones players will probably agree that while the Brotherhood characters can be pretty good on their own, they work much better with the Brotherhood Without Banners agenda in play.

What really makes the Brotherhood special is their suite of abilities that trigger off of not having any power on your House card. This is made easier over the long stretch of the game by the Brotherhood agenda. Of course, with it your Brotherhood characters, and your game, are just as vulnerable as renowned characters - keep duplicates and Thoros of Myr handy - but the tradeoff of some pretty sweet abilities will hopefully make up for that.

The Neutral House card is also something of an agenda unto itself*. You can build a deck around it - Brotherhood, Night's Watch, Wildling, etc. - and add in characters from all of the other Houses as your "splash" characters, as opposed to the other way around, which brings us to Hollow Hill.

With Hollow Hill and the Neutral House card in play, you can get rid of all gold penalties on characters (although you're still stuck with the gold penalties on locations and attachments), with the added bonus of getting to draw a card whenever you play a card not of your House affiliation. This could be quite often, depending on how diverse you make your deck. The question that naturally arises from this combo is what aspects of the various Houses (leaving out the "House X Only" cards) would you bring together if you could and could you make them work together?

On the other hand, there is nothing to say that you could not use Hollow Hill with any House card and reap the benefits if you had a need to mix more Houses together and had the additional gold to pay for it. The question therefore remains the same, but with the addendum of asking if it's also worth the additional gold.

So there you have it, more options for a more diverse A Game of Thrones experience. We hope there's plenty to discuss here in the comments and on the A Game of Thrones forums. Until next time!

* Those of you who can remember back that far can see certain similarities with the True Queen agenda.