Welcome to the A Game of Thrones: The Card Game spotlight! First and foremost we would like to thank everyone who came to participate in our LCG Days regional tournaments and made it an awesome event. We hope to see you all at our next big tournament. We would also like to congratulate our tournament winners:

Melee: Will Lentz
Joust: Lucas Reed
Overall: Greg Atkinson

Congratulations, all!

Today, we’ll take a look at the next Chapter Pack in Secrets of Oldtown, Called by the Conclave, and a new Baratheon Maester, Maester Lomys. Specifically, we will be looking at Maester Lomys' impact on the Baratheon rush.

Blooming Before the Frost

Taking a quick step back, we note that the basic premise of a power rush deck is to get out a few key characters quickly and try to get as much power as you can before your opponent can put up an adequate defense to stop you. With the right deck any House can do this, but House Baratheon excels at it. The reason is its prevalence of characters with renown. Claiming extra power on won challenges is pretty strong, given that the goal of the game is to claim power, and when multiple characters with renown are participating in challenges, the amount of power you can claim in a turn can be staggering.

A major drawback to this strategy, however, is the fragility of characters. All sorts of things can kill or discard characters and when they die all of their power goes with them. If you have a ton of power on your characters and those characters die, you suffer a major setback on the road to victory, especially if your opponent has also been stacking up power and takes the lead because of all of your dead renown characters. This can be especially punishing because so many renowned characters are also unique and if they die they can't be replaced with copies. Many is the number of power rush players who have gotten so close only to be defeated by a Valar, Wildfire, or direct kill. There are ways to protect these characters: duplicates, Bodyguards, Power of Blood, etc., but you always run the risk of running out of saves before claiming the final, critical power.

Pruning the Garden

Packing your deck with duplicates and attachments to save your renowned characters can potentially bloat it. This is especially true in those situations when you've just lost an important character and the thing you most need to draw from the top of your deck is another character, not a support card.

Fortunately, there are a few efficient cards like Loyal Guard and Ser Parmen Crane that work double duty as characters and saves. With Called by the Conclave, Maester Lomys enters the fray to help keep your powerhouse characters alive. Maester Lomys does have a significant drawback, in that you actually have to discard power from your characters (and kneel Maester Lomys) in order to give them "cannot be killed", but given the choice between losing all of the power on a character and losing just one, it comes out to be the lesser of two evils. What is more, you can save multiple characters from a reset if you time it right, such as using Maester Lomys' ability a pre-plot action just before a Valar.

Hopefully we've given you plenty to discuss here in the comments and on the A Game of Thrones forums. Until next time!