How does Hollow Hill's (If you have no power on your House card, reduce the gold penalty on all characters you play from your hand by 1. Response: After you play a character with an affiliation that does not match any other card you control (including your House card), draw 1 card) draw response trigger?

Is the trigger for drawing every time I play a character if I have a card in play with a different affiliation, even if I also have other cards in play with the same affiliation? Or is the trigger every time I play a card and no other card I have in play matches that affiliation?

For example, if I'm running a Stark/Targ deck with the Alliance agenda (Before drawing your setup hand, name a House. Ignore the out-of-House gold penalty to play or place cards from that House. The House card of each opponent without a Treaty agenda gains: 'Marshalling: Kneel this card to (choose 1): draw 1 card or take 2 gold from the treasury to your gold pool.'), and I have both Stark and Targ cards in play, can I trigger Hollow Hill's response every time I play a character (obviously, until I hit the draw cap)?

Twentyft said:

Seems pretty straight-forward. No draw if you already control a card with that affiliation.

Makes sense. It's what I thought. But as I was reading it again, the idea popped into my head that it could mean after you play a character whose affiliation is not the same as any individual card you control, rather than not the same as all the affiliations you currently control.

Thread Necromancer says: "Rise ye."

After some discussion at CardgameDB ( here ) Khudzlin sent a question about how Hollow Hill interacts with dual-house characters. Here is the question and answer that he got from Damon.

The exact question:
I'm playing house Stark and I have Hollow Hill (Response: After you play a character with an affiliation that does not match any other card you control (including your House card), draw 1 card.) in play. I play Ser Jorah Mormont (Princes of the Sun), who has the Targaryen and Stark affiliations. Can I trigger Hollow Hill's response (assuming I have no cards with the Targaryen affiliation in play before playing him)?

And here is the answer from Damon Stone:
The question to ask is does the card you played have your house affiliation or an affiliation that matches any other card. Ser Jorah Mormont does match your house card so you do not get to draw.

Somehow Damon's interpretation seems a bit… peculiar, to me. I always believed that the comparison was done for each house affiliation separately - so for a Bara/Martell card like Spiteful Bastard you would first compare Baratheon to all other cards you have, and then compare Martell separately… So, what's happening here? Is the affiliation with Hollow Hill for a card like Spiteful Bastard considered to be Martell/Bara, with even a partial match being a match? Or is there something else in the wording that I'm missing in the 'an affiliation that does not match' portion?

I agree with you Drakey… to me the wording on hollow hill can only mean one of two things, and Damon's answer isn't one of them.

(Least Likely) 1) Check the affiliation of the card. The affiliation of this card is "Stark & Targ". You control no other "Stark & Targ" cards, draw a card.

(My interpretation) 2) Check the affiliations of the card. Is there an "affiliation that does not match …". There is Targ - you control no other Targ cards, draw a card.

For it to be the way Damon says, it would have to be written differently. Something like "After you play a character whose affiliation(s) do not match…"

The way I understand Damon's answer is:

1. Multiple House shields on a card are all part of its affiliation (singular)
2. "Match" isn't the same as "be", so I have no problem with considering "Stark&Targaryen" matches "Stark" while being different from it.

But the bottom line is what Damon wrote, since he's the rules guy.

This is as old as dual-House characters.

Look at it this way: say I have an effect that says "Response: after you play a character with an affiliation that does not match any other character you control, draw a card." The only character you have in play is Brienne of Tarth (Satrk/Bara dual). Then you play Wildling Bard (also Stark/Bara dual). Can you draw a card or not? If you insist on making comparisons to all affiliations differently, you end up with 4 possible answers:

1. Bara-Brienne & Bara-Bard: Response invalid
2. Bara-Brienne & Stark-Bard: Response valid
3. Stark-Brienne & Bara-Bard: Response valid
4. Stark-Brienne & Stark-Bard: Response invalid

Which one of those 4 do you follow? Well, Drakey and Istrail - by saying you look at everything individually and if there is anything that doesn't match, the "doesn't match" requirement is met - seem to be saying that since #2 & 3 are a possibility, there is no match, so the Response could be used. But seriously, how much more could 2 Stark/Bara dual house characters match?

This question is as old as dual-House cards. FFG's ruling is that since the dual House card is - at all times - as much one affiliation as the other, then so long as there is any match between the dual and another card, the affiliations match.

That's what you are running into here. Since Jorah is always as much Stark as Targ, he will never be a non-Stark, and will always match your Stark House card, even if you are looking at his Targ affiliation.

ktom said:

Okay, that clears the logic up for me nicely, thanks. My original gut instinct went that ' won't there be issues using dual house cards with cards Feral Pack? ', but looks to me like the wording there has been made to take that into account. Essentially we're always just looking at the overlaps between the two defined groups, and they 'match' if the overlap is non-zero.

That said, looking at Imposter, the term affiliation seems to be used a bit differently between cards.

I'm willing to accept that that's the ruling by precedent and by official word from on high, but I admit I don't follow your logic Ktom.

By my reasoning, I'd, play "Brienne", check for any other stark characters - is there any other card in play that has the Stark affiliation? If there is, then I cannot draw for her stark affiliation. I then check for other Baratheon characters - are there any other cards in play with a Bara affiliation? In this case, there is, so I cannot draw for her bara affiliation. If I played Brienne with a neutral house, I'd still only have played one character, so I wouldn't be drawing for each affiliation with hollow hill.

To me, this all comes from Hollow Hill asking me to see if the card has AN affiliation that matches no other card in play, and treating "Stark & Bara" as two affiliations for all purposes - on the card played and the cards I'm checking against. As I said, I see no scenario in which Brienne would allow you to draw with bard in play, because *either* you check for each affiliation against all other affiliations, or you check for the (sole) affiliation, which in this case is "Stark & Bara" (1 item).

Allowing "Stark and Bara" to be one affiliation for purposes of cards that refer to "An" affiliation but two for purposes of cards that check against it seems fundamentally inconsistent.

-Istaril said:

The point is that you are playing one card, but coming up with two different answers. You cannot have two answers for one card.

Ultimately, you are making the two comparisons and if one of them works, you are going ahead with the Response, even if the other one doesn't work. You are effectively saying that in order for Hollow Hill's Response to be valid, either comparison #1 OR comparison #2 has to meet the play restriction. However, Damon's answer - and the consistent ruling of FFG going back a long way on this issue - is that comparison #1 AND comparison #2 has to meet the play restriction. So if either one would not be allowed, the whole thing is not allowed.

Consistency in wording is unfortunately not FFG's strong suit. By the old gods, the FAQ uses the verb "trigger" for passive effects and we see it again on the River plots.