We are playing with core set plus the Greyjoy and Martell expansions and have found a few cards that seem grossly overpowered given our card pool and knowledge of the game. As it is, a Targaryen-only plot is the only card we can think of offhand to mess with attachments, and there don't seem to be a whole lot of ways of simply removing characters outside of Martell, so aside from relying on reset plots, I'm not sure what to do for most of our decks when cards like these come into play:

* Nymeria / Lightbringer -- If you can save a character every turn with the same card, you are almost never going to lose characters except to 2-claim plots and if you block a deadly attack, which is easily avoidable.

* Taste for Blood -- Getting 1 power for every lost challenge on defense wasn't enough for 1 gold, it's also non-unique and +1 strength. And as I understand it, the character doesn't even have to be in the battle to get the power. Unless you have a ton of renown, it is hard to pull past this.

Is there some strategy / cards / rules we're overlooking to mitigate the power of abilities such as these, or do we just need to buy more cards to find answers? I love the game and especially my Martell deck, but I have to admit it feels cheap to win by playing Taste for Blood and sitting back to let them earn half my power for me.

Don't worry, there are a lot of cards that deal with attachments out there.

http://www.cardgamedb.com/index.php/GoTDeckbuilder.html, check this site out since you aren't familiar with all the cards yet. You can search for cards by text, which is handy if you need to find an effect to fit your deck, but don't know what is out there.

Anyway, here are some names to look for:

The most reliable neutral ones are probably Tin Link and Ill-Tidings. Tin Link is nice because it is repeatable, but Ill-Tidings is the only dedicated attachment removal card that will discard the Black and White Ravens (Tin Link + Copper Link can, but that's not super useful unless you're running a maester agenda).

If you don't mind running maesters, I would probably use Tin Link, since it is a repeatable effect. The Bastard attachment is an easy answer for attachments too, but is more limited than the others.

Targaryen probably has the best attachment removal. Off the top of my head besides that plot, they have Mereenese Brothel, Jorah's Cohorts, and Dany's Handmaiden. They're all pretty good cards, Mereenese Brothel is probably the best.

Baratheon has Maester Cressen, as you probably saw in the core set, which is grrreat since his effect is repeatable also, and doesn't require anything besides just kneeling him to use it. You can use the plot 'At the Gates' to search for him and put him into play also. That being said, some neutral removal would also be useful.

IMO Greyjoy and Lannister's options are pretty weak. As far as I know, Greyjoy just has the Scurvy Cutthroat which doesn't end up being that useful, and Lannister has Bought and Paid for, which is a really inefficient and kind of poor choice also. For these houses, I'd just splash some sort of neutral removal.

Martell has Maester of Lemonwood, who just comes into play and discards whatever condition attachments he wants, it's kind of useful.

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Besides that, there are some tricks to dealing with attachments also. A character leaving play in any form, like back to the hand or on the top of the deck will bleed off any attachments on it. The same goes for a character who no longer meets the requirements for an attachment (ie. you have an attachment that says "maester character only" and I trigger Meera Reed to blank your maester's text box. Since he's no longer a maester, the attachments will bleed off.

Also, you can find other ways to deal with problems if your house has poor removal options. Lannister for example, has poor attachment removal, but some good options for bleeding power off of characters.