I have a quick question, Does it cost an additional 2 gold to play neutral house cards if you are not playing with the neutral house card? Example is if I were to play a neutral character in my house stark deck would that character cost 2 more gold to play out since I'm not running the neutral house card? The reason I ask is because the neutral house card states that the out of house characters gold penalty is reduced by 1, so this would imply that neutral house is in fact a house of its own which would make it seem that playing neutral house characters, items and locations would have a gold penalty in any other deck except neutral house.

crumbinator said:

It is not a Neutral House Card, as there is no Neutral House.

Read the card again: "Neutral Faction. You have no House Affiliation."

From the Rules: "If, during marshalling, you wish to play a character, location, or attachment that is affiliated with a different House, the gold cost to play that card is increased by 2. This is called the gold penalty, and it is the price that must be paid for playing characters that are not loyal to your House. You pay no gold penalty when playing neutral cards."

Neutral cards never have an out-of-house gold penalty because they have NO house. When you are playing Neutral Faction, you have NO house, so any cards with any house affiliation cost a gold penalty (2 gold, which is actually reduced to 1 because of the card's effect).

I've toyed on-and-off with wanting to use that card for something, but I've never quite had a good deck idea to build about it. Night's Watch? Maesters? Shadows?

KristoffStark said:

ktom said:

Actually, I was just thinking that. There is a guy in my meta who runs a Brotherhood deck, but he combines it with House Dayne ... maybe I should build me a plain old Neutral Brotherhood deck. Hmmm.

kauai1964 said:

Actually, the penalty is only reduced for characters (and it's the same with Hollow Hill). The gold penalty for locations and attachments is still 2 gold.