"X" Honor Guard

Cost 4

STR 4

2 Icons( M&P Stark/Targaryen, M&I Lannister, I&P Baratheon)

Army. (Dothraki.-Targaryen, House Tyrell.-Baratheon)

House "X" only. No attachments.
Challenges: You may put "X" Honor Guard into play from your hand, under the control of any opponent. After that opponent wins a challenge in which "X" Honor Guard participated, take control of "X" Honor Guard.

Not much love for these guys around here and on tzumainn.com and I just wanted to open up a discussion about them(not that I consider them anywhere as important than the Carrion Bird). I understand the hate in Joust but I am not ready to give up on them for Melee. I agree that a huge drawback is the chance of giving an opponent claim soak but we must be able to come up with some "Game of Thrones" type deals that involve this card. The options increase when playing the "Littlefinger Variant" where players can give and receive gold from each other. So what are some ideas or thoughts, good or bad, about these cards?

Well, that's what it comes down to. They are negotiation cards. There's not much love for them in Joust because there is almost never a good reason to hand your Joust opponent a 4-STR Army. But in Melee, they can be used as leverage. So you're looking for examples of when people have made deals in Melee more than a specific deal that is good for these guys in-particular.

I like 'em. Without their ability they are relatively vanilla, which I'm fine with, but in the right conditions in Melee they can stop hemorraging, or help force opponents to rethink plans of who they were going to attack. Also with the titles you can make sure you don't face against your own character at least for one round.

Last night I taught my youngest brother the game in a three player match, and he asked me the same question -- what is the deal with this card. So I pointed out:

1) If you ignore the ability, they are a 4 cost, 4 STR army with Mil/Pow

2) When playing against Targ and the Queen's Knight, you can bounce it into play mid challenge to get Targ to lose the INT challenge.

3) A well played Valar makes it a useless card for your opponent as well.

Well, I guess these were kinda situational (and, in a deck that allows 5 Kings cards, they can trigger Targ Dragon effects), but you get the idea.

I was kind of sceptical about the card since we play almost no melee games here. In Joust it is just nonsence to try to negotiate. In melee it could be fine, but I still think that other players can a will take advatage of it as it happend before because as Cersei pointed out "When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground."

So I would much rather include some stable cards in my deck then this one.

The honor guards are for me probably the most attracting cards to play in a melee contest- very innovative in my opinion.

For joust i tried to run the Bara army in my deck with the Bara traitor and Keeper of oaths . The idea was to let your opponent go first in the challenge phase, than make your challenges, before you quit the challenge phase trigger the honor guards effect. Effectively most of the time your opponent will win dominance- which mustn´t necessarily be a disadvantage- and you could steal your army back next round, getting a 4 cost charachter for free. The deck also had other ideas like this. However it proofed to be to ineffective because you´ll need more cards with the honor guard effect to make it a viable strategy. Anyway it was a nice fun deck overall.

I love 'em. They are a great card for defining melee as a completely different animal than Joust and play up your negotitaion and deal making skills. They add to the complexity of the decision making process and add a level to the game that makes melee fascinating.

They are one of the real highlights of the Core Set.

Just opening up this discussion again because I think there might be some Joust combo value with the new "Men with no King" character. Would the timing work in your favor on this? I am not sure but if your opponent isn't running many neutrals or OOH characters, you could do alot worse than giving them one of these as it looks possible that you will be able to play a reinforcement card(for one gold usually) and then use MwnK to take it(4/4 Army bi-con) back for 2 gold. The more I think of it the more it requires the perfect storm(3 cards in the right place at the right time AND 3 gold) but it is an interesting option. You could even have OOH ones(just not your opponents house).

Its an interesting combo. I'm not sure the set up is worth it for them (maybe if honor guard had renown, stealth or deadly).

I think from the "You could even have OOH ones(just not your opponents house)" comment, you're forgetting the "House X only" restriction on the Honor Guards.

I'd tend to agree with Lars. While the timing of it works well enough, the set up isn't really worth it, IMHO. Even if you do get the set-up (3 specific cards - one in play, two in hand - a lost challenge and 3 gold in the Challenge phase), you gain an Honor Guard for your troubles? With the 5-STR MwnK in play and the 3/4-STR Reinforcement event/character you just got, does the 4-STR Honor Guard really gain you that much at this point? Even if there was no character to take from your opponent (an an absence of neutral of OOH characters in not something I see a lot in LCG), the 2-gold from MwnK's ability may have better uses elsewhere than to "buy" another 4-STR vanilla character.

I haven't played very much LCG melee, so take my comments with a grain of salt. I don't doubt that there are times when these guys are great, but 80% of the time I think I would prefer to draw a different card. I suspect that this army is more likely to clog your hand (too expensive to play and no good to ambush) than to save the day. So to answer your question with a question, when have you ever needed this card to win and no other card would have worked?

Anyone use these guys in the Melee at GenCon?

not that i saw. ~Though we did run out of Tissues in our hotel room so one of my roomates might have used them

I did not see a one either.