Hey Team,

Question came up at our regionals today, I'd like to get claricfication.

Player A has 12 power and the Maesters Path (whilst you have any chains on this Agenda you cannot win). The Maesters path has 2 chains left

Player B has 10 power.

Time is called-who wins?

Cheers

Honest

Player B. Exact thing happened to me in Feb .

Incorrect. Player A.

The rules for modified wins at time limit say:

"If the time limit is reached, the player closes to his victory total (in power) earns a modified match win and his opponent receives a match loss."

So the rules for what to do at time limit only talk about evaluation of the "victory total" (which does not include the Agenda limitation), not the "victory condition," which does. (Note that the rules do indeed say the player must meet his "victory condition" before time is called to earn the full win.) You effectively ignore the "cannot win" condition of Maester's Path when awarding modified wins after time has been called.

Nate has clarified this situation before. That this is the correct way to read the tournament rules is coming straight from FFG.

Omg this ****** bull. I was kicked out of top 4 in that tourney because of the modified loss!!!

If that's the ruling, it is just so wrong! Just consider two situations: A. Maesters' player has no Maesters left in his deck. B. He has some Maesters left in a deck, but not in play or his hand and it could possibly take him another 2-3 turns just to draw even 1 Maester.

Aren't those situations specifically the type for which judges are supposed to be used for in a first place? And not for saying that "following the letter of law, we have a Maesters guy with 3 links on Agenda and no Maesters left in a deck as a winner." So in my opinion, a judge should just consider each game which goes over the time limit separately and be willing to interpret the rules based on what just makes sense from a game perspective.

BBSB12 said:

I respectfully and completely disagree. I think the tournament rules should be clear enough that every judge in a similar situation should rule in the exact same way. I don't want whether I receive a modified win or a modified loss to depend on a judge's determination of my deck state and which of my win conditions he or she found more compelling.

Dennis, that really sucks - I feel for you. Be sure to let the TO from that tournament know what happened.

That is a lot of variables to consider though. They would also have to look at all event cards then to see if it was possible to bring a Maester into play from their dead or discard pile, or if they had a Plot that might assist in this. Or many other possibilities.

Also, consider Melisandra vs a Brotherhood deck. If your brotherhood characters have say 15+ power on them, however your oppenent who has 5 power has Melisandra out, who do you consider should win when Time is called? Granted their power doesn't count to win at that moment, but if they had more time perhaps they could kneel, kill, discard or blank Melisandra to gain the win. Just because the 15 power doesn't count at that time, should the oppenent with 5 power be considered the winner?

Slothgodfather said:

The ruling does not say "ignore everything but raw power at time limit." It says "who is closer to their victory total." Effects that modify the way power is counted, or how many power a player needs to get, are still considered when you reach time limit. Your "victory total" still includes all of that. If you do a "victory total" count on that Brotherhood deck while Mel is out they count exactly 0 power, so they lose the determination of the modified win.

Say you not playing an Agenda and, at time limit, have 12 power. I'm 3 away from winning. I have 14 power, but since I am using 3 The North Agendas, I'm actually still 7 power away from winning. I do not get the modified win because, even though I have more power, I am further away from my victory total. I may have accumulated more power, but my deck did not perform as well as yours did in the given time limit.

As for the "the TO should make a determination based on the current game state" is a really bad idea, imho. It's too subjective. It also assumes that the judge would play the two decks exactly the same way as the players. As a Targ player, I've been sitting at 2 power against an opponent's 13, knowing that I was in full control of the game and would win - but the Stark and Bara players around me had written me off. So who should determine the modified win based on "what makes sense from the game perspective" since everyone's perspective on the game is likely to be different? And does that mean the judge should be factoring in the play styles and skills of the players as well? I know John is a better player than Matt most of the time, so does that mean I hand John the modified win when the score is 10-13 in favor of Matt at the end of time limit? As has been said, there are too many variables involved to let the judge decide on their own, based on "the game perspective."

The rule is "closest to victory total." That is the only criteria, and the only variable that counts. But you do include everything that contributes to determining the "victory total" during the game.

I understand that how much power you need to win would be considered, such as with house attachments or the wildling/night's watch agendas. That makes perfect sense.

It does seem odd to me that you would take into consideration the imposed win condition of 1 agenda, such as a wildling agenda requiring 2 more power, but NOT take into consideration the imposed win condition of another agenda, such as the Maester's "cannot win" condition.

But then again, I guess that's why they made the distinction of "victory total" and not "victory condition". So it makes sense with that wording. I suppose it even works with the Mel example.

Thanks, as always, for the info ktom.

Thanks for the chats team,

First off, condolences to the gentleman who received the dud ruling to cause him to miss the top 4 in Feb. These things happen, and that I got the rule wrong in Sydney myself means it may happen again.

So the tournament document says the golden rule (in bold if memory serves correct) is that when the rules and a card contradict each other, the card wins. This gives us a situation such as described above, where a card says a player cannot win, the rules say he can. You would expect the card (the agenda) to win, but its not the case. If win conditions on agendas are not taken into account for Maester Path, but are on other agendas (The North series is a good example here) where you can lose a game even if you have more power,FFG can we have some update on this on the next errata/FAQ please, to make it official (and hopefully more well known)?

Many thanks all

Honest

Honest said:

Be careful with that thinking. If you follow it too closely, then all that card-specific errata in the FAQ is meaningless because the card takes precedence over the "rules" in the FAQ. Rules that tell you how to interpret the card text obviously "win" over the text of the card. That's what this ruling is doing: telling you how to interpret the "cannot win" text on the card, so the rules win over the card.

Honest said:

They really have already done this by describing the full win in terms of "victory condition" and the modified win in terms of "victory total (in power)" in the tournament rules.

I also don't agree that this is a situation where two cards are saying the same thing, so you would expect both of them to "win" over the rules in the same way. The two Agendas (Maester's Path and any The North Agenda) are not equivalent because one places an additional criteria on winning while the other modifies the existing condition by changing the number of power needed. So when the rules say you are looking at the power count only, it doesn't seem contradictory at all that the one that doesn't impact the power count isn't considered.

Say I have one character hit by an effect saying "choose a character; that character may not be declared as an attacker or defender in military challenges this phase." I have another character hit by an effect saying "choose a character; that character loses a military icon until the end of the phase." If something looks at all the characters with military icons I have in play, I'm going to get a different answer than I would for something that looks at all the characters I have in play that can be declared as participants in a military challenge. That's pretty similar to what is going on here.

i am seriously losing sleep over this now. i woulda been 3-1 in swiss in that tourney instead of 2-2 and easily made top 4. fuuuuuuuuuuuudge. if i recall correctly i had 14 power and only 1 chain left on my agenda and my opponent had 8ish power.

Keep in mind that you would NOT have been 3-1. You would have been 2-1-1. Modified wins do not count the same as full wins, so 3-1, where one of the wins was modified, is not equivalent to 3-1, where all three wins were achieved within time limit. Granted, it's a better standing than 2-2, but whether or not it would have been enough to get you into the Top 4 depends on a lot more than who got the modified win in that one game.

For reference, scoring is:

• 5 points per match win
• 3 points for modified win
• 1 point for true tie
• 0 points for loss (standard or modified)

ktom said:

How frequently are games modified wins?

Bomb said:

Modified wins happen only when time limit is reached with no player reaching their victory condition. So, effectively, the question is "how often do tournament games go for the full 60 minutes without anyone winning?" Depending on the tournament, the size of the field, and the players, this can happen a lot, or not much at all.

There always seems to be at least one game per round that goes to 50+ minutes. At smaller events - 12ish people - not finishing at all by 60 minutes doesn't happen too much. But once you start getting to a field size of 40, there always seems to be 1-3 games per round that end in modified wins.

Tomorrow we'll have a tournament with a time limit set at 40min - so there will be modified wins for sure.

Bolzano said:

Can I ask why?

Now that I think about it, I'd like to have 30 minute games with 2 out of 3 per round. Even though I'm a slow player, but I still think it's better to average games rather than define results based on one bad setup (Every deck should have a chance for a second bad setup, I say!)

BBSB12 said:

Knew someone would notice that after I've published a reply. Obviously I mean a bad setup after mulligan. In the end of the day, AGoT is a game of not just skill, but also chance. And that's fine with me. What is not fine is the fact that there is no real averaging over match-ups. And that's what I was proposing - 3 1/2 hour games, best 2 out of 3(it will be longer, but that's just sad truth about game length).

Just for example, in last tourney I've placed against same deck twice - one time I won, one time I've lost. Part of it was skill, part of it mistakes, but if you asked me about main factor, I'd say a setup (3 drop in second game vs. 5 or 6 drop in first game). Another example, my game against Targ Burn - 1st game lost 15-0, 2nd game - complete domination. Now imagine both of these examples in a situation of 2 out of 3 games (ideally, up to 100 games, but that would be one hell of tournament=).

Bolzano said:

This isn't fun anymore! I really hate modified wins (unless the game was really decided at that point and than maybe even more because than I hate my opponent for playing slowly)

Well the point is to get used to avoid playing slowly - of course not to have modified wins, but there will be some.

But usually we have 50min or 1 hour.

BBSB12 said:

But if you set the time limit to 30 minutes, there is a very real chance that you will not take any of those 3 games to 15 power or a true win. So "2 out of 3" may average out "bad starts," but it doesn't allow "in-game averaging out" of all the rest. A very real argument can be made that by averaging out the games to make chance less of a factor, you end up making skill less of a factor as well by not giving the deck enough of a chance to work itself out.

In the end, neither method is perfect.

Bolzano said:

Actually, at these shop tourneys, we usually have 45 minutes (since we need to pack 4 rounds before the shop closes), but we finish the current turn when the time is up.

id love 30 min rounds since most of my decks fall apart around turn 4