Eastwatch-by-the-Sea Multiple Opponents

By Rostro2, in 2. AGoT Rules Discussion

Posted at

I find this Baratheon card very useful for disarming the Brotherhood Agenda, Infamy, and pulling power off my renown characters to my house card to protect the power from character death and Slanders and Lies.
Our group has been playing 6 player melee for over a year and loving it! We frequent the errata and the framework.
Last game we came against a rule hurdle. One player running Brotherhood Agenda, another player running Beric w Infamy attachment, and another player with Eastwatch-by-the-Sea. An intense rules discussion came up about Eastwatch's ability, the card reads:
"Response: After an opponent reveals a plot card, move 1 power from a character in play to its controller's House card."
Ok, the scenario is the brotherhood agenda player has a brotherhood char with 6 power on this single character and none on his house. the beric/infamy player has 3 power on beric and none on his house. It is the next plot phase and Eastwatch is in play.
Observation:
Eastwatch does not say kneel to trigger effect.
Card text doesn’t specify that the specific character power is moved from, has to be controlled by the opponent that just revealed a plot card.
Card text does NOT say "After one or more opponents reveal a plot card…".
So… one could logically say according to above that in a 6-player game, Eastwatch's ability could move 5 power tokens from characters to their respective house card. For example, 3 power could be moved from the brotherhood character to the brotherhood house card, and 2 power could be moved from Beric to the Beric house card.
All the players in the last game did not agree with this. One player said, you can only trigger the effect once. Another player said could trigger it more than once, but only 1 power per oppenent could be moved to player house.
Any words of logic would be great. Any references to how other cards work or the errata would be awesome! :)

Posted at

Rostro said:

Observation:
Eastwatch does not say kneel to trigger effect.
Card text doesn’t specify that the specific character power is moved from, has to be controlled by the opponent that just revealed a plot card.
Card text does NOT say "After one or more opponents reveal a plot card…".
So… one could logically say according to above that in a 6-player game, Eastwatch's ability could move 5 power tokens from characters to their respective house card. For example, 3 power could be moved from the brotherhood character to the brotherhood house card, and 2 power could be moved from Beric to the Beric house card.
All the players in the last game did not agree with this. One player said, you can only trigger the effect once. Another player said could trigger it more than once, but only 1 power per oppenent could be moved to player house.
Any words of logic would be great. Any references to how other cards work or the errata would be awesome! :)

Your observations are correct. In a 6 player game there is nothing stopping Eastwatch from triggering once for each opponent and moving a power from any character to its controller's house card, for a total of 5 power moved (though one at a time, rather than all at once).

Sorry, Brotherhood players, that's how the card is written.

Posted at

It it triggered only once, the text would be "after one or more opponents reveal a plot card" and if it was limited to one character for each opponent, it would continue "move a power token from a character controlled by that opponent to its controller's House card" or have an explicit limit.

Posted at

Generally speaking:

- Responses can only be triggered 1 time per thing they are Responding to. Eastwatch response to "an opponent" revealing a plot card. So yes, in your situation, with 5 opponents each revealing 1 plot card, that is 5 different things that the card can respond to (kind of like a card that says "after a character dies" has 5 different things to respond to when Valar kills 5 characters). You can trigger the Response 1 time for each plot card revealed by an opponent.

- Card text is very specific. When a card refers to "a character," it means any character in play. If there is supposed to be some sort of relationship between a particular character and a particular player, the card would need to specify it. SImply saying "a character" doesn't narrow it down at all. So yes, in your situation, Opponent A revealing a plot card allows the Eastwatch player to move power between Player B's character and House card.

Posted at

Thank you for the responses. I guess no further explanation is needed. ~'The truth is simple.' It's all straight forward in the card text. :)

Thanks!

Posted at

Rostro said:

~'The truth is simple.' It's all straight forward in the card text. :)

Honestly, it is. But people tend to decide how they want something to work out, then try to explain why the card text "really says" that, instead of reading what is actually on the card.