Very purposefully leaving alone the messy issues of opportunity cost and how to evaluate the printed and unprinted drawbacks on House of Dreams:

(1) The most evident of the things I've learned in my time playing AGOT is that no individual player or group of players has any ability to consistently predict anything whatsoever about what the meta will look like more than eight or nine months from the present. And I mean no one: not the designers, not the playtesters; neither the world's most skilled competitive players and rules lawyers nor any otherwise intuitive collection of forums goers. From this viewpoint, the more predictive of the "worries" expressed about such a game-changing card as House of Dreams read as hubris at its most obvious.

(2) Corey -- along with Dobbler, likely the most skilled player in the history of the game (and, outside of a brief period in summer 2011, likely the least caring) -- put immense effort into preparing for the 2011 AGOT World Championship, and his payoff was the game's most prestigious prize: an opportunity to design a card to his liking. He chose to create, in consultation with the game's designers, a card that attempts to push the game in a direction of his liking. If an individual finds the card he chose to design personally distasteful, I suggest that that player channel his or her displeasure into practicing the game, win a major championship title, and design a card that effectively counters House of Dreams, should the card be demonstrated to have a negative impact on the environment after the meta has a chance to adjust to its presence. Or, hell, even if it turns out not to be negative; win a world championship and work with the designers to take the game in some other direction that suits you. Attempting to sway the opinions of the tiny minority of FFG's AGOT customer base represented by us forums goers -- concerning a card that may very well be enjoyed by a less forums-vocal yet very large majority of players -- seems about as purposeful a mission as that of the truth-seeking troublemakers who started the Damon/Penfold thread. The already ridiculously lengthy and overwhelmingly positive discussion over on agotcards.org is some indication.

Update: various edits for clarity

….. but that doesn't give anyone some sort of right to make whatever [card] they want.

rings said:

…..isn't that EXACTLY what winning affords you?

dcdennis said:

No, not "EXACTLY" the card they want. The card should still be balanced. Are you saying if I win a World Championship, I should be able to have something like Jaqen H'ghar printed without any power checking?

dcdennis said:

rings said:

….. but that doesn't give anyone some sort of right to make whatever [card] they want.

…..isn't that EXACTLY what winning affords you?

No, not "EXACTLY" the card they want. The card should still be balanced. Are you saying if I win a World Championship, I should be able to have something like Jaqen H'ghar printed without any power checking?

phoenixember said:

It sounds like you are assuming designers do not check for power level of champion designed cards. I don't doubt that there is a lot of back and forth in an attempt to fit the card into the game and in an attempt to balance the card. Obviously if a champ wants to create a card that says "You claim 15 power. Cannot be canceled." then FFG will tell them to go pound sand and to submit a different idea.

Bomb said:

No, i'm not assuming that at all. I know the designers were part of the process. I also know the DC Meta has openly admitted in another thread to fudging the playtesting process to get this card printed as it is.

Having seen phoenixember's collection of kitten tails, I can confirm.

Unfortunately, I do have a life and a job, so I don't have all day to spend data mining the forums for it.

imrahil327 said:

I forget which Champion it was, but somebody asked Damon to make a Martell card for the son of Dagos Manwoody.

*looks up character name…*

Damon: No, you cannot make a card named "Dickon Manwoody."

I forget which Champion it was, but somebody asked Damon to make a Martell card for the son of Dagos Manwoody.

*looks up character name…*

Damon: No, you cannot make a card named "Dickon Manwoody."

Grimwalker said:

Yes the game is really missing that. that and Sea *****, Golden Storm and Joso's Cock.

Ratatoskr said:

Only a fraction of the houses have strong in-house location control. And I got the impression neutral (event-based) location control wasn't played as much. But I'm a bit out of the loop, so maybe I'm misreading the meta game. The most popular location control recently seems to have come from running Newly Made Lord. The immunity against that is certainly a boon. But considering the pool of eligible locations, the immunity is more likely to protect a gimmicky location, rather than one that if lost cripples your game, with a few exceptions (Baratheon Wall is probably one that will become more popular, even though there have already been builds utilizing it here and there).

I'm not gonna claim that nobody will find some very strong new deck types utilizing this agenda. That's sort of the point of an agenda, no? I don't see this agenda displacing any of the current strong decks with different agendas (in terms of strength, though as a new shiny, we probably will see a meta shift in terms of quantity of decks, with all the skewed tourney results that this often entails). But I don't see it as having anywhere near the utility of the TMP agenda. You get one location. It sits there, it does its thing. Mostly like many decks without this agenda, really.

I don't get what people want. Another White Book?