Saturnine said:

there is more:

the search is for one player only (not like the plot for both). and you save a plot slot.

also, you save deck slots and eventual "dead" cards with this immune loaction.

and you can (almost) totally rely on that card, so you build your deck accordingly.

broken? not before it has seen the day of gaming. but i wont say its not a candidate.

bad card design? yes imo. simply because of the lacking drawback. also from now on, every new location with a cost of 2+ (meaning with a good ability) has to be checked if too strong combined with HoD. so the design team has sort of restricted themselves.

AGoT DC Meta said:

Good thing those aren't mutually exclusive.

Saturnine said:

Why wouldn't the immunity matter in a majority of games? It seems to me the immunity matters a great deal.

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?

AGoT DC Meta said:

Saturnine said:

I'd be inclined to agree with this, there's been huge decrease in the viability of event-based location control. Probably related to cancel being more abundant and popular. That's pretty much left the game with Frozen Solid, Climbing Spikes and Newly Made Lord. And yes, those are pretty limited to certain houses in usability, so the immunity is not a big deal for them - now everybody just gets to feel like Lannister.

Saturnine said:

Well, as far as I can tell, it does allow running a few unique locations in your deck and choosing your location based on the matchup (depending on the coin toss). Very few decks could even take advantage of this however… maybe a Stark deck that chooses Winterfell Castle against burn and Bear Island otherwise?

Saturnine said:

Heh, good question. I feel that people are so used to the old power agendas that they haven't really looked at their power balance (or lack thereof) in comparison to not running an agenda in a while. Now this new shiny thing comes along, and by its almost complete lack of an obvious drawback highlights the fact that many of the existing Agendas simply raise the power level of a deck, pure and simple.

I'd guess the problem is less with people feeling that HoD is over-powered, but more with how it flaunts publicly what Agendas have been doing for a long time already, but at least under a pretended balance from a drawback.

~ So, how many of you are betting on a No Agenda (even no charagenda) deck winning GenCon or Stahleck, with this No Agenda crusher not yet being legal? Cause without it, they're completely viable competetively, right?

TLDR (for dennis): I poke fun at people thinking that Agendas were balanced (when compared to not running an Agenda) before HoD.

ktom said:

~You should change your boardname to nostra-ktomus for your portents of doom. I thought the environment was getting stale for you?

How is this different than any other agenda, or any other card for that matter, in its latent ability to be abused? The fact that people don't have a clear and automatic idea for how this can be abused leads me to think that this is all huffing and puffing. I perceive the downside to HoD, as others do, as more nuanced than something like "You can't win if x" or "You draw 1 less card if x". But there is a cost; there is a downside, however subtle. A cost when compared to no-agenda? Maybe not, but when we're talking about comparing fun decks, it doesn't matter. When discussing the competitive environment, it is a factor because almost no one in the competitive environment (and arguably no one that wins) foregoes the opportunity cost of running an agenda. And the advantage of some agendas is more than others. Bottom line is that this agenda's downside is that you have a location on setup that may not do you any good at the beginning of the game, or may be useless late game depending on the location, and you have to make a concerted effort to protect it, and you're passing up the 4-5 card advantage you could have from playing another agenda. That's not to mention that if your opponent does get rid of the location, you have ZERO advantage.

Now on the other hand, certain locations can provide for card advantage like Aegon's Hill, this may put it on par with KoW and KoS, albeit in different ways. It certainly isn't surefire card advantage, as it is 95% of the time with KoW, and even then it is situational (i.e. for Aegon's Hill they have to have a character in hand during challenges; for Seastone Chair the have to win a challenge with a noble character). For people like Greg who want to ban KoS and KoW, I can see how this is personally problematic, but as it stands in the current environment, this agenda has not proven to be more powerful than current existing agendas, and may not prove to be more powerful.

TLDR - People are overreacting and should play with it before complaining.

AGoT DC Meta said:

~You should change your boardname to nostra-ktomus for your portents of doom. I thought the environment was getting stale for you?

It is. A brand new way to build Stark Kill doesn't refresh the environment that much. This pattern has been seen many times before.

AGoT DC Meta said:

It's not. That's what I meant above when I said we've seen this pattern many times before.

I tend to agree with you that the immediate reaction we are seeing to HoD is due to the lack of "overt" drawback. All I've been saying is that I think any "indirect" or "lost opportunity" drawback there might to HoD is so subtle as to be not there. After all, many of the overt drawbacks are virtually not there.

AGoT DC Meta said:

~Why start now? You must be new here; that's not our way.

Tourney of Stahleck said:

It has a drawback. It limits the amount and size of cards you can declare during set-up.

For example, my current agenda-less Dragon deck has 12 cards at 4G, 8 cards at 0g and 11 cards at 1g with 46 set-up cards in total. It currently has an ok set-up ability since I can drop a 4g character and still drop 2-4 lower cost cards. If I was to use HoD my set-up capable cards drop from 46 to 34. Is that good? Sure, I get a guaranteed location but its the character's who lay the beats. So how does that help?

Bear Island gets thrown around a lot but Stark has legions of high quality, higher cost characters. You don't have to use them but you're already changing your deck to use lower cost characters. This leaves you vulnerable to cards that hate on lower cost, lower strength characters. Perhaps even non-unique hate since most Houses have little depth at the lower card slots.

ktom said:

Yes. I think anything that makes "fun" decks competitive, obviously has the potential to make strong decks too strong.

Saturnine said:

Again, "opportunity cost" does not count as a drawback in any way because opportunity costs exists for any possible deck you build, agenda or no agenda. It certainly doesn't mitigate what you even admit is a lack of a drawback on the card itself which other agendas have (KoTHH being a great example). You can't claim the card is balanced because of "opportunity cost"; that's just not a sound argument.

And there is no way you can say the immunity won't matter in the majority of competitive games. Maybe your meta is different than the California metas but we see Bandit Lord OOH from every single house (less from Stark though).

LaughingTree said:

LaughingTree said:

I'm saying it's not necessarily unbalanced just because it doesn't have a strong drawback. I'd even argue that the more agendas there are in the environment, the less severe potential drawbacks can be, because different agendas will bolster different types of decks. Of course you still need to balance potential benefits against potential drawbacks, but in my opinion, the balance between those two is much better in HoD than in TMP, for example.

Saturnine said:

LaughingTree said:

Interesting, in our Regional in May (Cincinnati) we saw Condemned by the Council in the majority of decks. Also, just speaking from personal experience (can't speak for the whole event) I only saw one NML the whole time, out of a GJ deck where it belongs.

ktom said:

AGoT DC Meta said:

~You should change your boardname to nostra-ktomus for your portents of doom. I thought the environment was getting stale for you?

It is. A brand new way to build Stark Kill doesn't refresh the environment that much. This pattern has been seen many times before.

AGoT DC Meta said:

How is this different than any other agenda, or any other card for that matter, in its latent ability to be abused?

It's not. That's what I meant above when I said we've seen this pattern many times before.

I tend to agree with you that the immediate reaction we are seeing to HoD is due to the lack of "overt" drawback. All I've been saying is that I think any "indirect" or "lost opportunity" drawback there might to HoD is so subtle as to be not there. After all, many of the overt drawbacks are virtually not there.

AGoT DC Meta said:

TLDR - People are overreacting and should play with it before complaining.

~Why start now? You must be new here; that's not our way.

QFT. I've done my fair share of complaining.

I agree people will jump to the fresh Stark murder build or the fresh Targ burn deck first, but it will also create legitimately new, exciting builds at the near-competitive level. Were people talking about GJ noble decks being viable before this agenda? Or even viable House Dayne decks for that matter. People talked about Bara night's watch, but I've never heard of it containing or being built around The Wall. This comes from making those locations viable for the first time for as long as I've been playing.

Do people have to talk about the deck, or just play it?

I seem to remember Greg having a very viable Greyjoy noble deck before.

Kennon said:

~Greg's decks don't count, as he is somewhat of a "Frankenstein" of deckbuilders.

But seriously, I don't remember seeing that or hearing about it at any serious tournament. Most of the time the talk I heard was people shaking their heads saying they wish it worked better.

AGoT DC Meta said:

But here's the thing: How likely is it that what we're going to see is:

• A GJ Noble deck built around The Seastone chair - that predominantly discards and/or chokes.
• A Dayne deck built around Starfall - that predominantly locks down opponent's challenges
• A Bara NW deck built around The Wall - that predominantly uses renown and/or weenies to rush for power

I think you are totally right that the agenda could end up inspiring some legitimately new builds. I also think that most of the builds using it are going to be the same things in a new package.

I hope I am proved wrong.

___

Just because you are in my meta, and just because I ate your chili today, and just because I drank three of your wife's sodas, these three things do not excuse the lack of a TLDR here. You better treat me right or ill find a play group with more tolerance for a slovenly semi young professional with mommy issues and a substance abuse problem.

dcdennis said:

@dennis -

tldr

Like Deathjester and some others, I am not overly concerned with the card today on Day 1, just the direction of the card and future of it (unlike TLS which was too good on Day 1).

However, it just isn't a good card moving forward. It severely limits cards printed in the future, and creates easy situations where either it or future cards get erratta/restriction/banning more easily. As we all know, FFG isn't able to playtest to the extent that MTG or other do (although those games have their share of issues even with professional playtesters)…and no rotation. Should be interesting…

The 'drawback' is almost non-existent, other than the fact that you can't play Maesters or another agenda. I can't say I agree with this line of thinking either (keep printing really strong agendas with little in the way of drawbacks, in order to counter…previous really strong agendas with negligible drawbacks).

I can't say it won't be fun though - and that is a good thing. I just think it could have been balanced a little better. IMHO it will probably be restricted at some point, which will balance it further.

LoL on Finite's 'just win a championship and counter the card' logic. I think Corey is a very good player - although hasn't had the seer # of placings to put him up with Dobbler (which certainly seems to do with lack of interest, not lack of ability) or Mathlete, but that doesn't give anyone some sort of right to make whatever they want. Hopefully the winner of the next Worlds makes a an event that says 'if a World Champion plays this card, they win the game, cannot be canceled' card, so we can use the same logic to force the next World Champ make something to counter it…

finitesquarewell said:

Considering that you've won a Championship and the number of times you've advocated or implied your insight into the game, I'd be interested in hearing some analysis rather than purposefully skipping over the topic.

finitesquarewell said:

Sure, I'll agree that we (the community as a whole) aren't always entirely right, but then again, we don't always entirely agree. The only way to hash out the truth between now and whatever point (say eight or nine months) is to theorize, discuss, play, and otherwise analyze the cards and strategies.

finitesquarewell said:

(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.

I'm sorry to hear that you believe the only people allowed to have opinions on the issue are those that have won World Championships. Considering that, however, I again am quite surprised that you decline to offer any meaningful insight into the discussion.

And frankly, I don't find jokes about that witchhunt very funny, especially considering your role in propagating and participating in it.

finitesquarewell said:

1. Anyone making reasonable arguments regarding legitimate worries about what is bad for the game is merely expressing Hubris so we should all stop, but your decree that no one is able to consistently predict things about the game is not hubris. However, your implied argument that the card is not bad for the game - no that isn't considered hubris at all - that's a completely different realm.

Make sure you let FFG know to stop all future playtesting and also stop gathering feedback of all kinds because all of it is "hubris at its most obvious."

2. If you don't like a particular player designed card, your only solution should be to win a world championship and waste an opportunity to create an interesting and personalized card just to specifically counter the card you don't like.

BTW from reading the agotcards.org thread it seems to me that most if not all of the positive discussion over there are from players who happen to be your friends from your meta. If I am wrong I apologize but if not let's stop pointing to the circle jerk that is the house of dreams thread on agotcards.org as evidence of anything.

If it turns out to be the best agenda, then I'll use it. You'd be foolish not to.