Please help as i think i may have been playing Ambush wrong.

Opponent A attacks me for a military challenge and i declare defenders. After totalling the STR I then play an ambush card as part of the defence . Is this correct, another words can i put the ambush card into play as part of the defence ?

Thanks

Also just to clarify, when i talk about Ambush and being part of the defence i am specifically talking about a character such as Dragon Knight as opposed to any attachments…and i am talking about Dragon Knight kneeling and not just his text modifier.

You have been playing Ambush incorrectly. Ambush doesn't put a character into the challenge, it simply puts the character into play. When you're the defender, this can effectiely give you the same result, as you can ambush them in after the attacker declares his challenge but before you have declared defenders (during the player action window, to be perfectly clear) to have some surprise characters to defend with that he probably didn't expect/take into account. On the offense, however, this means that anyone you ambush in after you've declared your attack, barring any abilities, will not be able to participate in that challenge. There are some cards, one that a Targaryen player would care about being the Horseback Archers , whose effects allow you to put them into the challenge from your hand, but this is not the same thing as the Ambush keyword.

So, just to clarify, what Ambush does (as stated in the rule book) is it allows you to "put a card with the 'Ambush' keyword into play from your hand as an 'Any Phase' action, by paying its printed gold cost with influence". In other words, you can ambush a card into play during any player action window by kneeling its gold cost in influence and putting it into play as if you had played it (so it comes in standing, that's the key here).

The other thing you are doing wrong is triggering any ability once you start counting attack and defense STR to resolve the challenge.

Once defenders are declared and all players pass on taking actions, the challenge starts to resolve. In order to resolve the challenge, you count STR, determine the winner, settle claim, award unopposed (if applicable), and award Renown (if applicable). Then, you resolve passives related to winning/losing the challenge, settling claim, etc. Then, players can trigger Responses to any of that. Once ALL of that is done, you can start playing player actions (like Ambush) again.

So in your original scenario, once you started counting STR, you were out of chances to do anything with Ambush, period.

How are costs impacted when using Ambush to play an out-of-house card?

As far as I know, there are no "out of House" Ambush cards. They are all "House X only," matching their printed Houses. If FFG screwed up and made any non-"House X only" Ambush cards (or, I suppose, if you're trying to use Dragon Egg out of House), Ambush would reference the printed cost of the card when determining its influence cost.

Even Dragon Egg is House Targaryen only. So, not only does it only give Targ cards the ambush keyword, you can only play it out of Targaryen in the first place.

I am sorry to say, but I believe you are both mistaken:

http://www.cardgamedb.com/index.php/GoTCards.html/_/dragon-chaser-sb

Tywin said:

The only "Ambush" card that I know of without the appropriate "House X only" is the banned Jaqen H'gar, which has all 6 printed House affiliations, anyway.

Oh, phew! That is great to know…these old chapter packs from the first cycle are impossible to find and thus, I don't have the cards from many of them (this one included) so my only way of seeing them (unless you know of a better resource) is through the online databases.

Thanks for taking the time to explain!!

On that same website, you can go to the deckbuilder and type "Ambush" in the "text" search parameter. This will give you all 19 cards (and True Queen's Harbinger because it mentions ambush in its effect) with the ambush keyword, along with their pictures and the decks you can find them in. I'm not sure how you found this guy without doing that or clicking through the card index, which includes pictures of all the cards as well…

ktom said:

However, if he wasn't banned, he could be played in a Neutral Faction deck because he isn't restricted to any house. Of course, the Neutral Faction didn't exist yet when this Jaqen was printed, so there would have been no need. We'll see what will come out of the first-cycle reedition.

J_Roel said:

When you use the search function on your smartphone it doesn't let you see the picture, just the text; I haven't encountered too many that have had incorrect or incomplete text, but this one certainly was an example. After I saw ktom's response I went and took a look at the image on my laptop.

I would like to thank you both again for taking the time to clarify this!

Oh, I see, that explains it then. I've never used the site on anything but my computer, so I had no idea.