I control a Hellholt Engineer and I put Balerion the Black into play and use Balerion's response to kneel my opponent's locations and characters, as well as my own. Can I use the response on HellHolt Engineer to stand one of my locations?

The reason I ask is because I come from a background of playing a different game where there's a diffrerence between "me" spending my opponent's location and his own actions spending his location. I'm pretty sure it should work, but just wanted to double check.

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Hellholt Engineer

Response After an opponent kneels a location, choose and stand a location you control.

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Balerion the Black

Response After you play Balerion the Black from your hand, kneel all non- Dragon characters and locations.

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I also forgot to add one other part to my question. Who gets to chose the order in which the characters and locations knelt? I'm not sure if its always Balerion's controller, or the 1st Player.

LordOWar said:

The locations are not knelt directly by the conscious choice of your opponent. Therefore, Hellholt Engineer's play restrictions aren't met and you cannot trigger the ability.

(And yes, if you were paying close attention, you probably recognized that Hellholt Engineer's play restrictions are pretty much only met when an opponent kneels a location to pay a cost!)

As for who chooses the order in which things are knelt by Balerion, the answer is "no one." Remember that in AGoT, there are no "Last In, First Out" chains or stacks. Each effect has to resolve completely before any other can be triggered. So, since Balerion kneels all characters and locations, they all kneel at the same time. Simultaneously, when Balerion's effect is resolved. They will all be knelt before any other effect can be triggered.

(The exception, of course, is "save" and "cancel" Responses, the only true interrupts in the game, which break the initiation-resolution "link" in an effect. However, since these interrupts happen before resolution, they would take place before any locations are knelt.)

Are you sure that Hellholt Engineer cannot respond to an opponent kneeling a location through a card effect like Attack from the Sea or Balerion? Both cards use the imperative, referencing the controller.

Yes, I'm sure.

Feel free to send the question directly to FFG through the rules question link. They've answered it before, so I'm pretty confident in their response - although they have contradicted themselves before.

If they have answered this question before, then I will accept it. It wouldn't the first time they made a ruling that goes against how I understand card and rule text