Now they are not only married to their sword and vow,
but to shadows.
Hope they get some cool locations to make them more viable.

You meant Kingsguard are in sight to don the white, right?

if white is the new black, then yes!
When you're clarmoring in the shadows, white and black lose much distinctions and become a darkish blur…

Ruvion said:

That is very true. How do you don the white in the shadows?

Btw, I love the new Kingsguard direction with jumping shadows and what not.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I see a bit of a trend here…

1. Night's Watch brethren jump from your hand with the help of a unique Neutral location (the Wall) or a Stark event (Passing the Wall). Built in jumbacks at the end of challenge. Requires good bit of intrigue to protect the hand, but the North agenda and the Wall can deal with this okay. Watch out for repeated Intrigue attacks in multiplayer though. This is somewhat reminiscent of the Ambush keyword.

2. Naval characters jump from the standby state while in play into a current challenge in progress. No real protection here, other than protected from effects targetting participating characters while in standby mode (meh).

3. Kingsguard yahoos jump from Shadows. Jumpbacks require Ser Preston Greenfield, Sister of Truth, or On My Oath plot (from dead/discard). Very protected while in shadows.

Conclusion: AGoT LCG designers like to jump while designing cards?! Or they just like platformers like the Super Mario Brothers.

Ruvion said:

I always get the feeling they like mechanics for the sake of mechanics and non-counterable gameplay to be Tier 1. <.<

You are right that with this LCG business model, FFG has to continue to churn out hot potatoes, often times this means new mechanics, in order to maintain the interests of its consumers…especially its monthly "subscribers".

The next CP cycle, the Kingsroad is a nice refreshing change in that as we know so far it is a revisit to the past mechanics (other than the new way of viewing board position a la "in your command"). I hope that supporting past themes, especially those that are viewed as weaker themes, remains a sticking trend going forward.

The uncounterable mechanics you mentioned may generally be something the designers hope that the meta itself rapidly adapts and corrects with some newly introduced cards that nudges them to balance. At least, an evolving self-correcting meta philosophy was the gist of what I got from the 2012 Damon Stone interview by TC. But sometimes it just can't be helped and the nuissance needs the BER stick.

With all that said, I still think there are strong similarilties in thoses 3 mechanics with cards jumping from X to Y, as mentioned above. Maybe that is the natural progression of development for a card game with heavy emphasis on unit management (Magic's Old Aggro?).