AGOT - new cycle - Secrets of Oldtown

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Fantasy Flight Games is proud to announce the next exciting cycle of Chapter Packs for A Game of Thrones: The Card Game! Beginning this Winter, Secrets of Oldtown expands the breadth of A Game of Thrones and reaches into the South where the great Citadel of the Maesters rises high above the ancient city as a pillar of learning and wisdom. Throughout the six Chapter Packs that make up the Secrets of Oldtown expansion, links in the chain of knowledge will be formed and the Maesters, too, will choose sides and join the struggle to bring peace to Westeros through knowledge ... or cunning.

Featuring iconic characters like Magister Illyrio, Archmaester Marwyn, Jaqen H'ghar, The Laughing Storm (card designed by 2010 World Joust Champion Alec Irwin), the Secrets of Oldtown cycle will bring new levels of immersion and strategy to your game.

Nate French, lead designer for A Game of Thrones: The Card Game has this to say about Secrets of Oldtown:

As you would expect, Secrets of Oldtown is a set designed around the Maesters of the Citadel. One of the key principles that guided the design of the set was that the Maesters should bring a "mind over matter" feel to the game. Instead of beating you over the head with huge strength and superior numbers, the Maesters take a more cerebral approach to the Game of Thrones, preferring to work behind the scenes and out of harm's way. There are a lot of subtle synergies and interactions built into the set, and it'll be interesting to see what players make of them.

At the heart of the Maester builds is the new agenda, The Maester's Path. This card allows players to remove chain attachments from their decks at the start of the game, and then craft the chain for their Maester characters as the game proceeds. One of the things I like about this agenda is that players have direct control over how much impact it will have on their build: you can run it with a single chain link and very little drawback, or you can run it with all 12 links that are found in the Secrets of Oldtown cycle. Further, players might be drawn to the Agenda for a variety of reasons: Do you want the sheer card advantage that comes from getting free attachments whenever you win a challenge? Or is there a single chain with a useful, toolbox sort of effect, that really shores up one of your deck's weaknesses? Or maybe you just like the idea of removing cards from your deck when the game begins, increasing your chances to draw a completely different, essential card in your setup hand. These are the subtleties that the Maesters of Oldtown bring to the table.

The Chains themselves have some interesting possibilities as well. They are all "Maester character only," and many of them have text that reads: "Response: After attached character kneels..." This trigger holds some subtle power in that kneeling the Maester is not a cost of using the chain. Which means that a Maester with multiple links of this type attached can trigger all of them in response to being knelt. (Additionally, these effects also stack if you get more than one copy of such a chain on a single Maester!) So if you had a Maester with both the Pale Steel Link and the Bronze Link attached, you could kneel that Maester (perhaps to initiate a challenge), and then trigger the Bronze Link to move an attachment from your discard pile to your hand, and then also trigger the Pale Steel Link to put that attachment directly into play. And, since you are still in the response window of the Maester who just knelt, if you just returned another chain from your discard pile, you could potentially trigger its effect too! Of course, players also need ways to kneel their chained Maester when it is convenient to do so, so a few of the more powerful chains do have the traditional "Any Phase: Kneel attached character to..." trigger to pay for their effects. Using both types together will ensure that the efficient "chains" of effects are always at your fingertips.

As expected, there are a number of Maester characters in the set, including Luwin, Murenmure, Kedry, Lomys, and not one but 2 Archmaesters. There is also a Conclave character that represents an assembly of all the Archmaesters, as well as some long awaited support for the Learned crest (), building on an idea that Learned characters are able to Learn from and mimic effects that are occuring in the environment around them. Additionally, since we're in Oldtown, some of the Hightowers make an appearance, and the Oldtown Raven shows up as well.

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Another card from the set

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A useful plot card for a maester centric deck

Until Secrets of Oldtown, playing a Maester-centric deck has been pretty tough - expensive, mostly, given that there aren't really enough Maesters in any one House to provide enough characters for a deck. Alliance (Princes of the Sun, F59) helps, as does the Neutral House card. One more card which is likely to become a part of many Maester decks is At the Gates.

Using a search plot lets you save the space in your deck that you might otherwise allocate to duplicates, event cards, or similar, and hopefully allows you to make your deck a little more focused and consistent. Building Season or Summoning Season have their advantages if there is a particular character or location that you absolutely need in play in order for your deck to work, but the downside is that your opponent (or an opponent, if you're playing in the melee) also gets the benefit of searching out their lynchpin character or location. At the Gates is limited in that it can only bring out Maesters costing three or lower, but at least your opponent doesn't also get a Maester in the process. Another nice thing is that At the Gates only refers to the printed cost of the Maester you search for, so the gold penalty does not apply and you can therefore use out-of-House Maesters inexpensively. At the Gates is also a City plot, which gives it a nice place alongside the other City plots from the King's Landing expansion.

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This week, we head to the far East and meet up with the Queen in Exile, Daenerys Targaryen.

Her Majesty

The first thing you may have noticed in this new incarnation of Daenerys is the higher price for the same icons, keyword, traits, and crest. What accounts for the price increase, then? The simple, yet effective ability to give Targaryen characters you control (including Dany herself) +1 STR*. Given its passive and across-the-board nature, this is a pretty big boost, especially given the number of low-STR characters in House Targaryen. Obvious comparisons to Daenerys Targaryen would be Hoster Tully (Lords of Winter, F21) and Randyl Tarly (Kings of the Sea, F45), although Dany has a slightly wider reach. Of course, in the case of the Randyl Tarly, if you're also playing a WAR-crest deck with Daemon Blackfyre (Tales from the Red Keep, F73), all of your Targaryen characters get another big boost. Suddenly, all of your low-cost Targaryen claim soaks can now stand alongside the big boys.

Armies of the Dragon

Making your low-STR Targaryen characters bigger and stronger, apart from making them better in challenges, has other benefits: for example, that +1 STR might be just enough to keep your characters from being tied up by Noose and Swordpoint, or killed by Ser Ilyn Payne or City of Soldiers (The Battle of Blackwater Bay, F120). Furthermore, if you want to clear out all of your opponent's 1 STR characters with Threat from the North (Princes of the Sun, F56) and don't want to do the same to your own, they are now protected by Daenerys' STR boost. Or, if you are playing with Winter, the Winds of Winter plot** makes your characters that much stronger than your opponents'. Another good use that the new Daenerys can be put to is making Khal Drogo (Wolves of the North, F9) a massive killing machine: with just Dany in play, Khal Drogo can, with won Power challenges, kill characters up to 3 STR. Beef him up further with, say, Aegon's Blade, and huge armies can go down to Khal Drogo. Don't you love that mental picture?

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Great card for Martell

Doran's Game

Technically, Doran's Game isn't specifically made for Maesters. It could just as easily work with Littlefinger or Tom Sevenstrings*. In fact, most of the Maesters currently in the card pool do not have Learned crests. On the other hand, over the course of Secrets of Oldtown, a great deal of Learned crest characters will be entering the metagame, the majority of which are Maesters. Given the Secrets of Oldtown's developing synergy for the Maester trait, whole decks could be built around it and the presence of Learned crests in such decks would make Doran's Game that much nicer of a boost. At least for House Martell decks.

Working Together

Of course, you could just spend 3 influence and Doran's Game to cancel an event card, but this would make Doran's Game a mere variation on The Hand's Judgement. Where Doran's Game really shines is in its second effect, that is, what happens after the event is cancelled. If you spend 3 influence to cancel an event, the event is cancelled and discarded, done and done. If, however, you cancel the event by kneeling a Learned character, you can then grab the cancelled event card and attach it to your House card by kneeling a second Learned character. An event like Routing the Charge or Die by the Sword**, not only gets cancelled, its owner then loses possession of it to his opponent. Once attached, it looms dangerously, waiting to be turned back on its original player, protected from the assaults of intrigue challenges. Doran's Game introduces a new weapon into an already heavy arsenal of House Martell event cards. Let Dorne's enemies beware!