First Tilt - Common Mistakes, Part 2

We are back from a longer than usual delay (sorry about that). But, here we are back in from the cold and ready to regale you with more tips that we hope will be helpful as you continue to learn this great game.

This week, we're going to continue our series about common mistakes. Last time we took a look at the Plot, Draw, and Marshaling phases. Today, we're going to tackle Challenges, Dominance, Standing, and Taxation. The point of this series is to look at what are the most common errors new players make and maybe deal with some of the small timing issues that come up. We'll leave the bigger discussion of timing and rules lawyering to our friends at the Quill and Tankard.

Without further ado, let's jump in shall we?

The Challenges phase is where most of the meat and potatoes of the game happens. You battle, you win (hopefully), kill characters, get power, mill decks and hands and all that fun stuff. Due to this, there is much that happens in this phase that bears mentioning. So, I'm going to break this down a little bit into chunks.

Shadows

Why wait until now to discuss Shadows? Well, because in most cases, this is the first phase you'll actually be able to bring a card out of shadows since, most of the time, you've marshaled them into shadows during the Marshaling phase, you have to wait until at least this phase to bring them out.

So, the main rule is that you can only bring a single card out of Shadows at the very beginning of the phase, before anything else happens. First Player gets first opportunity for a Shadows action and it moves clockwise from there. If you decide to initiate a challenge, kneel a card for an effect, or play an event, it is now too late to bring a card out of shadows. Now, obviously, there are exceptions, but those exceptions will be spelled out on the relevant cards. If you don't have a card that gives you the ability to bring a card out of shadows at some other time than the start of the phase, it's the only time you can do this.

What does this mean? Once the phase begins, if someone has a card in shadows, they need to be given the opportunity to take that action if they desire. Whether you actually ask them or simply pause after saying something like, "Okay, starting the challenges phase..." wait a few beats and look at them. I always actually ask if they have a shadows action, but that's me. Honestly, if you don't give your opponent any time to take the shadows action and start barreling through and they stop you and inform you they have one, you don't have much license to complain about "revealing too much" if you didn't give them a chance. It's easier for everyone if you just pause. A few seconds will not make the difference, especially since being forced to rewind actually takes longer.


Keywords
Once important note about keywords - they are not character abilities. However, they are card effects. So, this means cards like The Red Viper or Renly Baratheon are not immune to these keywords - they can still die to Deadly. But, since they are card effects, Cat o' the Canals is immune to all keywords (she's even immune to Valar Morghulis, believe it or not... crazy).

• Stealth - you cannot declare Stealth targets as the attacker until you've allowed your opponent the opportunity to take a player action. I recommend you say, "Do you have any actions before declaring defenders?" This doesn't give away that you might have a stealth action, but it does provide that pause before you declare stealth so that they can't suddenly say they have an action once you've declared stealth.
  
• Deadly - people always forget about Deadly. It only works on the offense and it only works if the attacking player has more characters with the Deadly keyword participating in the challenge than the defending player.
  
• Renown - this is a passive effect that must happen. You need to get into the habit of checking to see if you or your opponent has any Renown characters on the field and then helping each other remember to claim power if that character was participating in a challenge as the victor.

Mandatory Passives
A passive effect is a card that does not have Response or Any Phase (or Phase Name) in front of it. If the text reads as if the effect just "happens" when certain conditions are met and doesn't include things like "may choose" or some other verbiage that makes it clear it's a player's choice as to whether or not to perform the action, the passive is a mandatory passive. Ignoring a mandatory passive is technically against the rules. If both players allow a mandatory passive to be ignored, you've entered what is called an "illegal game state," That means that the game is not progressing the way it's intended to progress because a game effect has been completely ignored.

In casual games, this is usually easy to work out, if you can fire the passive without really affecting other elements in the game, then you just agree to do that. If too much time has passed or too much information has been revealed and rewinding is no longer an option - well, then the table will need to work that out. Most of the time, you'll just agree to let it pass and work to prevent the oversight going forward, but it's important.

In competitive play, this can get tense. It almost always requires a judge and every judge handles this differently. The safest thing is to pay attention to the cards and simply not let a passive go unnoticed.

Attacking and Defending
There is only one point in a challenge where you get to declare attackers and only one place where you can declare defenders. Once either window passes, there isn't another opportunity to do this (outside of any specific card ability like Greatjon Umber or the new Naval Enhancements). For example, once you've declared defenders, you can't use the Ambush keyword to put a character into play with the intention of using them as a defender if you've already declared defenders. While there are specific cards that can enter play from your hand as a participant after the challenge has begun (like Catelyn Stark or Horseback Archers), these are the exception.

Dominance
The most common error people make in Dominance has to do with strength modifiers and player actions: Strength for dominance is counted before any player actions can occur. What does this mean?

• You cannot buff a character with a Warship or some other strength modifier to try and boost your ability to win dominance
  
• Strength modified during the challenges phase might have expired once the Challenges phase ends (the exception are passive strength modifiers like King's Pavilion or Power of Arms)
  
• You MAY bring a card out of Shadows, provided you can pay the cost, before Dominance strength is counted. If that card is a character, that characters strength WILL count for Dominance.

Standing and Taxation
Really, these phases happen quickly and rarely have any impact. That said, it's important to note that both of these phases do have Player Action windows. This means that something CAN happen. So, while you're in a rush to move to the next phase, don't forget to check your cards for something you might want to do during those phases.

Conclusion

There are a lot of places in this game where you can get tripped up. What I've tried to do in these past two articles is go over a few common mistakes that I encounter with new players. Heck, a lot of these are mistakes I made when I first started. I hope you find these little guides helpful. What motivates me to write them is remembering how I wished stuff like this existed when I started.

This is just a taste of phase-mongery. If you really want to understand the intricacies at a deeper level, make sure you pay attention to Quill and Tankard Regulars. There hasn't been a single article that I haven't found enlightening in some way.

Did I miss something? Is there some other mistake that you see constantly that frustrates you and wish n00bs knew better? Shout out in the forums and let us know!