Forging the Chain - Danger Zone

Welcome back to another edition of Forging the Chain. Today I'll be talking about the danger zone or the period in which you have improved a fair amount but still don't know the text of every card. This period is especially problematic because you will think you know what all the cards say. I'm a bit famous in my meta for not reading cards because well I foolishly think I already know what they say. So the advice I provide today is simple, read every card in your hand and on the table even if you are sure you know what they do. Then remember what the cards say.

Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong! Well, at least wrong for me. So in order to illustrate my point I will provide some examples from last night. I played 8 games and there were a myriad of terrible blunders that were caused by not reading cards effectively. Bear in mind that these blunders occurred after about 5 hours of gaming and on no sleep. But this is actually the ideal scenario for practicing. If you are serious about this game you will find this is the precise situation in which you will be playing your most important games. Since we do our tournaments as one day events you must be the most vigilant about playing with precision while being fatigued. Well then, on to the disasters.

The first mistake was made in a game against a Lannister PBtT deck. I was playing a Martell Summer deck and felt like I would probably have the advantage. My opponent dropped down The Iron Throne (LotR) on the flop. I looked at my board with Samwell Tarly, an Orphan and then at my hand with my Bannermen. I thought oh boy this is real, real bad. However, I had a condemned by the council in hand. At this point I did not read the Iron Throne and remembered the card as "Response: Kneel to cancel a triggered effect." Of course the card is not that amazing and is only restricted to character abilities. I proceeded to play the entire game as if every effect could be instantly cancelled. That meant first of all I couldn't play condemned by the council because he would just cancel it. So I had to try to waste other effects to get him to kneel the throne. For instance, he did not take the bait turn 1 and despite winning an intrigue challenge I did not play my event. Eventually I won a very close game despite playing the entire game wrong.

In another game, I had Gilly on the table and my opponent had a 2 claim plot. He was playing Targ KotHH with ambush guys, and he had just enough influence to bring in one character. So I played my turn knowing that I had A Game of Cyvasse (ACoS) for the character that he would eventually bring into the game. I played it perfectly. Then my opponent played Forever Burning on Gilly and dropped in a Dragon Knight reducing her strength to 0. I had both a He Calls it Thinking in hand and The Bastard of Godsgrace (EB) on the table. So I didn't play the He Calls it Thinking on the response. Then I attempted to use Bastard to boost Gilly in order to use Game of Cyvasse. My opponent then reminded me that Gilly was not a Martell character, yikes. He proceeded to kill 2 of my 3 characters and I looked like the fool. I was able to win this game as well, but blunders like these will often lose games.

The last reading blunder I will recount was made by one of my opponents. He had 3 characters on the table and I had Sam and The Red Viper (PotS). So the Red Viper was active and about to go into beast mode. I played a Black Raven and triggered Sam. My opponent cancelled the response and attached He Calls it Thinking to his refugee instead of some other decent character without an intrigue icon. I looked at him funny and said hmm that's an odd choice. He smiled because he clearly had a plan. Later in the turn, when I attacked with the Red Viper, he smiled and tossed out Game of Cyvasse. Huzzah his crazy plan had worked now his refugee had more strength than my Viper. Oh wait the Viper is immune to events, argghhhhh. A few seconds later the refugee died to claim and he had wasted a wonderful attachment.

Well hopefully this journey into the mistakes that can be made by not reading cards has motivated you to carefully read each of your cards before having your pro play blow up in your fact. Until next time keep improving!

Tiny Grimes recently migrated over to AGOT, in January 2012. Although he has not played the game long, Tiny spends far too much of his time playing and thinking about the game. He has played in four tournaments, placing first in a 15 person local event, 2nd in the 2012 Pasadena Regional (32 players), and 3rd in the first regional of the 2012 season (32 person event - Kingdom Con), and 10th at Gencon 2012.