Forging The Chain - Rules Blowouts

Welcome to another edition of Forging the Chain. This week I am going to discuss one of the most annoying aspects of the game, the dreaded rules blowout. Nothing is worse than having a plan cooked up that is destroyed not by the superior play of your opponent, but by your own lack of knowledge of a rule. What makes this worse is that this will be a common occurrence throughout your first hundred games or so. Moreover, even after you have quite a bit of experience with the game some rule will still jump up and bite you when you least expect it.

As usual, I will start with an example from my own experience. The other day I was playing Stark against a maester deck. It was winter and I decided to bring Meera out to blank my opponent's two maesters so they could not grab any chains. Now if you've followed this column you know I have extensive experience playing maesters. However, what I was still unaware of is that with the errata to The Maester's Path, a maester can still grab the Apprentice Collar even if blanked of their traits. This is the case because the agenda now reads "printed" maester and Meera, though amazing, is not able to scrub the ink off of the physical card. I was stunned. I placed 2nd and 3rd in regionals and made the top 16 at Gencon all with maester decks and didn't know that rule. My mind started racing back through all my games. How many had I lost because I didn't grab my Apprentice Collar because I thought my maester was unable to pull chains. Needless to say I was very frustrated. However, it was a meaningless game on OCTGN and now I know the rule. So in the end the rules blowout was great because I learned a valuable piece of information.

Here's the silver lining to the rules blowout problem. When these rules blowouts happen in non tournament games, you should actually be happy. The only way to improve is to learn and learning all the little aspects of anything is what makes you great at it. However, you must file away these tidbits and learn from them. The only thing more annoying than losing to a rules blowout once is losing to the same one again! This is one of the main reasons I suggest playing a ton of games with a deck before taking it to a tournament. You will hopefully encounter the most common rules issues before you get to the event. When playing Martell and Stark this advice is especially important because you have to learn all of the issues surrounding Meera Reed and The Red Viper. What all is the Viper immune to. What can cancel Meera? I remember in one of my early days having this great plan that if I blocked with the Riverrun Guard his strength would go up and then come down. This would trigger the Hound who would leave play and I could then bring Meera back into shadows and then blank a 2nd card with her. Then I could jump Catelyn into play and Meera would go into shadows when Catelyn went back to my hand. I built my deck around these idea and was stunned to find out that Riverrun Guard does not have his strength reduced and therefore the Hound does not go back to your hand. Also, since jumping Catelyn goes back to your hand as an end of phase action you cannot trigger Meera there as well. These rules blowouts are crazy annoying the first time, but then you adjust, learn, and move on.

The most frustrating situation is when two players disagree over rules interpretations. This happens all too frequently on OCTGN and leads to many heated arguments. So here is a general tip. If you play in a tiny meta, you probably don't know the rules well. I'm sure you think you know them well, but until you start playing against a larger group of players you need to be aware that the interpretations your group has decided upon are often incorrect. Second, if someone says they travel to play in tournaments around the country or world, they probably know the rules well. Of course this is not always the case as illustrated above by my own recent rules blowout, but generally speaking it holds true.

So to illustrate I will provide a few rules clashes I have had on OCTGN over the last few months. To begin let me state that being a jerk online is no more acceptable than it is in person. While OCTGN may seem like a limitless and nameless community, it is not. For example, I have a list of individuals I simply will not play against. This list is not based on their skill, but rather their demeanor. I realize rules issues can be annoying, but they are not an excuse to abandon all notions of civility. Ok my ethics rant is complete, now onto some examples.

The most recent rules issue came over the Sellsword Deserter who states that if a character has the ally or refugee trait it is -1 strength. I tried to attack with the Deserter and my opponent pointed out that the character has 0 strength since he is an ally and refugee. I noted that card states "or." At this point for the next 3 minutes or so he would type out "both ally and refugee" in response to everything I typed. I think he was finally swayed by me linking him the AGOT cards entry which contains this exact discussion. Did he provide a profuse apology for letting his frustration get the best of him? Of course not. He simply said, "oh you might be right." As I would tell my daughter, this behavior is not okay.

In another game I played Fear of Winter turn 1 and my opponent played City of Lies which states that you can put 2 shadows cards into shadows from hand. When I pointed out to him that Fear of Winter only allowed one card to be played total for his turn, he said LOL. Then he proceeded to type LOL to every response I made. Finally, after linking him the AGOT cards page he was still unconvinced, but said fine we can play by your rules or some such nonsense. Again, this type of behavior is not okay.

There are a number of other examples I could provide of people behaving poorly regarding rules issues, but that's not the point of this article. The point is, try to take these annoying rules blowouts in stride and as part of your learning curve. They will happen; it's just a matter of what you do with them. Do you let them put you on tilt and cause you to treat your opponent poorly or do you grow from your experiences? You know how I feel because as always, 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.