Secrets and Schemes Is Now Available for A Game of Thrones: The Card Game

“Any friend of Varys the Spider is someone I will trust just as far as I can throw him.”
   –George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

The Seven Kingdoms are rife with turmoil and intrigue. The Great Houses of Westeros plot and scheme, playing their game of thrones. In this world, secrets are weapons just as dangerous as swords or bows. Join the battles and intrigues with Secrets and Schemes, the first Chapter Pack of the Wardens cycle for A Game of Thrones: The Card Game, now available at your local retailer!

In this Chapter Pack, you get your first taste of the upcoming Wardens cycle. This cycle brings plenty of House Arryn cards down from the Eyrie to join the fight for the Iron Throne, while offering new support for your trait-based decks. At the same time, every House gains new Limited Responses, powerful abilities that can only be triggered once per round. Each House has new secrets and tactics prepared, and this expansion gives you the chance to use them all.

Deadly Weapons

Two of the Limited Responses found in Secrets and Schemes come in the form of deadly Weapons, wielded by renowned warriors. The first of these weapons is Red Rain (Secrets and Schemes, 6), the Valyrian steel sword of House Drumm. In A Game of Thrones: The Card Game, this deadly sword can only be wielded by a unique Greyjoy character, but its Limited Response dramatically increases the havoc the attached character wreaks in challenges. After the character wielding Red Rain is declared as an attacker, you may choose a character controlled by the defending player. If you then win the challenge by four or more Strength, the chosen character is discarded from play!

The other Limited Response Weapon included in this Chapter Pack is Hotah’s Axe (Secrets and Schemes, 12). This attachment bears the setup keyword, and it also reads, “Limited Response: After you win a challenge in which attached character participated, choose a character. That character loses a challenge icon of your choice until the end of the phase. Then, if that character has no challenge icons, kill it.” Removing challenge icons has long been the specialty of House Martell, and with Hotah’s Axe, you can easily kill troublesome single-icon characters, like the Horselord (Ancestral Home, 75), that oppose your quest for the Iron Throne.

Building the Realm

Of course, not every card with a Limited Response ability is an attachment. You’ll find a similarly powerful ability on Ser Kevan Lannister (Secrets and Schemes, 8), a champion card designed by the 2012 A Game of Thrones: The Card Game Chinese Champion, Bing Ouyang. This version of Ser Kevan Lannister boasts two beneficial traits: Lord and Knight, alongside a Noble crest, which enables you to protect him with The Power of Blood (Core Set, 194). But many times, you won’t even want to keep Ser Kevan Lannister from dying. As a Limited Response, whenever Ser Kevan Lannister enters play or leaves play, you may choose a Lannister or neutral location in your discard pile and put it into play.

This ability has dozens of possible applications, but one of these potential uses is to add new resilience to Lannister decks using the House of Dreams (A Roll of the Dice, 119) agenda. Many players use City plots to counter this agenda, counting on A City Besieged (Chasing Dragons, 59) to discard their opponent’s House of Dreams location. Ser Kevan Lannister allows you to return that location to play, giving you the chance to reestablish your deck’s central strategy and forcing your opponent to find another answer to your location.

Scheme in the Shadows

Whether you take up fabled weapons or join Ser Kevan Lannister in building the fortune of House Lannister, you can join the fight for the Iron Throne in this Chapter Pack. Forge secrets into weapons and lay your schemes well: only one can win the game of thrones!

Secrets and Schemes is now available at your local retailer! 

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