Skill & Strategy in Legendary: Game of Thrones

Despite the subject line, today’s blog is not a strategy guide! Instead, it’s a look at a couple of cards from the about-to-release Legendary: Game of Thrones showing how I redefined two Hero classes whose names make sense in superhero games but don't apply as well to GRR Martin's fantasy world.

Legendary uses five card classes, aka colors, to define the heroes of all the various Legendary deckbuilding games. The five colors are Tech (Black), Ranged (Blue), Covert (Red), Strength (Green), and Instinct (White). It’s the first two classes—Black and Blue—that needed to be redefined for Game of Thrones.

Blue is for Skill

Ranged (Blue) is about blasting things, usually with energy beams, lightning, lasers, psychic powers, and so on. Yes, Daenerys’ dragons could muster convincing energy attacks, and there’s at least one flaming sword in the world, but ranged/energy isn’t a rich source of character concepts in GoT. I called Blue “Magic” when I designed Legendary: Big Trouble in Little China, but that’s not right for GoT either, where magic is usually hidden and covert instead of showy and explosive.

So I went with a concept that’s extremely important to the great Houses and their warriors: Blue is now Skill. “Skill Heroes (Blue) have prowess with weapons and combat, especially the combat styles practiced by trained warriors and knights.” It’s not about brawn, it’s not about instinct, it’s about skills recognized by other great knights, like the skills possessed by Loras Tyrell, who shows up as a Skill Hero on one of the cards from the Great Warriors hero set.

Two of Jaime Lannister’s cards are Skill cards, including one of his two common cards, Kingslayer.

Jaime’s defining act, earlier in his career, is so infamous that everyone expects him to do his worst. That’s how I think of the part of the card that forces you to choose an enemy to draw a card, Jaime has a bit of a deathwish and he’s a provocateur. In a two-player game you obviously know who’s drawing the card, it’s in multiplayer games that the lobbying becomes interesting, though you’re usually attempting to help the enemy who seems like less of a threat.

Meanwhile, Sword Mastery is the GoT set’s version of the Conqueror ability. If there’s any Ally in the Sword range-space, the space in the middle of the range track, Kingslayer provides another +2 Attack that can only be used against Masterminds. Since Kingslayer is a Common card, you might draw multiples in the same hand. When Sword Mastery triggers, an enemy Mastermind tends to follow the King into oblivion.

Black is for Strategy

The other card I’m showing today is the rare card from Jaime Lannister. It’s a Covert (Red card) that plays on the connection between the Lannister twins. They’re so intertwined that Cersei is showing up on Jaime’s Rare card!

The Strategy trigger on Intertwined is all Cersei. And Strategy is what Black has become instead of Tech in GoT. The series’ opening credits have some wonderful tech, but I wouldn’t say there’s much tech to build Hero cards with. So I went with a quality that sets many of the most deadly characters in GoT apart:: “Strategy Heroes (Black) use big-picture manipulation, grand strategic and master plans.”

Cersei is the poster ‘hero’ for Strategy cards. Intertwined’s Strategy trigger offers an unusual amount of choice in how you’ll use the effect, but the story concept is the same: someone is being removed from the big picture.

As you’d expect, Tyrion is another Lannister with Strategy in mind. The Small Council of the Baratheon House has some Strategy cards, but there aren’t as many in the Stark and Dothraki houses. In fact, one of the Stark Masterminds gets weaker when attacked with Strategy cards; Lord Eddard the Hand wasn’t playing the long game.