George Ankers

English Teacher (the Lancashire indie rock band) performing at Rock City in Nottingham, bathed in orange lighting with the crowd silhouetted in front of them.

Brilliant night out seeing English Teacher. When they mix up their approach so much it's easy to forget what a catapult of a voice Lily Fontaine has on her when she wants to use it. Awesome.

It was one of the dumbest decks I ever built for the jank blog back in the day. Just absolute dog. Loved it.

A Martell location, The Water Gardens, unique, 1 cost. Dorne trait. Action: Kneel the Water Gardens to reduce the cost of the next non-character card you marshal, play or ambush this phase by X. X is the number of plot cards in your used pile.

These were a 3x in one of my favourite ever decks, NW/Dragon spamming reserve for ridiculous Siege Prep draws. You could fetch them with Aegon and stand them with him or Missandei. I don't know what else you put them in, but they were fun there.

I like People Watching just fine, but I don't expect it to land in my top 25 this year. CMAT's been robbed!

Absolute banger plot. And Craster being immune to it is so funny.

Obviously the best thing about Marched was when you put their claimsoak to the sword to clearly set up their Tywin to be Marched, then flip something else while they flip their own Marched to try to avoid having to hurt themselves later.

The double-Marched decks were the ones that most did my head in when I was getting to grips with 2.0, but good lord is it a necessary and healthy thing for the game.

The Beths on stage, seen from the middle of the crowd with a gaggle of heads watching them crush it

Absolutely mind-blowing gig from the Beths tonight. Just an incredible live act, fully cemented Straight Line Was a Lie as my album of the year. I feel like I could punch God. Damn.

10 bonus points if you can find a genuine use case for choosing a character with printed cost lower than the X you paid.

Though the man’s killing had been filmed, a fact checker is obliged to seek comment from any party alleged to have committed a crime. I called the soldier’s lawyer. He picked up from a café, where I could hear trance music blasting in the background. The lawyer told me that while, yes, his client did shoot the man picking olives, and yes, the man did die, the Israeli military court found his client not guilty of murder because the man picking olives was a terrorist who was throwing stones. Even though the video did not show the Palestinian man throwing stones, the court said that he was, so he was. QED, his client did not murder anyone, and it would be slanderous for us to say so.

if you read one thing today, make it this absolutely devastating piece from a fact-checker who quit the New Yorker
bidoun.org/articles/hou...

Britain’s Bathroom Ban The UK has gone from a bathroom ban being unthinkable to a Labour government implementing one without a vote

the UK's new anti-trans rules are indefensible & will make global fascism stronger

my latest with @liberalcurrents.com

www.liberalcurrents.com/britains-bat...

Shout-out to the delightful but wildly niche 2v2 format, where a Bara deck and a Targ deck could team up to annihilate entire boards by combining this with the loyal Targ plot that applied '-1 and killed if STR 0' to everything in play.

Most of my Stark decks after this was released were Fealties that were constructive rather than attrition but still ran mostly or only Winter plots. This was good in those decks but frequently didn't make it to 3x (or 1x) - though perhaps more a comment on Stark's absurd bench of well-costed chars.

The window between this card coming out and the restricting/nerfing of Taena might have been peak Thrones. I loved my 'draw entire deck by round 2' melee deck so much.

I had to remove this from my cube because it was far, far too good and easy to use.

I wish

no no no no no no no no no no

At this point I'm basically just screaming incoherently about this to random platforms in sequence, and it's Bluesky's turn now: The Beths have delivered their masterpiece. Straight Line Was a Lie has shot straight to the front of the running for album of the year.

It was a legit fantastic prize. Shame that TfW really only had one target in 99.9999% of use cases, Core Summer, but it was really great for fetching that.

OURS IS THE OLD WA-[shot]

Nice! I also enjoy Stray Italian Greyhound but have never got around to trying anything else by Teng so I'm looking forward to giving that a listen! And you definitely got my attention with "didgeridoos".

Love this thing. Turning off Bodyguards before you HFK something important is delicious, plus many other wonderful applications. 1x in every Tyrell deck.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was in a lot of those decks. I remember liking it even at its cost point because it didn't care whether it was knelt, so worked nicely with Halder. I think I also put it in my NW/Rose to give Standy Randy a save after I'd sworn him to the Watch.

That also tracks. I pretty much boiled down to playing exclusively Tyrell/Fealty over my last couple of years of playing or playing-ish and that's more or less why (beyond dropping the turn one Hightower, obv)

Perhaps the platonic ideal of a card that's not actually broken but just really, really, really, really, really strong. I feel like he single-handedly revived NW/Fealty as a concept, just because it felt so disgusting to marshal him for 1 gold.

Yeah, I had a lovely time trying to splash him into every faction before it (quickly) became clear that he was overcosted. Coupled with the Wolf King and later Malleon's Tome, it was fun trying to build decks where he participated in every challenge, attack and defence.

Really didn't expect we'd get anything near this good of a response from CGE. Probably the best possible result in the circumstances. Great to see.

Feel like this had a pretty prolific first year-ish of release in 2.0, in both joust and melee, and then there just ended up being too many two-claimers that gave you better gold, initiative and abilities. Good pickup in draft, though.

Quite impressed to see I've been blocked by whatever automated method CGE has been using to block people critical of its Potter Codenames announcement, despite never having taken part in the conversation on this platform. I must be doing something right.