The Ocean Orchestra - Intimidate

Probably the most powerful in-house ability in AGOT, Intimidate is a great power to have, and probably the most worth-it to get ability for characters.

What it does is that it simply makes every defending character's STR counts as zero if their STR is lower than the attacking character's STR (if the character has Intimidate). This creates opportunities for unopposed challenges, as well as giving you great advantage in punching through large number of weenies with a single high-STR Intimidate character.

The Greyjoys have a good number of characters with Intimidate, average STR of about 3, therefore, to maximize this power, you'll need to find means to increase the STR of these characters. There are multiple ways for the Greyjoys to do this - they have their Warships, attachments (Dragon Horn, for example), and events to push the STR of their Intimidate characters up to the sky and the simple sea raid simply becomes air raid. Intimidate STR needs to reach about 4 to become really useful, and 5 is usually enough to penetrate most defenses.

The Greyjoy's Intimidate tech is actually pretty well developed. First they have good Intimidate characters that can pump up their own STR through certain means - for example, Euron's Enforcers gains STR from the presence of other Raiders (including themselves), Nute the Barber can discard cards from hand to increase STR and so on. The standard event "Risen from the Sea" played in pretty much every Greyjoy deck also gives a +1 STR after that, making it an excellent utility card. Longship Victory gives +2 STR to participating character and that is simply awesome when used on a character that has Intimidate.

Due to the power of Intimidate, the Banner of the Kraken is probably the most worth-it bannerman to play, not to mention the protection it gives to the attached characters against cards that cannot target anyone with attachment.

One issue about the Intimidate characters is that many of them has the "No Attachment" clause - though it protects them from stuff like Flame-Kissed, it also opens them to kneeling effects as well as some other functions that plays off characters with no attachments. Another issue is the relatively high-cost of the characters with Intimidate. But hey, you can't have everything.

The Intimidate also works very well into the Greyjoy's standard unopposed challenge victory path - since having no defenders with any STR is as good as giving you the unopposed victory. Couple this with Support from Harlaw for the standing ability and the added Stealth to avoid that one fella that has high STR, this is simply routine killing when you have that all in place.

(o.o)