So I've been playing standard format joust games for a while now and two characters stand out as REALLY powerful.

Brienne of Tarth (ITE) - While Brienne of Tarth is participating in a challenge, opponents cannot trigger effects.

She seems especially powerful in a Military challenge on the attack. They can't save, remove characters from the challenge, boost their strength, etc. You can do all these things and play cards like moment of glory or trigger abilities which they can't cancel!

There only seem to be a few decent ways of dealing with her other than with a targetted kill: Milk of the Poppy (and other in house attachments) and Ramsey's Betrothed. Both are pretty easily dealt with themselves as in a Stark deck the stalwart Arya Stark is very popular and Baratheon have great attachment control through Stripped Of Honors.

The only passive effect I can think of that affects the situation is Nestor Royce's ability, which will only help if they have more lords/ladies/nobles than you.

Castellan Of The Rock

Lannister have plenty of good kneel effects but this one just seems to have so little cost. For the ability to kneel their strongest non-immune character each turn you don't pay much. He's not understrengthed, gets two icons and in standard there is only one card worth using that hurts allies: Ser Arys Oakheart. He's non-unique so you can run 2 or 3 without having dead cards in hand and if they steal him they generally won't be able to use his powerful ability. So you get a slightly weaker character than otherwise in return for kneeling the character of your choice each turn. This guy burns me on a regular basis.

Do you guys find these characters incredibly strong too? What do you use for counters?

Both of them are very good cards.

I myself use both of them, Brienne in Stark and Castelan in Lanni. They are good when they hit the table, but I would not say they are overpowered. There is planty of ways to get rid of them. Brienne cant participate in all challenges so she can be killed by event in a different one. Castelan has a Limited Responce: so you cannot triger any other limited responce this round. I think that is limited enough.

Castellan of the rock is good and well i rarely play Brienne of Tarth (ITE) however she can be very beneficial. My top ten of the best / "overpowered" if you like,  standard charachters : 

1. Drogon (ITE)
2. Tywin Lannister (ahoth)
3. Eddard Stark (5KE) 
4. Dagmer Cleftjaw (talons)
5. Timett, son of Timett (talons)
6. Illy Payne (Promotion)
7. Ser Davos Seaworth (5KE) 
8. Arya Stark (5KE) 
9. Viserion (5KE) 
10. shared (Robb, Stannis, Cersei, Daeny : all 5KE)   

It´s in my opinion usually very hard for some standard decks today to find a counter strategy against a deck that either works with burn as a permanent terminal effect (center of the deck Drogon ITE and multiple saves for Drogon)  and against a kneel deck with Tywin (and multiple saves).

Yeah the castellan is really gamewinning sometimes. It is really helpful to run a few attachments, as he has the "a character without attachments" restriction.

(which a lot of powerfull effects have right now)

What I´m missing to this point is the TalonsEd Queen of Thorns. Often when she hits the table you can´t do anything unless you can trigger two effects worth canceling in one round. Which is not very often in my experience.

Ghost of Highheart

Darkstar (ITLP)

Myrcella (5 Kings)

are also very useful

I dont thing that Ghost of High Heart isnt that overpowered, since they can draw a card after you discard one from their hand. Somethimes happend that they got better card then the one I just discarded.

On the other hand I think that Viserion (ITE) is very powerfull, it is very dangerous in both defence and in attack and when you go unopposed you get 3 power.

Rozy said:

Yep, Viserion (ITE) is unlisted on position no. 11 / 12 or so on my list, i just felt that Viseroin (5kE) is more versatile than the ITE version.

Also i think  the strength of  Ghost of highheart must be defined by a more statistical method. Just a few points: 

• the handsize and the chance to make a good pick differs from 0 (useless)- X (very helpful) 
• if the draw cap was reached by your opponent (common in standard) the ghost of high heart is a beast
• the chance to see your opponents schemings with a relative low engagement on your side is sometimes better than the discard 
• "cannot be discarded" is a very rare ability these days

Soemone who is better at maths than i am may feel invited to define the true value of the ghost in mathematical terms. ;-) 

Old Ben said:

It's an Control Card so it looks not so impressive like Viserion (ITE). GOHH has also nice synergies with other cards like Shield Island or Locked in a tower. Only Tagaryen is not his friend.  I have seen that the card was discussed already on tzumainn. For me it's a 5.

I'm still not totally sold on Viserion 5K - though he is damn good. I can't pass up the game breaker that is Viserion ITE, especially with dupes and PTT? to protect him. And 5K Rhaegal (my favorite of the 5K dragons) to stand him.

Ser Davos is definteily on my list. 5K Robb is close to the top - I think the scariest of Kings.

Myrcella for sure.

I can't name enough scary Lannister cards - all the ones you guys brought up are excellent.

Lte me add Veteran looters - who have gotten SO mcuh better now that First Snow is gone - and they were already A list carsd to start with. Greyjoy mill in Standard is pretty darn nasty right now.

Great thread! .

And what about Maester Wendamyr (AHoT), he is a nightmare for every kill focused deck. His reusable save with 2 inf standing ability is great. This one was a real pain in my *** when I play Stark and could not kill a damn thing :(

I agree Maester Wendamyr is a nightmare for most of the dedicated Stark kill decks. And he´s good against other houses too. However he´s more or less a silver bullet against Stark kill and wouldn´t do much against Targaryen burn. Lanni kneel also helps to deal with him.

I wouldn´t rank him that high, even if he´s good. I think most of the top rank spaces should be preserved for charachters with global effects (like Drogon, Tywin, Payne, Dagmer, Timmet)  and extra ordinary fire power (like Eddard, Davos ...).    

Ben - I'm really suprised you have Dagmer ranked ahead of Davos, Arya and Payne (!) Granted - he's got that global effect, but plenty of greyjoys have stealth anyway and the House has other stealth realted tricks to boot - i dunno.

He never posed particular problems for me - but maybe psot winter rotation, he has becoem more of a staple. apart from balck friday, Greyjoy took a pretty big hit around here.  Still, htere have always seemed to be more important targets to Milk or Kill than Dagmer. Why the respect?

From all the lists here it seems that Martell has no power characters or at least not in the top 10. For me Myrcella is very good but I would not put her in the top ten eighter. Do you think of any good characters for Martell.

I have to say that generaly there has always been a good Red Viper and Aero Hotah. (from what I remember - meaning WNE and younger)

ITE Arianne (who is, in fact, ITE - funny, I never noticed that) is probably top ten or top 15.

Drawstar is, and always has been in my Top Ten characters. Myrcella might be Top Ten too - she makes a LOT of my decks.

The current versions of Viper and Hotah are solvable and don't worry me over much.

Stag Lord said:

Well like always, everything started with a fun deck back in WED time, Aegon Targaryen had a nice theme deck "Euron is looking for his bride" (-Dany of course), so we had a Greyjoy deck with the dragons (especially ITE Drogon). In one melee game that situation happened when both Dagmer and Drogon hit the table totally destroying every players charachter base. That was the first time i paid some more respect to Dagmer. Nowadays we have the experience in our local game group that war crests and stealth and cards like e.g. crows nest work good together. You usually don´t need the -X penalties with Dagmer -1 or -2 strength to all non-stealth charachters is usually enough to dominate the challenge phase. 

Since Greyjoy hasn´t got that much viable (imo) charachter control these days like they used to have i think he´s probably the best Greyjoy charachter today. I sometimes wonder if there was a circle of anti-agenda planned since Dagmer seems to bear the same restrictions as Tywin Lannister (ahothorns).

I also agree about the unique Martell charachter discussion, they don´t seem to have a´n outstanding charachter at the moment, Drawstar, Myrcella and Arianne (ITE) are close to the top but finally don´t seem to make the cut. Red Viper (WED) would have easily made the top 3, but the current Vipers are just a shadow of the older versions. 

I'll grant that he is really strong - and maybe the best unique Greyjoy has at the moment. (I am partial to ITE Victarion though he uses claim replacement to steal lcaotions)  I just think that he misses the Top Ten cut - and certainly comes in behind Ilyn and his constant kill effect, Araya and her repeatable kill effect and Davos - well, I am aprtial to Baratheon. His STr 2 makes him vulnerable, but I still think he hits the tabel with more impact than Dagmer.

Greyjoy stealth and resource denial is a very fun and competitve strategy in Standard. I think they lost a lot of their rush cards when winter went, and I am not sure how well the Kings of Salt and Rock deck works now - but of all the Houses, they are best positioned to deal with some of those nasty, nasty locations that have been released recently.