Post-Stahleck and during the Christmas period, the Global Operations Team (G.O.T.) has been listening to the debate between those players arguing for and against rotation. There are compelling arguments for both sides, and G.O.T. has made the decision to implement rotation for a test period of three months, beginning January 2025. This rotation period will coincide with a new Restricted List update complete with changes to account for cards removed by rotation, and also to account for current meta trends.
The cards to be cycled out for the rotation test period are the contents of the entire Westeros cycle and the War of the Five Kings cycle. This will remove 240 cards from the active card pool for the standard format of the game. This change and the new upcoming Restricted List will hopefully be active from the 20th of January 2025 on both theironthrone.net and thronesdb.com for playing and deckbuilding.
As part of the rotation test, there will be some tournaments organised and the general atmosphere and feedback of gameplay will be closely monitored going forward, and a decision will be taken at a later date whether to continue with rotation testing or whether to revert back to the full card pool. Indeed, some areas have independently begun their own preparations for in-person rotation events, with the Czech meta organising the first known event in Prague on February 8th (March on Winterfell – Rotation test). G.O.T. intends to promote similar events online in order to gain as much feedback as possible.
No decision has yet been taken on how temporary or permanent this change is, nor how a permanent change might look in the future. Members in the G.O.T. committees all have their own views and not all views align. If you are interested in the arguments presented within G.O.T. both for and against, then the documents can be viewed here. A third-party idea has also been constructed here.
That is all for now; we hope this change will leave you motivated to explore new possibilities, and intrigued about what more can come.
