"Marched to the New Wall" - Stahleck Top8 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

This is the deck I was piloting into the Top8 of Stahleck this year. I felt like there was some interest in the list, so I feel like publishing it.

I built this deck after german nationals and made some 50+ test games on theironthrone with it. I liked the play style and quickly decided for this to be my Stahleck choice independently of the meta, as I do not play much lately and I felt like playing a deck I know this well will be much better than playing some metacall. It turned out that the deck was even an okay meta call.

The deck has two win conditions: Getting The Wall up and running or play an attrition game with all the character hate you can get. The former is much easier to achieve and I feel like some people seem to see this deck as "Draw-The-Wall-Make-Or-Break" for that reason. I strongly disagree though, because it is perfectly possible for the deck to win without seeing the wall, it's just much harder. I have won both my Top32 and my Top16 match without it.

Setup and plotwise you want to mulligan hard for the wall (note that mathwise that means you keep any 6 or 7 card setups and for 5 card setups its almost neutral to mulligan or not). I always open with Time of Plenty, except if there is a Marchedpowerplay available.

I wont go through all the cards in the deck, but will instead comment on a few inclusions and obmissions. If you have more questions, just ask.

• Valar Dohaeris over Valar Morghulis: In testing I had switched back and forth between the two and both, but I really feel like Dohaeris does a perfect job in this deck and with two resets I was force-resetting myself way too often (plus I do not see which plot to cut at all). In the end, this boils down to personal taste.
• Breaking Ties over Flea Bottom: Before restrictions, the deck obviously played both. Flea Bottoms primary target is Veteran Builder and while these additional wall triggers are pretty good, it does not help at all in the much harder games where you do not see the wall. Breaking Ties on the other side... I do not have to explain you that it's good. Also, I think it is necessary to win against The Free Folk.
• Bloody Flux Arya over Core Arya: Her synergy with Coldhands and Mutiny At Craster's Keep is a subtheme of the deck. The dream play goes like this: You play Coldhands on a duped character, the duplicate falls off and you recruit it with the wall. Then, when the character returns, he is stuck in limbo.
• Poor Fellows: When I put out Bolton Flayer (see below), I was looking for a bicon weenie and this icon combination suited me best. Then I realized that people will typically give them power, believing they will not stick around anyway. But they surprisingly often do and did a good job in my timed games in Stahleck.

And here are some cards that people were assuming to be in my deck all day, but were actually not:

• Bolton Flayer has a somewhat redundant icon pair and is antisynergetic with Messenger Raven. I do need the draw desperately though and cut the flayers.
• Varys: Again, I do not play this as a reset deck. And even if I would, I would skip Varys as he would flood the discard pile with useless stuff.
• The Bay of Seals is only helpful in the matches with Wall, which do not need additional love.
• This is the only deck, one would ever put Hardhome in, and even inhere, I dont like it. My opponent will just use his characters in challenges - with no downside for him.
• Building Orders: Getting the wall and playing it is two different things. A plot that cannot do both is not a good opener, so I will much rather have plots that do stuff.
• Skagos came out a bit too late for me to thoroughly test it. While it's definitely intriguing with Ramsay Snow, I did not consider it an autoinclusion (location spots are tough!) and passed. Its definitely worth giving a shot though.

As far as the tournament goes, I am intrigued to skip on game by game reports, as I am terrible at remembering details. Rough summary: I steamrolled my opponents with the wall in 4 of 8 games, I had a card counting tie breaker win against Martell Wolf, lost to Stark Fealty and to Targaryen/Wolf in very tense games that were swinging back and forth. The last game (winner makes the cut!) was somehow special, as it was a mirror match against this deck. I had seen Ivans published predecessor list somewhere in the middle of testing and found it interesting, that someone published a list with so many similarities. Still, our Stahleck versions differ quite a bit. We both had the wall early, but it did not do much with out character bases. Still, I could grind this out quite well. So, I made my first Stahleck cut with the additional luck of placing 18th, where 19th onwards needed to play the qualification round. In TOP32 (Lannister Dragon) and TOP16 (HRD Meereen), I did not see a wall, but I could set up immediate pressure and control the game quite well. Both of these games went to time, with me being 4-5 power in the lead.

The Top8 game is available on stream, so I will give some details assuming you watched it:

• I asked jakob after the game, why he gave me Greatjon Umber instead of Arya Stark (Core) on the first Wall trigger and his (serious) response was: "Do I get to choose? I was playing around it all game." That's an advantage of playing decks no one else plays, even the pros don't remember what your cards do.
• Jakob and me had played a 6 plots game in Swiss as well, and I did not see his Valar Morghulis there. So I was totally not expecting him to run boths Valars and blindly ran into that one.
• With that background you might as well understand why I was playing that greedy Coldhands. There is another safety net for such a greed play: Kill the returning character with Harrenhal (GoH) :D
• Also because of the Swiss game, I dared setup naked wall, but this one went well.
• Playing that Jojen Reed was just stupid. In my defense: Lack of sleep, bla, bla

Time to say thank you, to everybody involved in running the thing. Special shoutout to the streaming team, I think Stahleck deserves you (and better Wifi). Of course, also a big thank you to my opponents. I enjoyed it very much. Also thanks for all the gentle pats on the back I got during the cut, that felt really good. See you all next year!