Bounce (cover) by Mandon & Varys - 4-2 at UK Nats 1.0

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• 1.0

Bounce bounce bounce

We're ready for a good time!

Bounce bounce bounce

We're ready for Mandon!

Hey guys, just wanted to share the list I played at UK Nats this weekend. Certainly nothing new, but still good fun. I had been wanting to play this deck since the beginning of the year and I am glad I have been to for UK Nats.

I went 4-2, missing out on top on SoS. My 2 losses were to Tyrell Conclave by the amazing Dave B. He went a bit too quickly for me to catch-up Oldtown putting a time-clock on the game, which I really don't deal well with. The second loss came against Stark SoB by the no less amazing Ryan W. I saw 5 characters in 6 turns. Despite doing some forth and back between my hand/shadow/game I did not manage to hold him enough to reach my second breath.

I lost both game, indubitably, it still feels like if I had had a bit more practice than I had this year (basically a few sessions across 2 weeks and mostly theory crafting) I could have tried a few more things in these games to maybe turn them over. It felt like the deck had it in it, and I simply wasn't able to turn it around.

More about some choices around the deck:

Flea Bottom over Trade Routes

This has been the main contention point of the few tests I ran, one or the other. Trade Routes was safer and technically provided more gold. But the deck just runs better with Flea Bottom. After many dicussions I opted for the second as it felt like there would be a decent number of PDs, and apparently Frozen Solid was less present

He Call is Thinking

So happy I could play this card. A bit like the restricted the decision came after many discussions, the last of them right as I was writing my decklist to give to the registration desk, when a final advice from Donovan made it: "with HCIT you either 3 or none". That's when I thought "fuck it, let's go for 3. They were in the deck to help tame the first turns of the SoB I would encounter and to help take the edge during the VM turn which was an important swing for me.

Other than that, little to say I guess. The deck got refined after a few games, removing Gerris, Hotah's Axe, Poisoned coin Maiden of Poison and a few other characters to focus on the more essential cards.

It's been an absolute pleasure to play Varys/Mandon up to 4 times per turn :).

I know Gabryel, played a Martell-Lion at the Tournoi de la Main when it was only chap 6 of the previous cycle, and after discussing with him, although the core idea is there the approach we took was different. He took the full on Gerris approach to play more VM and YWOYD, he was also limited by the cards that didn't exist yet.

If you have any questions, please feel free to let me know :) !