The Guns of Brimstone (Battle of the Nations - Team Poland) 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

Hello there! I was playing with this deck for Poland during Battle of the Nations. I won't lie - it didn't win too many games there (although gave us crucial wins against Austria and Germany) - but due to very specific formula of this tournament and the fact, that it was often picked as one of the first opponent's choices, it isn't perfectly relevant. I personally believe that it is one of the best options to play competitively Sand Snakes, who were never tier 1 deck, but after the release of Jade Sea became as close to the competitive meta as possible.

Originally I've built it as Alliance with Banner of the Stag and it was simply a The Red Viper (SoD) deck, supported with the best Bastards from both houses. It wasn't consistent enough, so I've quickly moved to solo Martell deck and started tuning it. During a lot of tests I've eventually removed Orphans of the Greenblood because there are already too many Sand Snakes and from other cheap characters I needed badly draw provided by Greenblood Traders. Also the plotdeck was very different previously - it was using a lot of city plots (At the Gates/City Festival/City of Spiders/City of Wealth) and while it was easier to play with gold provided by them, eventually I have moved to the soft Seven variant (The Maiden and The Father work perfectly here). I have also removed piece by piece the The Red Viper (SoD) module with To The Spears! and in the end decided to cut it entirely and focus on Sand Snakes magic.

The important thing about this deck that it has really shitload of tricks to unleash during challenges phase. Harmen Uller, covered with dust for a long time, really shines here as he enables a lot of Dorea Sand jumping altogether with Brimstone. The latter combined with the redesigned version of A Mission in Essos (R) generates ton of interesting decisions and tricks; all Sand Snakes are jumping back and forth like crazy. Also the new Mission let me exchange for example Nymeria's Guard (there were more copies in previous iterations) for Areo Hotah (Core) during the challenge or search quickly for Obella Sand or Bastard Daughter to mitigate the effects of military challenge.

As I've said, the tournament record may be not so great, but I had to face 3x Greyjoy Aloof, which is ridiculously bad matchup for most decks nowadays and especially for this one. Even with that in mind, at leaast in one of this games I've manage to have 14 power and lost by milimetres. On the other hand, GJ Aloof has problems dealing with Stark Xing and Sand Snakes easily crush Stark in almost each version - during the quarterfinal I've managed to wipe out entire opponent's board in 4th or 5th turn right before his You Win Or You Die. I've also lost with Lannister Kingdom of Shadows (R) driven by Raius, because the problem with shadows is that they easily beat most decks that don't play shadows themselves or aren't prepared against jumping (with Barring the Gates, Supporting the Faith, Political Disaster etc. - most cards that block Martell as well).

All in all, I think that many Martell archetypes received amazing support with the post-FFG packs and the variety of their decks may be overwhelming. I think though that regarding Sand Snakes, Free Companies with modified version of Flea Bottom (R), new Elia Sand (JS), A Mission in Essos (R) and Brimstone is the best possible option and it's almost never an easy game for opponents.

Enjoy!