First Player Championship 2017 Joust 3rd place. 1.0

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• 1.0

3rd place in both joust and melee? With the same house and banner? Kind of silly, if you ask me. But it worked.

This deck was honestly supposed to be a one-trick pony that I built the night before, with no playtesting. It was specifically designed to be an NPE, and somewhat of a joke deck. I hadn't played in over a month, built it last minute, and didn't get to play test it at all.

Originally it was a combo deck with Paid Off, and Brothel Madame combined with 2 copies of Supporting the Faith. On my way to the tournament, I was talking to my best friend about setting up Tywin Lannister (Core) and flipping a turn one Naval Superiority, then following it up with a Varys's Riddle when they (hopefully) flip a Summer Harvest to recover from their 0 gold turn. He convinced me to do that instead. So I borrowed a Naval and Riddle from a friend, and went that route. And booooooy did it do work. I never hit that specific combo, but even playing them out of order, and playing them without Tywin on turn one got the job done.

I went 3-2, with the last round of Swiss being the determining factor of whether or not I would make the cut to top 8. I managed to make our tournament organizer, who would later become our melee champion, scoop in the plot phase of turn two. I drew a terrible opening hand, Tywin, Cersei Lannister (LoCR), a few events, and a The Roseroad. I had to decide if I wanted to gamble really, really hard and drop Tywin/Roseroad on setup and risk the turn one Marched to the Wall. Like, would I honestly gamble my top 8 slot that hard? Marched hasn't been super popular in our meta for a while, and I had convinced myself that he was not running it, so I said screw it and threw down Tywin/Roseroad. He decided to mulligan a solid hand into two 3 drops, and a 2 drop. I flip turn one The First Snow of Winter, he flips A Noble Cause, if I recall. I choose to go first, I draw into some economy and a Tywin duplicate. I throw down Cersei and the Tywin dupe, he drops Ser Hobber Redwyne and fetches Margaery Tyrell (AMAF). Challenges start, I swing in military, then intrigue and power with Cersei. Turn two, I flip Naval, he flips Late Summer Feast, and scoops. 0 gold, no characters, and no locations. I felt like a douche, and it wasn't fun, but it was kind of hilarious.

Top 8, I had a rematch against one of my best friends, and this time I won. It was an absolute slug fest. I mean, every turn we had a big character we could play, but we had to play something else just to survive the turn. It felt like a movie scene where the guys are in a shootout and they run out of ammo so they just drop their guns are start beating each other to death. It was fun, it was tense, and it was hilarious. I barely managed to pull it off and rocketed to top 4.

I won't go into what happened in top 4, because there was some shady business that happened. It ended up that I got cheated out of a win, literally. But I ended up getting third, and despite some bitterness at the situation at hand, I was satisfied to have gotten that far on my own merit, and shit loads of luck.

After playing the first two rounds of the tournament, I realized some deck building mistakes that I had made, and have since tweaked this into a much smoother experience. I dropped the Paid Offs, because I'm not running Supporting the Faith in this instance. There was a game that I drew every single 7 drop, and never once drew economy to play even one of them. So I dropped Ser Gregor Clegane, and Crow Killers, and put in two Dragonstone Faithful, and two Vanguard Lancer. I also recommend possibly removing the Riddle, or Close Call, or just something for a Late Summer Feast so that you always have the economy to drop a high cost character, or set up lower cost characters and some key locations.