Zephro - House Lannister - My first attempt at Deck Building 1.0

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• 2.0
• 1.0

Hey man! So a few thoughts for you to ponder:

Your agenda, Banner of the Lion, is doing you absolutely nothing as you already picked House Lannister as your deck type. So consider using a different agenda, like Fealty, or Lord of the Crossing. If you're only going to use Lannister and neutral cards, you may as well get some sort of boost out of your agenda.

The deck is pretty character heavy, and a lot of those are 3x dupes for unique characters. Consider maybe lowering the overall count of character cards. For sure get 3x of non-unique characters that offer economy benefits (like Lannisport Merchant) going. Consider dropping a few copies of some of the unique characters. 3x each of Tywin, Tyrion, Cersei, Jaime, Hound, and Mountain is mostly going to have you drawing a bunch of dupes, which can be great, but most likely only if you're going up against a deck designed explicitly to kill characters, which isn't too frequent. But, there are a lot of decks running plots designed to reset the characters on the board, and at a certain pint, dupes are just not going to do enough work for you.

Up the counts of your locations as well. I don't know if I've ever seen a deck run without 3x Kingsroad, 3x Roseroad, and 3x of the house-specific card to reduce cost of a character by 1 (Western Fiefdom for Lannister).

Your attachments are a bit splashy, and you could focus those a bit. For instance, you have Noble Lineage, which I would argue is unnecessary as you already have more Power icons in your characters than Military or Intrigue. If you didn't make any character changes, you may as well drop bodyguard as you have plenty of protection for powerful, unique characters already.

Lannister is fun for a good, straightforward deck to start building off of; they can do a lot without getting too complicated. But with the deck the way it is right now, I think it's just a little unfocused. Pick a few of the powerful characters that have effects that synergize with each other and build around that a little bit. Example would be Cersei, Tyrion, Valyrian Steel Dagger, and Tears of Lys. Focus on the idea of hurting your opponent through intrigue. Then, fill out your deck with some military and power icons to help level things out so you can answer to attacks and keep things a little varied.

Hope it helps!

Thanks so much for the suggestions fallenturtles! This help me a lot.

I would suggest considering how you are going to win the game. For example, some decks try to kill all the other characters so you can win challenges till you hit 15 power. Some decks try to win dominance every round. Night's watch plays defense and gets power from The Wall. Each of those decks fills up on key cards and often ignores good cards that don't fit their theme. Basically, you want to be good enough at something so you can consistently gain power from it over your opponent. More than helping you decide which cards to include, this should help you decide which cards you can ignore to add more copies of the cards you want to see the most.

For example you have x1 Iron Throne. Great card for winning dominance. But is winning dominance playing into the strengths of your other cards? Could you cut The Iron Throne to make more room for additional copies of Lannisport or Casterly Rock and would doing so bring you closer to winning the game?

This should also lead you to think about the odds of drawing a particular card. If a card is 1/60 can I rely on that card to be helpful when I need it? With the Queen's Assassin I would say sure. You need some cheap characters to round out your deck and to kill for military claim so even if you don't get to use his ambush ability it still serves a purpose, if you get him at the right time it can be great, and if you don't see him it's not a big deal. On the other hand, The Maester's Chain is useless without a Maester which means you need to hit a 1/60 and 2/60 to be able to play it. It's not helpful if your opponent isn't using many condition attachments (although they are very common). But when there are nasty conditions in play, attachment removal can be a huge difference maker. So is it worth running x1? Would you be better served to ditch it for another card and take Confiscation as a plot? Would it be better to fun x3 and a couple more Maester's so you'll be able to use it when you need it?

I would also heavily recommend getting a few more econ cards. If you think of a deck like a car, there can be a lot of variety but there are some basic things you need to get it to work. Economy is the engine that lets everything else function. To many econ locations won't really be helpful but I would suggest shooting for somewhere in the 9-12 range for econ locations. If you go back to thinking about the odds of drawing if you have 10 econ cards you have a 1/6 chance to draw one so you have a pretty good chance of getting 1 for set up and another 1 in the first turn or two. Without those econ cards you'll not be able to back big characters up with little guys to kill for military claim or play events.

Finally, I would suggest choosing a plot to reset characters on the board. Valar Morghulis, Wildfire Assault, and First Snow of Winter are really powerful cards. You'll be surprised at how many games you can swing in your favor with a reset. And since a lot of games won't make it to round 7, you don't have to play it if it's gonna hurt you more than your opponent. This is also a thing to consider when choosing your characters. Having x2 is kind of a weird sport right now for a lot of characters because you have ok odds of seeing 1 during a game, but probably not a duplicate. And Valar Morghulis might be the most commonly played plot (it's at least one of them). This is not to say x2 of a character is always bad, but it is something to consider when you have a lot of unique characters at x2. When you are drawing cards later in the game, you don't want to be drawing dead characters you can't play.

I'm starting to think this might be to much of an information dump of my rambling thoughts but I already typed it out so hopefully it's helpful :)