King Robb's Political Disaster 1.0

• Versions
• 1.0

This is the first deck that I've released so feedback would be very welcome :)

One idea of this deck is to destroy your opponent's locations with Political Disaster. In every faction there are some pretty darn good locations that can prop up entire decks by themselves (e.g. Chamber of the Painted Table, The Wall), and the reason I like PD so much is that it basically forces your opponent to choose between maintaining econ or keeping their wincon. Combined with Put to the Torch it makes for amazing location control.

The other idea of the deck (as implied by the title) is this nice l'il beastie: King Robb's Host. I perfectly understand why this card has received little to no attention at all, but once you get past the cost, KRH is simply a great card. You can call it the biggest and the dumbest of the "big dumb guys" but it is what it is, good luck stopping it from stealing literally all of your hard-earned pow.

Econ: I will admit the cost curve is pretty intimidating. But Great Hall just gives an incredible amount of econ. Combine that with normal econ plus Donella Hornwood, The Kingsroad, and Calling the Banners and there's more than enough. On critical turns you can end up playing 15+ gold's worth.

Card draw: It's true that this deck has pretty low card draw, since you only have Summer (Core) and Jojen Reed. However, the cost curve helps: no matter how good your econ is, having so many expensive characters means that you're almost never going to end up playing more than 3 characters per turn, even on banners.

Setup: Even though there are only 9 locations, there's still a 70% chance that you'll get one in your starting hand. Add Winterfell Steward and Donella, and the probability rises to 86%. While 1 in 7 hands will have no econ, you can always mulligan and the chance that both your first and second hands have econ is 1 in 50. However this means that you have to be careful about mulligan. If you have a 6-gold setup with lots of econ (say GH, Donella, Steward), you should just keep it instead of risking a bad mulligan.

Now let me explain a bit more some of the choices I made for this deck.

First plots: this was the hardest part of the deck. A Noble Cause and Wardens of the North are fairly typical and must-haves in my book, and Political Disaster and Calling the Banners are both key to the deck. The other 3 plots are negotiable:

1. Early Frost: If you really don't like the plot list, then this is the plot to switch out. It's good for when you're dominating, but you might like another plot better. However because this deck is so aggressive, it's much harder without at least two 2-claims, and the reduced card draw means that you'll get less surprises.
2. Retaliation: Probably the best 2-claim plot in the game right now, with an added bonus that it's a War plot.
3. Wildfire Assault: Most (if not all) Stark decks need a board clear in case things somehow go really, really wrong, and this deck also helps characters like Catelyn Stark (WotN) without forcing you to I could see why some people would want to switch this one out, but I'm always a bit nervous playing without a reset.

Some plots I just could not find room for:

Counting Coppers was a fairly easy call: even though it cures card draw, the lack of a 2-gold loyal (northern keep hasn't come out yet) means that it's hard to do anything that turn.

Marched to the Wall is usually a must but it simply wasn't good enough to make the cut. Maybe if it was a War plot I would replace frost, but even so I would be very hesitant to make that call.

Valar Morghulis just doesn't synergize well with this deck. Sure you can save with Jory Cassel but it's too much risk for a deck that has so many characters.

A Storm of Swords is interesting because it has amazing synergy with KRH and the extra mil challenge is useful for most Stark decks, but I didn't want to put all my chips on KRH. I switched this for frost but found that frost worked better: you need a strong board position to guarantee 2 mil challenges, and at that point you might as well use frost to get the int and pow as well.

The decklist itself is pretty self-evident; maybe I would -1 copy of Arya's Gift since KRH has no attachments anyway, but let's face it: nobody wants a milk stuck on their cat or robb or even septa.

Other cuts: The Blackfish because he's just too expensive and I'm not sure I even need his card draw. Flea Bottom is always great with Summer but it just doesn't work with PD. The God's Eye is way too expensive (what were the creators thinking?). The North Remembers is the card I will probably most regret cutting but even with Robb I'm not sure if it's completely worth the cost. Also any more events would raise legitimate questions about setup: with >14 events, 1 in 5 hands will have 3 or more events; with 11, it's 1 in 10, which actually happens less frequently than no econ hands.

As for matchups, this deck performs well against most meta decks including builders (duh) and even targ fealty (since you can torch astapor). Even against lanni rains the deck works brilliantly as long as you can get the ASS combo (Arya, Sansa, Septa). The only decks I can think of that might cause some trouble are wildling/rush decks or a deck that uses lots of 2-claims - my advice in this case would be to do your best to defend. Troll your opponent by using KRH defensively, and after you survive the rush you'll find that the 2-claims make up ground really quickly. Overall this deck achieved an 85% win rate during testing, so I'm confident that the basic premise of the deck (KRH+PD) is valid despite how counterintuitive it looks.

I know it's a pretty long summary already but the last thing I wanted to say was have lots of fun with this deck, and please please please let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions or concerns with the deck. Thanks :)