Hi,
Just wanted to ask a few questions as group of my friends have been playing the game with just the single "core" set for a couple months now.
1) During a recent Military challenge I had core set Renly and Stannis's Northern Cavalry onboard, suffice to say I lost the challenge but defended it to prevent a free power claim.
Stannis's Northern Cavalry had been lowered in Strength that turn due to the Lannister plot card "Hear me Roar".
Do I have to kill Renly for this claim or can I choose Stannis's Northern Cavalry and then have it be prevented from dying, thus annulling the military claim?
2) Core Deck balance? In a multiplayer game I won quickly with Baratheon a few times, but everyone else in the 3/4 player games is wary of this speed so the Baratheon player is often targetted to keep it deliberately weak, sometimes having almost a board wipe every turn with multiple military challenges and as soon as you are low in strength ultimately you become the whipping boy for the other challenges.
So without a board wipe or removal ability how are you meant to prevent this happening? Eventually your hand is cleared purely through repeat intrigue or you have to play what you get to empty your hand.
The Power on house dries up as you can't defend the challenges and power on characters dries up as they are killed. As soon as I even approach 8-10 power (whether it takes 2 or 8 turns, long or short) they know the game well enough to cripple my characters, but I have nothing in return other than being able to hope I draw & play some attachments? Renown on defence is an issue too, trust me with 1 Deadly in the set and not enough military stealthers I dont get to win the challenges on defence so I could claim renown, they know this and so prevent it occuring.
I have played with the Stark deck before and ultimately if a situation becomes dire you can Valar Morghulis from plot or Lethal counterattack as an event if you still have that in your hand. Similarly the one time I played Targayan I was burning threats off the board without much issue multiplayer and was able to keep people alive in front of me due to this offence as defence tactic. The Lannisters sem incredibly powerful though. I don't ever want to choose them for Summoning season (Jaime/Tywin/Bronn/Varys/Littlefinger) and the one time I managed to mount a serious military assault ever they reduced my only 2 claim to "0", but similarly Wildfire assaulted me if I (or other players) had somehow got too powerful by them leaving me alone for too long.
I do prefer a jack of all trades style deck definetly and a way to come back into the game if all isnt going well. I would much rather have a nice balance of powers too rather than being overwhelmingly Military or Power. I definetly preferred the Targaryan deck when playing with them purely for balance (and because it kinda felt like an old school Red/Black burn MtG deck) but didnt really like the flavour of that deck overall. For what its worth in the rare times that I play an MtG game I play Blue/Black (maybe with a hint of green/red)...so if there is anything more like that in AGoT please let me know.
How are you meant to rescue a bad situation with this deck?
We even tried focusing decks down to 30 cards for fun and while the deck did get a bit better, the other decks got a lot stronger.
Am I reading this wrong, it just seems like core Baratheon is incredibly underpowered in this regard and it just gets even worse (especially plot card wise) if you play a heads-up game?
Edited by 0nighthawk0