Hey, I am a new player who just bought the starter core set. A friend and I decided that we would each claim two decks. I ended up with the Lannister and Targaryen decks.

I would like to upgrade both decks through chapter packs. Are there certain chapter packs that are better suited for Lannister or Targaryen? Should I just buy as many chapter packs as I can reasonably afford?

You can check the contents of the chapter packs there: http://www.tzumainn.com/agot/cards/

There are ratings & comments so you have an idea about which cards are better than others.

Then you can check posted Targ/Lanni decks (on the same website or on this forum) to see what cards are used most.

Welcome to the game!

A good idea might be to buy as many chapter packs as possible, possibly splitting them with your friend to get a wider variety of cards.

A few pieces of information that can be useful, for each expansion:

Clash of Arms expansion:

• There are powerful plots for each house in the chapter pack Ancient Enemies, which are also required for some other cards (the Greyjoy expansion has more of the plots that can be used with these cards) - additionally this chapter packs has some nice cards for Targ & Stark
• Otherwise the Clash of Arms expansion has some quite nice cards for Targaryen and Stark, pretty much evenly spread out, so it's more of a manner of which types of cards you like. If you want to have a closer look, check www.tzumainn.com/agot/cards/

A Time of Ravens

• Most of the cards in this expansion revolve around Summer/Winter, so you'll need the cards for making it summer or winter to get full use out of them. Targaryen likes Summer, and for this you'll need the Song of Summer chapter pack. Stark likes winter, and thus the Winds of Winter chapter pack is needed.
• For consistency with a seasonal deck, the Change of Seasons chapter pack has a good plot.
• The refugees of war chapter pack has powerful low-cost characters for each house that are very useful in almost any deck

King's Landing

• While not requiring them, King's Landing cards tend to benefit from running the seasons from Time of Ravens.
• Many of the Stark cards in the first two chapter packs are centered around running a deck with lots of cards with the Shadows mechanic, but there aren't that many viable shadows cards for Stark yet. This can be worked around using the Shadows Agenda from City of Secrets and using shadow cards from other factions.

As my Tower of the Hand chapter pack and Kings of the Sea expansion are still in transit, someone else should be able to fill in the blanks. =)

There's also some discussion on Lannister and Stark chapter packs as well as some other thoughts on the matter in this thread: http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=16&efcid=4&efidt=150987

Thanks guys, appreciate the help.

I just want to point out that the OP asked about Lannister and Targaryen, not Stark and Targ.

Checking Tzumainn's is the best way to get familiar with the cards for your chosen houses. If you play a few games and tell us how you'd like to improve your decks we can give you specific Chapter Packs and cards that will help. Or you can tell us what you like best about the Houses and we can help you develop a deck that plays to that. There are just too many variances on themes and builds to be able to give you specific feedback for a general question, other than get the Fury Plots from the Ancient Enemies CP.

Umm... Sorry about that, seem to have been a bit asleep there.

Thankfully the general information still is useful, although there's some purposeless Stark info in there. Oh, and since winter is viable in Lannister the season advice also works, though to a lesser degree. Lannister cards in KLE don't get anything from seasons though, although some Targyaren cards like summer.

The advice WWDrakey gave is really good. I am still learning the game and haven't gotten all the chapter packs yet so I can't give a complete perspective, but here is what I have found (and it overlaps a lot with what WWDrakey said):

The most generically useful chapter packs for me so far have been Ancient Enemies, Refugees of War, and Scattered Armies.

The plots in Ancient Enemies make for great first turn plots since they give a lot of gold and have high initiative. Usually, on the first turn I've found I just want a big income and don't want to "waste" any of my more situational/reactive plots like Wildfire Assault or Power of Blood, etc.

The refugee cards in Refugees of War are pretty strong in joust -- 2 strength with 2 icons for free. They can help you jump off to a quick start early in the game (any card you play during setup is "free" since you draw back to seven). There are three copies of each of the refugee cards in the chapter pack so that's pretty sweet for filling out your deck.

One nice thing about these two chapter packs is that there is a plot for each house in Ancient Enemies and a refugee for each house in Refugees of War so maybe you and your friend can split those.

The reinforcements events in Scattered Armies can be strong in any deck -- they all allow you to put a beefy 3 or 4 strength character into play for one gold when you lose a challenge. The reinforcements are all included only one time each so that pack might be harder to split with a friend.

Besides those, you probably want to eventually get a copy of each of the first three chapter packs in the A Time of Ravens cycle so that you have the ravens (which all the Summer/Winter cards key off of) needed to play either a Summer or Winter deck. A Change of Seasons has a plot that lets you search for a raven -- really nice to have in a dedicated season deck. It seems like the seasons mechanic has become a permanent part of the game rather than a mechanic limited to the A Time of Ravens cycle because several cards in King's Landing Edition interact with Summer/Winter so you probably need to get these chapter packs if you want to be able to use all the cards in future chapter packs working at their full functionality.

Beyond those pointers, I think it's best just to look through the cards on tzumainn and see what you like. I've heard that Castellan of the Rock is pretty good in Lannister and there's three copies of him in The Battle of the Ruby Ford (a pretty solid pack all around in my opinion).

Oh, one other thing, I know you said you wanted to expand with chapter packs, and that's good if you want to get some new cards to fill the decks out to 60 and add some variety. However, if you want to make consistent 60 card decks, the best value is probably to get second core set since that gives a bunch of cards for each of the core set houses (with no Martell or Greyjoy cards like you get in the chapter packs) and most of the cards included 1x in the core set would be great at 2x in a deck (and if you're splitting with a friend, the second set only costs you the same as about two chapter packs).

Castellan of the Rock is very nearly a must have. It is just too useful with little regard to what you are building in Lannister.

A Time of Trials has the Street Waif. It doesn't matter a whole lot what build you are using being able to get discarded cards is always nice.