I have a just a few deck building questions. I'm new to the game, but not new to CCG's. MY questions are:

• Is there a recommended ratio of Character/Location/Event/Attachment cards to make up your deck?
• I have collected the Core boxed game, the entire first chapter set, and the new Greyjoy starter. Are there "truce" cards that allow you to build a deck with different houses (i.e. - Special card that allows me to have Stark and Greyjoy cards in the same deck)?

That's it for now. Thanks!

Mark DiBlasi said:

The short answer is "no, not really." The reason being that the line between the behavior of a lot of the different cards is kind of fuzzy. There are characters who provide income bonuses and locations that don't. And it often pays to think of events and attachments very similarly. So any recommendation becomes highly variable depending on House and deck strategy. That said, a general rule of thumb, particularly as you are learning the game, is 50% characters, 15-25% resource-providing cards (regardless of type) - depending on the cost of your chosen characters, and the rest in events, attachments and "effect locations."

Mark DiBlasi said:

There is actually nothing in the rules preventing you from having Stark and Greyjoy cards in the same deck. Unless a card specifically says "House X only," you can build it into any deck you like. People do this all the time. For example, Maester Cressen shows up in a lot of non-Baratheon decks because the anti-attachment ability is pretty strong in the LCG environment. The trick, of course, is that in order to play a card with a House affiliation that doesn't match your House card, you have to pay a 2-gold penalty (so Maester Cressen costs 4 gold to play in a Stark deck instead of the normal 2 in a Baratheon deck).

There are some cards that allow you to ignore or otherwise not pay the 2-gold penalty, which is probably more like what you are thinking when asking about a "truce." For example, the "City of Secrets" chapter pack has Agendas that allow you to ignore the gold penalty on Greyjoy or Martell cards, effectively letting you create that "truce" with those two Houses. The drawback, though, is that those Agendas also include a penalty for this privilege - namely that your opponents only need 10 points to win the game. So while they exist, you don't actually need (and may not even want) the cards in order to mix different Houses - if you're willing to pay the extra gold.

Hi!!!

Welcome to this great game and community!

I cannot answer the Deck Building question and nobody can. You'd receive 1000 different answers and opinions. This game is incredibly flexible and complex even for a rule of thumb in many cases...I think it strongly depends on your meta or, at least, on your playing style.

Anyway, I'll give you a couple of hints ignoring all the variables, just to give you an idea...

If you want to start deckbuilding with a basic deck, I'd suggest to pull up 30-32 chars, 16 Location (at least 8-9 of them have to be gold/inlfuence providing locations), 4-5 attachments and 7-8 events.

In this way, let's say, in a Stark deck, you'd have a lots of cheap chars flooding the table waiting for the strongest ones, a couple of key attachments (Icy Catapult, Ice, White Raven for Winter mechanic), different locations (some gold to speed up and power-up locations as Winterfell Castle)...A bunch of events are nice to give the deck a "surprise-factor" like "Winter is coming" or "To be a wolf".

I think if you try to do something like this, you'll easily obtain a HEAVY CHARACTERS deck. Then, game by game, you'll fine tune your deck.

I THING I NOTICED, is that day after day, the more I learn the game, the less number of char I tend to use...This is not a rule, but just a "tendence" of mine.

I like more control/oriented decks or at least, aggro control decks, where amazing openings can become an unexpected "big wall" for your oppo, if you get what I mean. In this cases (and in lots of competitive decks) you'll find 26-29 Characters, but, as I said, it's not even a rule of thumb. Just a statistic of recent decks I saw.

LOCATION WISDOM: to choose the best locations for you strategy is an important step. Be careful with the Limited ones, in order not to have a "stalled" opening hand or "empty draws" during the game. Try to pick up the "helping-strategy" locations first, then remember that 7-8 slots have to be left for the "resource providing locations".

Targaryen decks, i.e., usually need lots of Influence providing locations and usually different types of attachments (you'll tend to put in different ones and will be difficult to pull put some of them)...In this particular case, you'll see that lots of your opening hands will be awful, because it'll be full of attachment (useless on the first turn) and high-cost locations (influence is nevere free ;-)).

That'll be one of the most complex case, where you have lots of choices to do, like reducing number of chars to put more attachments/or influence and so on.

ATTACHMENT WISDOM: as I said before, too much attachments can be a bad choice, if you think about the opening hand and the necessity, for most of them, to have eligible targets. If we ignore Targaryen decks, where the choice is harder IMHO, try to put in just the ones you strictly need for your strategy (Motley is a good choice for Baratheon, i.e., but does not fix every deck, believe me).

EVENT WISDOM: be sure to have all the right stuff in the deck in order to trigger without problems all of your events. I say this because the first game I did with a Stark deck (I was pretty new to the game around Core Set date of birth ;-)), I put in Guilty because I liked it...But the lack of influence made it a useless cards most of the time (Stupid example, but it fits the theory ;-).

So, choose them as you do with attachments: think about some "surprise effects" and speed up/control things (it depends on the strategy). In a Stark deck Winter is coming seems an autoinclude, at least in aggro-basic decks...A Lannister pays his debts is a strong card I'd put in, at least at the begenning (someone does not like it)...

JUST WORDS

Now, if you see my decks, maybe you'll find anyone of these rules in them ;-) That's because of the reasons I explained at the start of this poem. Day by day you'll fine tune your decks, giving them your personal style. In this game is really possible to find lots of different decks around the same concepts.

I was not new to Card Games too when I started AgoT and let me tell you that there's no possible comparison between this game and others in "deckbuilding-game variety" possibilities.

ABOUT THE TWO/MORE HOUSES DECK

You can ALWAYS play OUT OF HOUSE CARDS (with the exception of "House X Only" cards). When you play them, you have to pay a 2 gold penalty, representing how it can be difficult to recruit an enemy member...

Anyway, I guess you already knew that...So...I think the thing you look for is the TREATY agendas (in LCG format)...You find them in City of Secrets.

Those are 2 different agendas which work for Greyjoy and Martell (they give you the chance to play those two houses with other houses ignoring gold penalties). It was did because in the Core Set Greyjoy and Martell were missing and FFG wanted to give us the chance to play those Houses as "support forces" for the main four...But now that the "Sea" expansion is out and the "South" expansion is coming, they can be nearly pointless, especially if you think about the fact that the "malus" on them is that the oppo need 5 less powers to win the game. Now I cannot see them playable...The effort you have to put in a deck to make them work is too much to be hold and it's not convenient.

CITY OF SHADOWS agenda makes you ignore the "House X only" restrictions for Shadow cards, but it implies that you play a Shadow deck.

I don't know if there's something to add...But if it is, I'm sure someone else will do it, better than me... ;-)

Hope it helps a bit.

Bye

ktom said:

SORRY Ktom I wrote at the same time as you (ruining the perfect explanations you usually write ;-) )...I was not trying to repeat things...;-)

Everyone - Thank you very much for the information. The comments/suggestions are very helpful!

Mark

You got a pretty good break down there from DB and ktom. Each House, deck type and play style will give you a different balance of cards and the only way to find out what works for you is to just sit down and build something. The ratios given work reasonably well as a guideline, but I'm going to give you a different kind of breakdown that helped me a lot when I first started building in this game.

I was running across a lot of kill effects, two players in my met loved Targaryen and Stark And as a result characters died after a turn or two in play with few exceptions. Only one player had Valar (this was in the CCG days) but it was utterly devestating until I learned not to overextend. I never played with less than half my deck full of characters and often as much as 40 characters in a 60 card deck. I put in 10 resource providing locations and then a total of 10 cards from the attachment and event catagories. This served me pretty well while I learned the game. I never ran out of characters, I usually had a decent amount of gold and only a few cards that couldn't be played during set-up. I knew this wasn't the ideal set-up because it really put all my plans on the table with few surprises outside of marshalling. I then started slowly working my characters down and making better character choices as well as ensuring my supporting cards were more effecient and targeted to my characters/deck-theme.

I also developed a very strict formula for my gold curve for characters and a general guideline for attachments and locations. Feel free to vary this or completely discard it.

Cost - Number of Characters
0-1 10
2 8
3 6
4 4
+5 2

Cost - Number of Locations
0-1 8
2 4
+3 2

Cost - Number of Attachments
0-1 4
+2 2

You can see the idea is to ensure that I can play pretty much any card in my deck when I draw into it with few exceptions. What can't be played that turn should ideally be able to be played next turn. I like to ensure that generally speaking I'm flopping 4-5 cards and every turn can put two new cards into play when you add my plot, gold, and reducers together. So when I do my test draws I should be able to put 4-5 cards down on set-up, 1-2 which should be resources and when added to the three plots I'm most likely to open with I should be able to put two characters into play. I like to keep about 4 characters in play and 4 locations. Depending on the House an dthe player (houses and players in melee) I may put more or less of one or both into play depending on how likely I am to see mass resets and targetd destruction/kill. If I have cards that need to be killed or discarded from play to use their effect I may go above this to ensure I have claim soak, resources, and special abilities in play to support my main character or two.

Mess around with the cards a bit and get a feel for what houses work best for how you play and you'll find a gold curve that works for you as well as a deck ratio. Remember just like the Game has a golden Rule, the text on a card always takes presidence over the rules of the game (though never the FAQ), deck building has a Golden Rule also, never let anyone's advice, no matter how good or well reasoned, trump your own play experience within your meta. If you find you only need 20 characters in your decks because a lack of resets in your play group and that more attachments works great because no one uses attachment hate then go for that. Exploit it for all it's worth and disregard everything else said.