Doing a little celebration! Just reached the end of a 9 day work sprint, only to hear the stuff released and my preorders were at the store! I'm now home, defragging from an exhausting work stretch, and poring over the cards.

First up, a Targaryen/Tyrell deck idea I wanted to mess around with. Who else is in the same boat, and what decks are you putting together first?

There's a lot of "cores in hand" elation going around. A fair bit of deckbuilding too, although tempered by those veterans who have either been playing on OCTGN or had their cores since Gencon (like myself)... and yet I still am excited about my local meta bursting to life with new cores, new players.

This board doesn't get a tonne of activity, though, so I'd consider heading over to cardgamedb and see what people are building!

I pre-ordered mine on coolstuff. Great prices but now I am waiting. AND WAITING. Probably won't have Cores in hand until middle of next week. Killing me!

...I'm going to go check fedex again...

Baratheon and Targ fealty seem like the strongest, so I'm mostly going to avoid those for now. I'll probably run 3 decks with Greyjoy/Lannister (very aggro), Martell/Tyrell (tricksy), and Nights Watch / Baratheon (very defensive)

5 tentative decks built!

Targ/Martell

Stark Fealty

Night's Watch/Tyrell

Lannister Fealty

Greyjoy/Baratheon

To some extent, I just like some absurd pairings, like the Baratheon family supporting the Greyjoys (hah!), and on the flip side, for any new player who wants to live out their Stark vs. Lannister family wishes, that's set to go.

New player - 1 core at the moment - so no deckbuilding for me. Want to get plenty of games in with the 4 illegal 'starter' decks to get a feel for the cards and factions. Then onto a 2nd and 3rd Core and deckbuilding!

I think I'm going to be playing Mono-House and/or Fealty decks exclusively for a couple weeks to get a real feel for how each House plays and how often and in what situations each of their given cards shine. Then once I get a good idea for myself of the strengths and weaknesses of the decks I'll break out into Dual-House Banner decks.

The NICE thing about having a smaller cardpool is it actually lets you dig into the cards and get a good understanding of the entire set and where an individual card fits into the game.

In an effort to get as much exposure to the different factions and see how they play, my current plan is to build....

Stark (banner GJ)

Targ (banner Lanni)

Some sort of NW/Martell build.

I'm gonna wait on Tyrell and all this talk of dominant Bara fealty sounds really lame/boring.

Anyone have a recommendation on which of NW or Martell I should "main" and "banner"? Or would Tyrell match better with one of them?

I'm looking at doing Targaryen (banner Baratheon), I think it could make for a very interesting mix. Baratheon for control, and Targaryen for burn.

I would probably do a Martell (banner NW) Starbucker, but that's just me.

I bought 2 Core sets. That way I don't just have to combine 2 factions in order to play a game, I can instantly go for mono-faction decks!

It's just the way I prefer to deck build, just really focus on the strengths of a single faction and go crazy.