Hey Dave.

Sunday will work, for sure. See if the other guys you know wanna get in on a game, as well. If we get 4 people, I say we just do another melee (I like the craziness of it). If we get more we can do a joust style tourney. I'm open to pretty much whatever.

I went and built a few decks last night. One is a much tighter Winter Greyjoy. Another is Dragon based Targaryen and a Sand Snake Martell. It remains to be seen how they fare in battle. I want to build a House Bolton Stark Deck too. It looks like it could make Melee games very interesting. I'll build something for my Lannisters as well. I'm thinking a Shadow focus for them.

Making the decks tighter makes a whole lot more sense than just packing a whole bunch of stuff into a large deck. I'll admit that building a deck now is a lot of fun. I'm sure I will learn more as I play them too.

Cool cool. Cool cool cool. I'll text the others today and let them know there's games on Sunday.

I actually tried to build Sand Snakes once but couldn't get it to work reliably, mostly because the style of play is more combo rush which is something to which I'm not accustomed. I also tried a Bolton build but honestly, I'd never dare run it in melee, mostly because there's more opportunity for players to swipe your characters and kill them off cross challenge. But if you run it, we'll know for sure. Maybe it'll do so badly, we'll all feel bad and then let you build up again unnoticed until you suddenly are at 14 power.

Also Lanni Shadows is pretty standard so you should find some good ideas. Targ dragons though? Well I hate Targ in the books, at least up until the fifth book, so I tend not to build them and have no real insight to offer. I built a copy of Twn2dn's (a well-known player/global community member) maester thing that won some big tourney, but haven't tried it yet.

But anyway, I'll bring a couple decks in the offchance we play some joust, one of which will be terrible to behold and the other which will be just terrible. Which one will I play? Wouldn't you like to know?

So how'd your guys's game go yesterday? I was thinking about the games yesterday and a few random things:

1. I still have no idea how to make a Bolton deck not a liability, even in joust. I'm tempted to try again but I probably won't.

2. Taylor, I really felt genuinely bad after our match! I realize that was not fun, and it wasn't my intent to frustrate you, but the deck is jerkish if the opponent is unfamiliar with it or doesn't draw answers, so I want to apologize again. Control decks are tough to play against and you letting me search Myrcella first turn was just rough since I would not have gotten Ghaston Grey to work as well if I didn't draw either of the two copies of her which were at the bottom of my deck. I hope rather than sour you on any aspect, it's encouraged you to meta and kick my butt next time! Plus GG will probably be restricted soon... But yeah I really should steer clear of lockdown decks against newer players for the first few matches but I don't so I must inherently be a dbag.

3. The cards I was thinking about were Flea Bottom Scavenger for card draw and Frozen Solid or Freezing Rain for location control. In Stark or Baratheon you could run Direct Assault but that requires you to get the challenge first, so attachments are usually better against Martell, especially since they don't have many options of attachment control. The nice thing about these options is that they're good all around regardless of the matchup so running them will never be useless.

4. Otherwise your Brotherhood deck? Pretty efficient and it was amazing that you could play so many mid-cost characters each turn. Very good gold curve.

5. Travis's deck seemed a lot better... renown plus knights on the cheap clearly paid off. Lindsay's Cersei was fantastic as well, confirming my suspicions that a Lanni intrigue rush is viable.

6. Matt and Chris texted to say they will try to be there next time but were too busy with Oprah's Book Club. I think they were once again discussing the poetry of Maya Angelou.

Oh also Direct Assault doesn't target uniques so my bad. Plus, check Hollow Hill for your BH deck because it only reduces gold penalty not cost, so you can't use it to reduce neutral Brotherhood. I misread that too. I guess it would be too good if it just dropped gold cost for characters.

To anyone who posts on this thread.

Travis, Lindsay and I will be playing on Sunday Feb.19 @ 1pm. Warp 1 on Whyte Ave and 99St.

Feel free to join us!

-Taylor

Hey Dave,

Don't feel bad about our game! I was frustrated at the start because literally had no options against what you were throwing down. After a few moments I got over it as it is only a game and nothing to get too hung up on. Besides when I am losing that bad I am just trying to finish the game as quickly as possible.

Gold penalty would refer to the cost of playing an out of house cards? I missed that too. Sometimes the wordings on cards can be confusing/misleading.

Our game afterwards was fun. Trav won by a little bit with his Baratheons again but I would have won with my Targ Dragons if he hadn't of played Melisandre which made my power on characters not count towards my total. Only missed him by a bit without all my renown power.

The more I play with you and others the more I understand about the game. Peace!

-Taylor

So how were games last weekend?

It was a lot of fun!

Nice to have some other guys there. Though, they mainly use the old CCG cards. Not sure how that works in tourneys because some of their cards were cheap.

Really fun games though. We played two 5 man melees.

-T

I take it Chris wasn't there then since he's the only other one who has LCG decks, although Matt did the last time I played him. If it was a tourney they wouldn't be able to use CCG decks.

Good to hear you had fun. I know what you mean though. Some of those CCG cards and combos are ridiculous. When we came back to the game some months ago, I watched a match where Chris, with an LCG deck, was bombarded with free event-based kill. Pretty awful. Just like five man melees. Were those matches longer or shorter? I imagine shorter though, simply because despite more plot and title stuff, there's more openings for power grab.

Our first game only lasted an hour the second was more like 2 hours.

It was a lot of fun but those Kill a character when you win a Challenge Event Cards from the CCGs suck. I hate them. I refuse to use them myself.

Which may mean my ultimate demise when I play Matt and Darrel-the other guy who showed up.

Good times all around through. Matt said he wants to start an Edmonton AGOT LCG facebook page so we can plan games and such. We will see when/if that happens and set up the next game. This weekend is out for me.

-T

Yeah those free events are gross. I think you can make something similar with war crest since there's two events that kill and discard locations after winning military challenges.

In any case, I'm working weekends now as well, or at least most of them, so it'll be tough to get games in unless we can find a night and venue to play. I'll check the Edmonton AGoT FB page to see... oh wait.

I pressured Matt into starting the group. Haha.

It's called 'A Game of Thrones TCG Edmonton Group"

I think it is a closed group so add me 'Taylor Chadwick' (my pic is currently Grandpa Simpson) and then I will add you to the group. Peace!

I just deactivated my FB temporarily. I'll be back on next week when I'm less busy and add you and the group. You guys should also make me an admin for no good reason.

I think everyone who joins is an admin. Or maybe just Matt is....we can steal the power from him.

Hey it is great to see that the meta group has been growing. Kudos to all the new players for making me jealous of your chances to play. I tend to be a little bit of a seasonal player due to work/coaching committments. I am totally looking forward to getting back in the swing of playing, perhaps in May. I do play LCG decks mostly to be current with the trends/flavour of the game; however I don't mind busting out some classic ccg if that is what the group is focusing on at the moment. Still awesome to see the action on the board and I will try and get out to a game when possible. Yourmom will never let me stay away for too long. He needs somebody to frustrate his lame unfun control decks.

You need to start coaching AGoT on weekends instead of interpretive dance. Your school will never win regionals, so please stop trying to reclaim your glory days. Also I think the consensus is to move away from the CCG decks since a) they're cheap and b) not everyone has access to said cheap. From what Taylor said, I think he hates the free event kill that everyone was running in triplicate during Ice and Fire. We don't want to scare newer players away. Well, not these ones anyway.

So how were games?

The old CCG stuff just feels different to me when I see it played. It is very rushed and quick to out the opponent. If you are playing an LCG deck it just can't quite work the same way. I say we assimilate the CCG out of play. The big tourneys don't use the cards anyway unless otherwise specified.

Add me on Facebook and join our group! We will try and get something going for weeknights soon.

I know what you mean. Although I haven't lost a single joust game since returning last year, even against decks packing ccg stuff, I do know that the ccg stuff is much more aggressive and powerful. You just have to know what your deck can do, and familiarity with ccg style builds is another thing. For the sake of a level playing field though I totally support LCG legal decks only. How do you guys feel about running ccg copies of lcg cards?

In other news I'll do the whole FB thing, but for now humor me and keep me posted here as well. I'm dealing with a bunch of things that involve people on FB and I'm trying to limit my e-communication of any kind until everything is handled. Mostly because I don't want to have to deal with messages or distractions. In fact I'll be operating without a phone for the next week. Really though I will be back on the FB after that. Hopefully you all will have arranged some kind of game night.