I have bought the Core starter, 2 of the Greyjoy starter, the Martell Starter and roughly 6 or 7 chapter packs. I am trying to teach this game to people that are coming from UFS and other games. Are there any cookie cutter decks out there for each faction that give people a feel for what each houses strengths are? I also have run into problems with Greyjoy and Martell decks having different types of cards (Kingdom/Shadow) from the other starters.

My current decks are constructed as such: Take out one plot from each deck that seems bad for the house it's in and replace it with the Fury of the... plot card for each specific house. Take out any cards that are useless in the deck they come in (Maester Aemon/Targaryen). I realize he is in there from a storyline standpoint,but he does nothing for the deck.

I want to show each faction with a full 60 card deck. I want to show people what else they would need to be competitive after they buy the starter. Any help would be great.

What chapter packs do you have?

All of the Clash of Arms Chapter Packs, Refugee's of War and Tower of the Hand. I have one of each of those chapter packs. Some of these I noticed other's saying in previous posts that some of the better cards (Refugee's/Fury of the...) where in these. I started with the Clash of arms series to try and go in set order. Then I was told that the core set came out after a few of the chapter packs, which was a bit confusing.

I'm not sure how much help I can be.. I don't have the Clash of Arms packs, but have some of the Seasons packs, and the King's Landing packs. That being said, Refugees is a great pack. I use almost all of the refugees in my decks most of the time, especially Bolton Refugee. Cat of the Canals is amazing, and Arena Knight is one of my favorite Baratheon characters. Tower of the Hand has some fun stuff in it. Try putting Aegon's Hill in a deck, and search for it with Building Season. You'll be amazed at how effective it is, especially when you put Valar in the same deck.

As for the Clash packs, I don't have them so I can't offer much advice. I hear the Icy Catapult combos well with the Refugees though...

I'll leave the deck-construction advive to the more experienced players (because, to be frank, I'd appreciate their advice just as much as you).

But I just wanted to say that I personally think that Maester Aemon actually adds a lot to the Targaryen deck. While it doesn't have any other Night's Watch characters to save, he's more than powerful enough if you just let him sit around saving himself .

Once you realise that he can save himself from being killed once every turn (usually in response to you losing a military challenge), then you can can start abusing his save ability to let him soak up almost every 1-strength military challenge you ever lose (in two-player, at least). All you have to do is kneel him to save himself whenever you lose the challenge, preventing you from having to kill anybody else to pay the claim. That means that your opponents needs to either hit you with a high claim (2+) military challenge, or win multiple military challenges against you each turn, before you even begin taking casualties (though obviously we're ignoring the possibility of deadly characters and other kill effects, etc).

Essentially, Aemon just does the same job as Viserys Targaryen does... except without you having to pay gold to re-play him every marshalling phase.

As such, I would argue that having both Aemon and Viserys in the Targ deck gives it a nice little kill-soaking sub-theme (that new players would probably benefit from seeing in action)( and I'd tentatively suggest that you're doing it a diservice by pulling him from it. Though, obviously that's just my personal opinion and it's completely your call.

LoneWanderer is correct that Maester Aemon works great as the only Night's Watch character in a deck. However, new players especially tend to enjoy "tribal" mechanics as they are some of the most obvious examples of the possibilities for synergy between cards in a CCG/LCG. As such, finding Maester Aemon in the Targ deck can be a bit disappointing for a new player when he sees multiple other Night's Watch characters in the Stark deck.

As for actual play value, Aemon does work better in Stark because he gives Ghost an extra target for his own claim soaking ability. If you just wanted to balance claim soak though, you might consider giving Aemon to Lannister because their only repeatable save effect is Bronn who is a bit unreliable (Stark has Trident Reinforcements, Nymeria and Ghost, Targaryen has Viserys, Baratheon has Lightbringer and Davos Seaworth).

As for the opening post request for balanced decks, I think you're off to a fine start. The Core Set decks and the two expansion decks are more or less balanced if you're playing melee (play skill and ability to manipulate other players at the table should be much more important than card power for people just learning the game). From there, I'd suggest just slowly adding cards from your chapter packs as you play enough to understand why they would be better than other cards already in the decks. Try to keep the 30/15/15 ratio mentioned in your other thread of characters/resources/stuff.

I don't know of any cookie cutter decks. A lot of the cards in the LCG are of roughly equal power level so to a first approximation just adding some cards from chapter packs to each deck should keep the decks fairly even. Really though I think the Core set and expansion decks are perfectly fun to play with as a starting point and after you see how your players react to them you will be able to tell a lot better than us what kind of cards you should add and remove from the decks.

Glad I am on the right track then. I will push out from there after I get a good enough feel for each factions strengths/weeknesses. There are acouple of posts I have read about that. Reading a post and playing through the situation are two different things though. Thanks for the advice.

just trying to close this thread as it is remaining unread for me no matter how many times i read it...