It was only a small tourney in Munich/Germany but with players from 3 different metas: Nürnberg, Munich and Salzburg (Austria). We played 4 Swiss Round, Semifinal and Final. The Wildling Horde was not tournament legal. The latest FAQ was used so Alchemist's Guild Hall was played with the errata

Here are the results:

Winner: Lannister + Shadow Agenda.
King's Landing, Alchemist's Guild Hall and Black Cells, Syrio. Gunther lost only one game vs. a Greyjoy Ressource Denial deck. So still Lanni can be beaten but it is difficult.

2nd place: Lannister
Only 2 people out of 8 played Lanni and they get the first two places...

3rd place: Targaryen played by thorondor, whom will some of you know.

His strategy: burn! He also beat one time one of the Lanni decks.

4th place: Greyjoy.

Winter, Location Control, Resource Denial, Icy Fisherman, Wintertime Marauders, in the Swiss Rounds he beat the winner of the tournament.

5th place: Martell

character control

6th place: Stark with Bear Island

7th place Targaryen + Summer Agenda played by me. Only 2 of 8 people played with agenda!

Last place: Targaryen

mischraum, thanks for sharing, I enjoy hearing how tournaments, big or small, turn out.

Yeah, me too.

So Greyjoy player run winter but no agenda? I wonder why. Kings of Winter seems to me like really no drawback agenda.

Rogue30 said:

The biggest drawback to the Agenda is advertising that you are relying on Winter. Opponents hold back character control waiting for your Marauders to show up. They hold back location control waiting for the Armada to show up. They conserve Carrion Birds. Essentially, just by putting the Agenda down, you tell your opponent 60-80% of your strategy for Greyjoy. On the flip side, since the Agenda doesn't really give much of a benefit, not using it keeps them guessing a little while longer.

Winter decks, especially Greyjoy Winter, hardly ever use the Agenda in our meta. It evolved because in the early Ravens days, playing a season Agenda invited your opponent to play Rule By Decree first round, which, if you hadn't drawn your raven attachment during Setup, screwed you big. Either you get caught by it with your Time for Ravens search, or you waited on the guaranteed season - which is a big drawback in a dedicated season deck.

Not playing the Agenda doesn't stop you from using the season strategy, but using the Agenda puts a big neon sign around it.

ktom said:

Great point ktom, but I pretty much expect nearly 100% of competitive GJ decks to run Winter. Winter provides so much for GJ, whether you rely on Winter heavily or lightly. I think GJ is more of a neon sign of Winter than than the Winter Agenda itself (~If someone ran Kings of Winter in Non-GJ, Non-Stark deck would you think they were running Winter or using a red-herring?). Maybe if you're running a GJ milling deck or a specific kind of character control deck you may not run Winter; even then, I'm going to be expecting a White Raven if your House is GJ.

Also, thanks for posting mischraum.de!

ktom said:

Clever. I didn't know about this trick. However I still think that Kings of winter is worth to run if your deck is going to rely on winter. And I agree with FATMOUSE - at tournament you can't hide for long that you play winter.

plus, if a GJ control deck is going good, the agenda doesn't provide them with that much of a bonus.

If I am building a Winter deck and I don't need to use another Agenda (Treaty, Shadows, etc) then I will always use the Kings of Winter Agenda. I've found that extra card out of an opponents hand to be quite useful. Also, as a frequent summer/winter player, I almost never use my raven search plot first turn. The RBD trick is definitely one drawback, but I also hate using it right away. If my deck shows that it can hang with an opponent without making it winter, then the search plot becomes a luxury, not a necessity.

A double-edged trick is to Summoning Season as your first plot. You can get your opponent to RBD, but at the cost of them getting a good character.

My Greyjoy deck uses winter, but doesn't rely upon it. It has about 12 cards that benefit from Winter, but I've played it in games where it was mostly summer and it still worked well (gotta love TfR Theon!).

Yeah, I think the winter agenda is too much to give up in GJ. In fact, in that deck I think it's often better than marauders. (At least, Alaynns + agenda is more threatening than marauders in many cases.)

And in most cases, I would assume a GJ deck runs winter even if it doesn't play the agenda. If they aren't running winter and marauders, they're giving up an awful lot...winter restricts gold and helps with removal immensely, not to mention it's a nice counter to Targ/Martell summer. Marauders also happen to have war crests, which is pretty nice with Price of War.

Maybe I just haven't seen enough alternate GJ builds....

--------------------

In terms of the tourney and results, thanks for posting. It isn't a huge surprise that Lanni won, of course, even post errata. I think that errata basically prevents the most egregious NPE instances, but Lanni still dominates when it comes to gold, draw, and efficiency in using shadows + city plots. (Lanni's abundance of gold and preference for playing second many rounds makes playing city plots easy, and those plots are very strong.)

Yeah, the Winter Agenda fits very well in most Greyjoy decks. I'm sure that there are alternate builds for Greyjoy decks. But like Dan mentioned, the Wintertime Marauders are too sexy not to try and include in the deck. Positive traits (army, ironborn), war crest, 3Str 2 icons and probably the most powerful non-unique response out there on a character.

Plus, the agenda is really annoying if you manage to keep it winter. You can literally force your opponent's hand by keeping your card count low. A free claim 1 intrigue challange per round with almost no drawback is not a bad thing to have around .

And ktom brings a very interesting point about Rule by Decree and the raven search plot. I've played around with a Greyjoy winter deck, and I never felt the need to play the raven search plot card unless I have samwell in my hand or played during setup. I just feel there's better things to do first round with a Greyjoy deck, as Dobbler also mentioned.

In addition our local player groups usually are not very big. Hiding the agenda is a good trick in a big torunament, with some stranger people, but not in the local store where everybody may know what kind of deck are you running.

The best part of all this is that Greyjoy will be able to run a better agenda when it shows up in some new chapter.

Twn2dn said:

hmm taking cards from hand is better then choosing up to 3 cards (no matter your plot claim) to be discarded from play but not better then watching your opponent kill 1-3 (dependent on plot claim) of his weakest/least useful characters?

Zsa said:

unless you're Lannister, right?

~ You got that axe ground down to where you want it yet, Lars?

lol, apparently not. I am just flabbergasted how things are looked at from one house to the next I guess.

~wait till I get started on the new stannis, you know the one that I was supposed to shut up and look forward to....

Lars said:

Yeah, it is interesting just how differently people review similar results depending on which House is able to pull it off. The game is certainly situational. The fact that the situations follow bizarre logic (if any) in terms of consistency for both designers and players is part of what makes it so fascinating. It's a very psychologically involved metagame.

Thanks for the report.

Almost everyone knows I'm an "usual" Lanni player. I've not been playin' a lot since the last winter, but I do follow the game and right now I NEED to jump back...

My 2 cents...I don't play any agenda with Lannis. I play straight lannis, with a couple of shadows effects but nothing more than that. I love straight "lanni kneel" with a strong focus on military.

It depends a lot on the meta...This game (as the other LCGs) is incredibly different from area to area...When I used to test Lanni shadow decks for a bit of statistics, it used to lose most of the time to my straight Lanni, Greyjoy, Stark aggro and Bara Shadow/summer.

Just to say that the mighty Lannis are strong, yes (and I know they can be pretty annoying...I know them well ), but they can be beaten.

EDIT: I guess, things would be pretty different in a white-border only format.

Lars said:

It's a good thing to have especially vs a Lanni player I think

Rogue30 said:

It seems evil to spoil all the discussion that was made on the topic... yet I asked the guy and he just said: I doesn't know why I didn't have it with me. I will include it in the next tournament.

o_0: At a tourney level don't all Greyjoy decks use many similar cards? I mean they are going to have winter marauders. But I at least try to have it so I get Alaynnys, or Wex Pyke out early so they can't just sit there with their character control waiting for the marauders.

And maybe its because I rarely use non-uniques but I find Alannys + Support much more scary then Marauders. And the reason I rely more heavily on uniques is more that I don't have as much time to think about building decks and my design is still based on a deck built in Standard. (Granted PttQ should be brought back).