The Lannister draw and Baratheon Noble Rush threads got me thinking... which houses have a good variety of viable builds and which are limited to one or two viable builds? While Lannister is currently seen as being the most competitive house right now, some Lanni fans have said that there aren't that many options on how to build a competitive deck (Lanni-Shadows and Hyperkneel being the two most popular options). Is the current cardpool of ~800 cards enough to allow sufficient variety in each house?

As a fairly new player, I'm definitely curious about more experienced players view on this. While I enjoy building (or trying to build...) solid tournament level decks, I also enjoy experimenting with unusual builds to see if I can make them competitive. I'm just wondering which houses players view as most conducive to this approach.

Well, at least IMO, there aren't many different builds for each house, but rather different flavors of the same build. Lanni has Hyperkneel and Shadows, but they usually end up with the same result: your opponents dudes are knelt. Sure you can go about it in a number of different ways, but it comes down to you are kneeling dudes. Baratheon is pretty much the same. They claim lots of power all at once. Sure you can use some control, but that's only to make it easier for you to gain all that power.

I actually think that Stark might be the one great example of two distinct builds. They have the defense deck, which uses stuff like Peasant Defenders, Riverrun, Hodor and the like, and they have the Rush deck. The Rush deck uses Siege of Winterfell, Epic phase events, and possibly Formal Petition, lots of tullies and the Blackfish. Now the line between these two builds is kinda blurry and you might see a bit of rush in the defense deck and a bit of defense in the rush deck. However, you have two different philosophies on how to win the game, and viable deck builds for each option. I am really liking the look of Stark these days.

Also, Targ and GJ might have different builds, not sure. I haven't seen much of them. Martell seems to just have Super Viper, but that's just what I've played against. There might be more to them also.

What defines a different build? 10 different cards? 20 different cards?

For instance, I could build a Targ Burn deck and compare it to a Targ Summer deck, and they might still be 80% the same deck.

Dobbler said:

Good question. In my view, different builds use different key cards to achieve the win condition and/or interefere with your opponent's attempt to do the same. For example, a Baratheon shadows deck that uses Kingswood Trail and Black Cells to disrupt your opponent and other inexpensive shadows cards to drive the Black Cells will play very different than a non-shadows Baratheon rush deck that relies primarily on vigilant, renown and inexpensive setup characters. Now, these decks will probably have a lot of the same cards but the key cards will be different. The same goes for a Bara winter deck, which will need several winter based cards to work, leaving little room for extensive shadow mechanics.

Another approach could be that if there are several cards that make sense in one deck but not in another, they're likely different builds. Queen of Thornes, for example, makes good sense in a Baratheon shadows deck but no sense in a deck without shadows. The same goes for KL Margaery. ToR The Wall only makes sense in a Bara winter deck, as does Shadow Stalker. These all suggest to me that those decks qualify as different builds.

So, I see at least three different builds for Bara. The question is, how many of them are competitive?

JeffK said:

Well, that's the real question. Every House actually has a number of different "builds" and a number of ways to achieve a win condition. But those paths are not created equal. They are not equally efficient, putting the "pieces" together into a deck are not equally apparent and they are not equally competitive. As a result, they are not equally used. As a community, we generally lean toward control and once we find a "solution" that works in a House, we tend to build variations and improvements on the theme rather than look for a new solution.

Take Staton's comment that there aren't many different builds in each House, but many variations on a few. In general, I'd modify that to "there aren't many different builds that anyone uses, although everyone puts their own personal touches on them."

Every House probably has at least 4 builds, but 1 or 2 are so much easier, more apparent and/or efficient to make and play that the others are ignored to the point of being "urban legends."

Thanks Ktom, you've placed Greyjoy mill at the same place as Snuff Film and the Jersey Devil.

NEver heard of the "Super Viper"? What is that deck about?

C

Castorp said:

Probably he's talking about PotS Viper x3, Lost Oasis x3, Taste for Blood x3, Venomous Blade x3, with help of Arianne, Ellaria and other Martell good stuff like Orphan, Viper's rage, Red Vengeance and some Martell draw.

ktom said:

Do you think that there are any competitive builds that people are missing due to being less obvious?

JeffK said:

Depends on how you define "competitive." I think the GJ mill deck bloodycelt mentions could be competitive if built and balanced properly, but it's hard to find the right way to drive home the win, so not a lot of people try to be competitive with the build. I think that Martell icon manipulation is a strong competitive build that very few people can pull off these days. It's a lot of moving parts that are not easy for everyone to put together, let alone keep track of in practice. I think Stark defense is a very strong build, but it eludes just about everyone because there is a lot of truth to the maxim "you can't win on defense alone." Lanni can do more than just kneel everything in sight (they can do some interesting things with stealth, pumping military characters and capitalizing on intrigue challenges), but that's all anyone every really seems to see.

If you define "competitive" as "wins more than it loses," that's hard to say because it is so much harder to streamline a deck dedicated more to the "sidelines" and "neat tricks" most of the Houses have that a given build not being "competitive" may have more to do with how the deck is put together and played than it is about the strategy itself being sub-optimal.

I think a lot of the builds ktom mentions are either so resource intensive that they take too long to set up right now or are so character heavy that the spam out characters and get crushed by a reset or two (~funny that draw fixes both of those problems ). Currently I find the game to be very fast paced (look at erick's lanni hyperkneel it gets going right away and just keeps going or dan's targ deck which used undercosted wildlings to help him keep up the pace early) and a lot of the decks are being skewed that way (shadows, even with the seed plot, is a little too slow right now)

ktom said:

That's actually the deck I'm working on right now for the NYC regionals. So far it's doing well, although Greyjoy seems to give it a very hard time. It's a lot of fun to play and I think the archetype has real potential. Once the 19th rolls around I'll have a much better idea, of course...

Lars said:

I don't really see any reason why the builds ktom was mentioning would be inherently slower, or more fragile against reset -heavy kneel-decks, than the more usual ones. Only that none of them offers to be exceedingly better than the ones that are more self-evident. The task of heavily testing and optimizing a deck, just to get it to be as consistent as say a GJ Winter deck, just seems a pretty daunting task to most people. No reason why a GJ mill couldn't run Wildlings for the cheap powerful stealth characters just as well as a Targ aggro-deck. (Well, except maybe for GJ actually having pretty strong low-cost characters to begin with)

If we define a build as a deck having a distinct set of key cards and a differing modus operandi, I'm pretty sure that most houses have at least a few different builds that could be dubbed competitive but just haven't been optimized enough. Icon Manipulation Martell is one of the better examples imho. But I still wouldn't bet on anybody finding that magical Baratheon control/rush build that would make Lanni-kneel eat dirt nine times out of ten...

Building the Greyjoy raid deck is tough. I'm in week three of testing, and I've got it at about 50-50. I'm trying to do it character lite (only 11 different characters, and lots of dupes/save for my uniques). There isn't as much raid tech in the game as I had initially thought, but if I get the engine running, I steamroll over the opponent. I think some of the new plots from LoW will help (Take Them By Surprise is going in) and I run Longclaw just for the renown (looking forward to the new Euron just for the renown trait). I think with a few more tweaks I can get this deck up to 60-70% win rate, if I can make it more consistent. But even at present the raiding still seems more of a side effect. But there is nothing sweeter than watching my opponent discard Red Vengence and He Calls it Thinking after I triggered a raid effect.