I know the basics like including enough resources, amount of characters and such. But please tell me what are the roads that lead to really good decks and which streets lead you to a stupid deck?

I get the feeling the designers included some traps for the rookies... A stalwart deck for example. There are some cards that refer to stalwart and gives bonuses but it if you go down that road you end up somewhere in the nowhere... Combine this with the Stark bannermen and people will laugh at you.

Or 3 x Gates of Winterfell in combination with Bear Island and a lot of characters - it never worked out for me. And boy did I try hard... almost stubborn... cause hey... I would get characters for free...

I think in general a deck is good (competitive?) when it establishes a central goal that will lead to a victory (power grab, character control, hand control, etc.), and then has several ways of achieving that goal.

Deck traps (like focusing on stalwart) occur when you focus too much energy on something that won't win the game. Free characters are nice, but to what end?

Having several ways to achieve that goal is the difference between a legitimate deck and a gimmick deck.

That's my two cents, more broadly applicable to deck building in general than just Thrones, since much of my deckbuilding experience is outside of Thrones. Still, hope it helps.

This may not be the answer your looking for, but I think these two things play an important role in having a "competitive" deck.

1) Be a strong player.

That means making the right moves at the right time (i.e. Should I marshall this character? Should I play this event? Should I make any challenges? What plot should I reveal?). Not making mistakes is also very important. It only takes one mistake to not win a game. At highly competitive levels, often the first player to make a mistake will be the one that loses. By mistake I mean things such as not realizing your opponent had a location that will cause you to lose a challenge if you don't commit a certain amount of strength or characters, or you should have played X plot instead of Y plot in round Z.

2) Know and understand the "metagame."

Knowing the current card pool and anticipating what your field will be will help you greatly in determining what deck you should run. longclaw recently won the TN Regional, partly due to understanding the metagame. He decided to use a Targ Shadows deck that apparently plays very well against Non-Lanni Shadow builds. With the recent Stark expansion, he didn't expect to see much Lannister (unlike earlier Regionals). It turned out the longclaw made a good call as zero Lannister decks were played, and he won the tournament Had longclaw anticipated heavy Lanni Shadow representation, I'm sure he would had ran a different deck.

ALWAYS work on 1) and 2) and you'll find that your decks will go much farther.

FATMOUSE said:

Guess what the next thread I wanted to start is: "How to get a competitive player?".

mischraum.de said:

Regardless of the game, one of the answers would be: "iron sharpens iron". Players improve by competing with each other. (And note: that's "compete with" ... instead of "compete against")

One thing that I observed myself doing as my decks became better (notice I say better not good) is that I pay more attention to gold curve. Make sure you can flop well and not get to tied up with lack of gold because all of your characters are 5 cost.

Learn to let go, this goes with the synergy statement above but just because a card is awesome doesn't mean it belongs in my deck. I mean Samwell could be in any deck as a neutral and the two card draw is great, but if it doesn't work with what I have in my deck....then it's gone. Cards must be removed if they don't work with other cards.

Also keep it to 60! Start running the math on percent chance of pulling a card and ask yourself what card would I rather pull.

Keeping it 60 is good advice in general, but don't let it become a mantra. In a game where it is about synergy you'll find the few cards over 60 will sometimes increase your redundancy effects enough that your odds of drawing specific effects are increased rather than decreased.

Common CCG wisdom would then say to pull the other cards to even it back out, but that would also lead to a lessened chance of drawing that more situational effect when you need it. If your deck is hitting 70 I would be worried.

My suggestion is to build a deck with all the cards that really work towards helping your deck achieve the victory condition in your chosen manner, and start culling cards by test draws, solitaire, and then finally by real games. Sometimes something looks awesome on paper but you find yourself not being able to make the card count in your games. Remove it, and any supporting cards, and if necessary replace it with something that has proven to be more useful.

I think a good deck should be between 60 to 65 cards. I've had great results with a deck as large as 69... but that was a melee deck and burned through cards pretty quickly in the CCG days.