I've been playing with the Starter Decks in the Core Set but was wondering about building some Greyjoy and Martell starter decks to go up against the existing decks. I've already got Princes of the Sun and plan to get Kings of the Sea as my next purchase.

What I have noticed with the existing starter deck and having played only melee with them is that they reach a sweet spot and then fade. My most recent experience was playing Stark against Targaryen and Lannister. I shot ahead with 10 power with the other two floundering on 2 or 3 each - the Direwolf effects had triggered off nicely to begin with. However, the deck faded and the Targ player came to the fore with beautiful recycling of Flame-Kissed by Lady Daenerys's Chambers. He reached 13 power just as the Lannister deck started coming to the fore. The gold/card draw abilities really fell into place at this point and he won with 15 with stark and Targ tying at 9.

I'm thinking what effects will fall into place well with Greyjoy and Martell. I don't want the decks to be too overpowered in comparison to the other decks but they also need to show off the good abilities of that house.

Cheers

Piers

There is some good discussion topic here .

I recently got into the game myself and if I could do it all over again, my second and third purchases would have been additional core sets. I am providing all the cards for my play group so more core sets was the easiest way to boost all factions relatively equally . You can really start to build decks with multiple core sets and every house is equally represented in comparison to chapter packs, which may boost one house significantly more than another. Now if you are buying all the chapter packs this will more or less balance out, but from pack to pack the boost to each house can fluctuate a lot. More core sets gives flexibility in what plots each deck can use, and 2 core sets plus princes of the sun means all your houses that you own will have x 2 copies of everything (if you got another core set instead of buying Kings of the Sea) so deck building balance should be pretty even and with more cards you can boost up to 60 card decks and have less of the fading problem you talked about without over powering anything. But if your heart is set on sticking to one core set the advice in the link above should set them up pretty evenly.