Were there any Night's Watch decks attempting to dominate challenge phase with teh Wall + jumping NW? This looked like a pretty strong build in the run up to the big event and i was wondering how it did in the field.

Some were guessing that it might be too slow of a deck for serious tournament play - did anyone agree with this after actually playing it out?

I was not at Gencon so cannot say if it was there :-) But from my test I have to say that a the wall based deck is too weak... especially if you have underneath assassin, pit viper, greyjoy with scouting vessel, aero against :-)

I know Jesse (I guess he's still part of the STM) was playing a NW Wall deck that rings made for him, but I'm not 100% on the details of how the deck ran for him. That's the only one I heard of being played.

I've been meaning to take on that challenge. I'd think that the Old Nan/Benjen Stark/Wall combo could be pretty darn nasty - and versatile.

It's too risky to run for tournament play.

I've found it best to run of out Stark location hate deck. Frozen Outpost, other defensive draw/effects (i.e. Storm Dancer, Guard at Riverrun, Winterfell), and some other Night's Watch characters (i.e. Stark Benjen) make Stark a strong choice. It does extremely well against Houses that are heavy on locations and/or have little location control. Stark gives it the most trouble. Cards like Feral Pack, Price of War (if your opponent is loaded with Mil Str), and Frozen Solid are all pretty brutal. Siege is vey fast if you lose or don't get a lock on the deck. If Lannister can pull off an early Condemned by the Council, it gets owned; otherwise, the deck dominates. As for Martell, it depends. Pit Viper, Underhanded Assassin, and Hotah are issues, but Frozen Moat can handle the first two. Hotah can be controlled if you have enough NW characters with varying STR. Varys helps too, but he is an issue. It generally owns Greyjoy (Scouting Vessel gets blown up or blanked out one way or another) and Bara (unless Bara rushes, but it's difficult to pull off). I haven't been able to test it against Targ, but I think Targ would fall apart against the location control.

Against experienced players (that is understand AND play the game a lot), games generally finish within time. Games drag out too long against non-expereinced players. In a tournament setting, you would have to ask your opponent to make a move if he or she was taking too long.

I would never run it in a big tournament because The Wall is simply too vulnerable. I think the deck could do well in a lucky string of match-ups, but I'm not the kind of person that likes to push my luck if I don't have to. Even with 3x Frozen Solid and 3x of the Wall in the deck, to not have a Frozen Solid, Climbing Spikes, Condemned, or Price of War ruin your path to victory at some point in a tournament as large as GenCon is very unlikely.

Old Nan is a beast in the deck.

Not sure how good Price of War will be against it. Won't the NW player own the challenge pahse? Pretty much the same thing with Condemned.

i'd be more worried about Pyromancers or Climbing Spikes personally.

Stag Lord said:

NW doesn't own very early on as you are still building up. Lannister has enough early control between kneel effects and cards like toll gate to ruin your ability of defending and winning an early Intrigue challenge. I've actually found that Lannister will control the game the first 6-7 rounds. However, Lannister Shadows falls apart against the NW deck very quickly. Price of War isn't as big of an issue, but you'd be surprised how big Stark can get, or if GJ can use Scouting Vessel for just one round.

Pyromancer's Apprentice is currently on of the best "got 'em" location hate cards in the game, but it's so expensive and poorly stat'ed that it never sees play, let alone thought of. 3 gold to blow up a location just doesn't seem worth it to most players (I wouldn't bee surprised if somebody ran one at GenCon). There's also the issue of not knowing when you're opponent will or won't have gold laying around. Climbing Spikes and Frozen Solid are the biggest issues. More so Frozen Solid.

At our next meet up, I'll bring my NW deck if you'd like to see it in action. Or should I call you up to play on OCTGN?

I'm currently playing a Baratheon-The Wall deck.

It's strong, but as others have mentioned, the Wall is quite vulnerable to many effects, the main one being the Climbing Spikes because it's so **** difficult to get rid of them. And I think there are currently quite a few Wildling decks running around, so the spikes won't be an uncommon sight.

Theoretically Baratheon has everything available to counter the different problem cards against the Wall, but some solutions are a bit fiddly:

- Frozen Solid: Maester Cressen, Ill Tidings (using Maester Aemon, searchable with the Raven plot)

- Climbing Spikes: Ill Tidings (maybe in combination with one or the other Nightmares to blank some Wildling traits)

- Mance Rayder: Milk of the Poppy, Nightmares, Motley (unreliable most of the times)

- Pyromancer's Apprentice: keep 1 Gold once your opponent has a card in shadows. Duplicates of the Wall are of course helping too.

- Price of War & Condemned by the Council: succesfully defend the challenge (that's what the Wall is there for), Hand's Jugdment, Brienne of Tarth [PS], duplicates

- Nightmares: Hand's Judgment

- Fear of Winter: Margaery Tyrell [DN]

- Fury of the Kraken: succesfully defend the challenge, duplicates

- Men with no King: Hand's Judgment to cancel the Reinforcement event (actually this could be quite a serious threat. Once the Wall has changed sides, it's probably gone for the rest of the game for you with no possibility to get it back.)

Other problem cards are the epic battles since the Wall only works during the Challenge phase. Price of War and Condemned work here too.

Defensiv decks like House Tully-Riverrun are also problematic, because most of the time you don't have enough attacking power to win a challenge against them, thus all House Tully characters claim 1 Power at the end of the Challenge phase. Nightmares helps but only three times (and you still have to draw them). And since the Wall decks tend to be so slow, I don't see how this can work out in your favour. You're probably also running one or the other The North agenda, thus need even more power to win.

A fun deck to play with (but not against ), but for me personnally it's too risky for a tournament.

This might come across as a dumb question, but what deck are y'all referring to? I have found what I think to be the card discussed on agot.dbler.com that lets you sneak nightwatch people into play. For what I can tell, the night watch people all look... terrible? They cannot defend or attack outside of this location? Is that why people are saying it is a fragile deck?

Rules question: When putting a card into play like the wall, are all costs still paid?

I saw a Lannister Deck using the Wall and jumpy NW characters (particularly the big armies) but it was used in the Melee and so the other three players just decided to leave that player alone and just attacked each other. It accomplished its goal of deterring other players from attacking it but it lacked any sort of offense and in the end it got 4th place at the Table.

estel said:

The NW characters look terrible because most of them don't have icons, but three of the six The North Agendas grant NW characters you control one of each icon. Run all 3 and suddenly those terrible characters look much better. The reason why we are saying it's fragile is because if The Wall is blanked or discarded from play you lose the main "gimmick" or the core of your deck. Without The Wall you no longer get to add STR to your existing board. This means you have to marshall more characters, which costs gold and diminishes your hand size. Controlling The Wall and Frozen Outpost can potentially give you a 8 STR tricon army that can defend twice or defend and attack once for free. Losing that really hurts your edge.

I'm not sure what you mean by your rules question. Are you asking about playing The Wall or putting a character into play using The Wall?

I know one of the Missouri guys, John, was running it out of Stark. We'd been working on it and tweaking it for a couple months up to the event, but with the extra power needed to win once you use the agenda's we just couldn't get it to really click with a win condition. With the addition of Dubious Loyalities to Seductive Promise and suddenly it has some awfully good ways to bring the opponent's best characters to their side of the board though...

Don't forget:

Fear of Winter.

The Targ location that takes your characters and dumps them into the dead pile.

Alannys Greyjoy

Confession.

bloodycelt said:

Fear can hurt, but if you optimize for the Setup and have decent board presence and a big army in hand, it's really not that bad.

I've yet to see one competitive deck that has used Aegon's Hill. It would make NW very sad.

Other than Fear, Alannys is probably the biggest problem of the four, given her amount of gameplay. There are usually enough 3+ STR characters that can be knelt or played if she hits the board though. Jeyne and Old Nan (to a degree) help too.

The last time I've ever seen Confession was in Dobbler's GJ Championship deck. It certainly would hurt. With Asshai and Knight's of the Hollow Hill, it will probably see more action.

In general, all 4 cards are legitimate counters.

Whoops and I just remembered. John's Wall deck was Lannister while at GenCon. He was likely the one from the melee. I got a little mixed up. We had talked about changing it to Stark for Dubious Loyalties.

Kennon said:

So much good stuff, so little space

Yeah, it is tough.

I helped Jesse build a Stark NW deck for the extra NW characters and for Frozen Outpost. It needed a lot more tweeking, but it did okay. There were a lot times going second where 12 strength NW armies stand up during challenges and then come back to attack.

Just very tough matchup against top level decks. It can defend very well, but really doesn't have a great win condition. Maybe Tower of Joy, but pretty much everything just stops your opponent from attacking until either they know they can win a specific challenge or find an answer.

I suppose you could also toss in frostfang peaks and riverrun in that deck type.

(Mill them, while claiming power from just sitting there not having lost a challenge... just have a tully character or so in play).