With all the recent talks about overpowered cards and NE houses, it might be interesting to discuss what each house's weaknesses are. These could be bad match ups, cards, mechanics, etc. Since I primarily play Martell and Targ, I'll throw out my thoughts on those.

Martell

- Winter, and especially the winter agenda. Winter hampers card effects (maesters/open market), reduces gold to mitigate Martell's card advantage, and (with agenda) eats into their hand size.

- Event/triggered effect cancels

- "Weenie" character control (burn, Venomous Blade, Payne, and Grey Wind are great against Martell)

Targ

- High-STR characters (especially non-unique, since second and third copies are still playable after the first dies)

- "Weenie" character control

- Location control, or other forms of resource denial (to take out influence AND gold)

Twn2dn said:

Always tough to say, unlike strengths - mainly since you can work around them usually pretty easy with nuetrals. I have never had an issue with Winter agenda with Martell, nor do I mind many cancels since they have a great response cancel. They do have a lot of good weenies, but they also have a lot of bomb characters that are even better if the weenies are controlled (Viper being the main one). And I don't really see them having more weenies than any other hosue.

Targ I agree more, although I would say they ahve the best weenie control cards in the game (burn), so not sure what that means (that they use a lot of weenies? Again, I don't see them using that many more and many of them have 'come into play' or 'when leave play' effects that still go off). But, high strength characters can be an issue, as is heavy location control in many builds I agree.

GJ have a ton of weaknesses - mainly just an under-average character base, with their best characters being more combo-oriented.

Draw (or draw effects) and income are probably the most consitant cards out there, so really I can't think of anything out of Lanni or Martell. Stark and Bara (along w/ GJ) have a tougher time drawing, but Bara has a really good income system (especially the 0 cost, 3 reducer).

Good thoughts Rings.

To clarify on Targ, I did mean that Targ as a house tends to depend more on its 1- and 2-STR characters than other houses, at least in my opinion. Targ's typical 3-gold character tends to be 2 STR with a ton of icons/abilities, rather than a vanilla 3-3 bicon. (Every house has lots of these 3g, 2STR characters these days, but it seems like Targ more than some houses have come to rely on 1- and 2-STR characters.) This may be changing though with more dothraki in the environment (though I haven't seen a competitive dothraki-centric build perform well at any tourneys.)

For Martell, I'm not sure if we agree or disagree...and maybe my use of "weaknesses" here was unclear? I agree that Martell doesn't have as many major weaknesses or auto-loss match ups as other houses. On the other hand, Martell doesn't win every game. The question then is which decks/mechanics/cards give Martell a tougher time? I've seen tier-1 Martell decks lose to GJ winter decks (recently, not years ago), and also to Targ burn (though much more rarely).

I wasn't looking for "silver bullet" solutions to problem houses, but just highlighting what I think each house struggles against.

To add my thoughts on other houses...

Bara

- Kneel, despite bara's standing effects. (I think a decent Lanni kneel deck can control Bara kneel fairly consistently.)

- Hand discard...though maybe this is mitigated somewhat with TLS in the environment?

Greyjoy

- Strong weenie control, especially burn (GJ's achilles heel)

- Military-heavy decks with high claim? (This seems to be my experience, but I could be wrong.)

I'd say one of Bara's problems is draw. Bara has no reliable/consistent source of in-house draw. king Robert's Debt is situational and non-repeatable. R'Hllor's blessing is not so situational, but not very good and generally you could have put something more useful in your deck.

Stark also can't do intrigue offense very well. Stark is actually OK at defending against intrigue now - Bouncing Catelyn and the various defensive Stark Cards at least stops your opponent from getting unopposed, but Stark has very few high strength intrigue cards, and nothing with Stealth or other tricks to help them on the attack. The only Stark decks that can actually do intrigue offense are Tully decks after the Blackfish gets 3 power on him..

House weaknesses are hard to come up with. This list may be entirely inacurate, but this is what I feel are the soft spots in the current houses:

BTW, I am perfectly fine with some of these weaknesses. I am in no way saying I want to see these holes filled!

Stark - Card advantage and offensive versitility. They aren't so horrible at defending their hand vs. intrigue challenges, but they certainly aren't going to inflict any damage on anyone elses hand. With that in mind, I find I get stuck playing the "control the table or go home" game. Vulnerable to strong intrigue attacks and character control.

Lanni - Certainly attachment control, but location control, while there, also seems weak.

Bara - Card draw, all forms of control, and cancels. Bara seems so wrapped up in trying to accomplish what they want, they don't really care about stopping other decks. Long games, even with Asshai, don't seem to favor Bara. Bara can dupe characters better than anyone else (they better be with all that juicy power sitting on them), but that still leaves them vulnerable to Targ Burn, and challenge/icon control.

GJ - Cohesiveness and card advantage. Their UO theme is decent enough to excel at melee, but lacks the sneakiness to get challenges through in joust. Underwelming character base consisting of decent weenies, but otherwise pricey characters. Vulnerable to Targ Burn, character control, and intrigue attacks.

Targ - Card draw and slow to set up. I find I'm spending so much on setting up locations for recursion, shadows, or draw, that I rely heavily on weenies until I have to gold to spend on bigger characters. Quite often this means the bigger characters just get left out of the deck, as they aren't that great in the first place. Vulnerable to fast decks, location control, and cancels (if there were any). They also have no location control of their own.

Martell - Monocons, monocons, monocons! There are some great characters out of Martell, but there are a lot of monocons at 3 , and especially 2 gold. With characters being played more for their abilites, and less for their icon spread or cost, it becomes difficult to keep up with challenges through standard means. But what does Martell care about standard means?

It seems to me that mitigating mass kill or recovering quickly are important indicators of strength. So another way to frame the question is - Which Houses are most vulnerable to Valar?

@Deathjester: Good point about Martell's monocons. That makes their board even more vulnerable to character removal, since knocking one out can create an icon hole. Since Martell has so much draw though, it often rarely seems to matter that their icon spread is poor.

Twn2dn said:

Very true - more than any other house I am missing an icon when playing Martell a lot. I miss old 4/3 Deadly/Vengful/Stealth Red Viper (5KE?), he filled a lot of holes (plus he was noble for that Locked in the Tower card I heard was good?). He was my MVP the year I lost in the finals to Luke it seemed.

Also, good points about some houses having an issue with 'super-characters'. That is what is getting me closer to playing more Targ (when their box comes out), easy location control and the ability to recycle my Milks.