I am needing some assistance in deck building. My curiosity comes in the form of determing how many multiples of a card to have in the deck. I know that I'm not allowed to have more than (3x) any card that has the same title (unless restricted by the text in the textbox of a card). But I'm curious to find out people's strategies when including multiples of unique cards (specifically characters) in the deck. One thought is to include 3x a unique for a higher chance of reveal, plus it gives you a chance to have a "Dummy" card drawn in case you lose an intrigue challenge. The only downside to that is that if the unique ends up in the dead pile before you have a chance to dupe it, you're left with 1/2 cards that are useless except for having a Dummy card in your hand for intrigue challenge fodder. The flip side of that being that if you only include 1/2x a unique card then you greatly reduce your chances of drawing that card into your hand, but you maximize it's effectiveness when you do draw it.

Where do you stand on this issue and why?

Winged_Human said:

generally 1x unique character which is not essential to my deck, 3x unique character which is + perhaps a Summoning season. I rarely run more than 2 unique characters at 3x each. Given the nature of the dead pile and how quickly characters can die I find it is usually better to have the chance to have 2 seperate characters on the table than 1 character with a dupe, and that is even more true when that dupe becomes a dead card in hand.

If you look at the top 8 decks from the 2010 championship you'll see that multiple copies of a unique character is kept to around 1 or 2 characters in the deck (Baratheon being the exception)

To hijack my own thread...

I've been studying some of the deck builds that people have been using, and some of the terms to describe deck builds are a bit confusing if someone could attempt to clarify for me so that when I'm browsing specific deck builds I know what I'm looking at, that would be great.

Words like the following:

Power Rush

Control

Siege Deck

Turn 2 Win (HOW is this even possible?)

Hyper-Kneel

Hyper Rush

Aggro

I know there's a few more that I'm missing but I can't find the threads that I ran across them in. I appreciate all the help and advice as I gear up for regionals.

Power Rush/Turn 2 Win/Hyper Rush/Aggro? - generally these are referring to similar decktypes, ones being designed to win as quickly as possible. Usually through the use of Renown , multiple challenges , and events which claim power . These decks are typically run out of Baratheon although other houses can do it too. Turn 2 win isn't that common (but not impossible) if you build your deck for it, the problem comes if your opponent manages to break your tempo it is hard to recover.

Control/hyper-kneel - Typically these decks will attempt to control one aspect of the game, usually characters in some fashon. Lannister decks are most often referred to as either of these types as they like to control your characters by kneeling them so they can't attack or defend.

Siege Deck - stark deck running the siege agenda

Aggro - aggro is more generic, usually something refering to fast, perhaps in winning or in attacking

Winged_Human said:

I can give you a quick easy example of one I sort of lucked into this weekend. Using a Bara Asshai deck I managed to by the time first Marshalling was complete have The Iron Throne (auto dominance edition) and Mel that doubles dominance and unopposed I and P challenges. My plot was Retaliation (4/8/2) and after my opponent went I was able to get an unopposed I challenge with a random character (2/15 power) then an unopposed Power challenge with Mel, I only took one off the house card but got 2 for the unopposed and 1 for Mel's renown (6/15 power). Add dominance. (8/15 power). Next turn I flip Power of Blood, I add have enough Asshai on the table to flip down Army of the Faithful for 1 gold and charge! Renown from the Military challenge that Mel and the Army partook in (10/15), then I believe I was victorious on both the I and P challenge with Mel. The I challenge was unopposed, so 3 more (13/15) and the P challenge took me over the top.

Now this was due to a perfect draw and crap draw by my opponent, and I'm nowhere near skillful enough to pull it off regularly, but it isn't as uncommon as you might think.

Another one that I'm not familiar with is the "Lions Voltron" Deck. I assume it's a Lanni deck, but what kind of deck does it refer to at that point?

Generally a voltron deck will focus on 1 character and uber them up with various attachments. Lions Voltron likely is focusing on Joff and getting him an intrigue and military icon using Devious Intentions and Rusted Sword . You then have a super Joff who is standing and claiming power and wreaking havoc.

Winged_Human said:

Darksbane has the right of it. The only difference that I would point out is that Aggro generally means a military heavy deck as opposed to power challenges.