This is something that I am coming to think is very important for this game. Especially for me. I am having a hard time finding people to play with, which means I must teach people to play and must make sure they have a good time playing their first time. I found a list of four decks for the main factions using only 2x core sets, not sure they are the best ever but they do seem like they are more straightforward than the tweaked and tuned decks.

Do you have any decklists that are good learner models?

How do you go about teaching new people to play the game and enjoy themselves?

Start with joust then move to melee. Melee is one of the reasons I really like the game so I always look to move to melee.

How do you get new people to agree to play?

Some people have a Pavlovian distaste for anything that looks like a CCG. It's like a CCG abused them in the past, which is possible, but still a little disconcerting when you are trying to get them to play and they end up huddled in a corner rocking back and forth saying "Bad touch bad touch"

Others are avid CCG players but of another game and will not hear of playing anything other than their chosen game. I understand not wanting to buy into another game but why can't I get them to try playing a game that to my mind is essentially just a board game where I have everything needed to play in the box. It is a hard sell for some reason.

How are you doing at getting a play group in your area?

After the switch to LCG, I was alone for a little over a year.

I had one friend that played every now and then. Whenever we met up, I always made sure it was in a game store for exposure.

Then finally, almost 2 years ago, I found a couple of other guys who had picked up the game for fun. One of them eventually caught the bug, and started buying cards. We ran a demo a year ago at a small convention down here, were busy demoing all day, but only managed to pick up 3-4 extra players. I managed to get 3 of those guys up to Calicon to expose them to the community, and they were hooked.

This year we did demos again, but our small group had enough other friends who were interested in the game, so we hosted a small tourney made up of quite a few new comers.

Small tourney success + HBO show + the return of several players from the CCG days = 20-24 players in our meta now, and a group of player growing up in LA.

I don't expect all of them to become as crazy as I am, but it's nice to see.

A couple of things that really helped:

1) Good demo decks. The Core Set decks alone are too clunky for my taste. If you can build 40 card decks that have a good theme, but don't over load new players with too many concepts, it's really helps.

2) Patience. I generally find the experience of teaching the game pretty painful. It's slow. I don't want to destroy them. We're just trying to have fun and learn the game. I try to determine how much guidance the person is looking for. Some people want to figure the game out on their own. Some people want me to explain every move I make, and what I think they should do. Just be patient, and feel things out.

3) Always have multiple deck ready to share.

4) If players eventually are interested in competitive play, I really recommend planning a road trip to a larger tourney/regional to get some exposure to the awesome community.

Once you get a few people playing, hopefully the game spreads. It's just that getting those first couple of players can be a very slow, lonely process.

There is hope!

Im a big proponent of melee games for newer players, but than again im a big proponent of melee games in general. For me when i was teaching my friends and my sister to play they just werent interested in Joust when they started losing. Even with equal decks and the idea of taking it easy, someone who knows how to play doesnt make the same play mistakes that new players make and suffer from. But in Melee games the the player whos in last still has the ability to change the game and influence the board. I feel like this helped my group really get a feel for the mechanics by experimenting with what they could use to stop me from grabbing a win. Plus when learning in a melee game i find it easier for players to correct mistakes they are making, it was less competitive among the newer players and more just aimed at me which i really do feel helped them learn the basics of deck building and also helped them get familiar with the house they were playing.

Downside being some of the melee interactions become very chaotic, his response before my response, when does claim come in, can i declare a trait after u declare defenders and so on, but the Faq flow chart really is useful when things like this come up. so i kind of started with melee, once they seemed to understand the basics of everything we went to joust and now we are back in melee.

Without making it obviously patronizing, I tend to build fun decks to go against more solid decks, and then give the solid decks to them. However, what I have always preferred over even that when teaching the game is to use decks that aren't tricky at all, really - Lannister, Martell, and sometimes Targ can be really difficult to teach with because they require a person to always make good choices. I tend to build a Bara rush deck, a Stark Siege deck, and a Greyjoy Winter deck to give them an idea of the copious possibilities in the game, while keeping the game relatively simple.

I also avoid any decks that are going to lead to NPEs. For the GJ winter deck, for example, I don't go down the Alannys + To Be a Kraken route, but stick more with just straight up cheap characters with some real gusto to 'em, and then allow Die by the Sword and Price of War to kick in (rather than canceling them). Stuff like that.

I'm looking to regrow the Boston meta as well, and just wanted to post to Deathjester: Thanks for the tips. I'll take those into consideration!

i just got the core set in the mail yesterday and three of us sat down to learn together. we only played with what was in the core set and it went pretty smooth. i do have to say, the learning curve isnt terrible as ive grown up playing ccg's but for my friends it was a bit slow going. they had never played a ccg or lcg before and it was trciky at first to keep track of all the abilities and triggers and whatnot. does anyone have a good suggestion for building beginner decks or actually have a decklist? im still so new that i wouldnt know what to query in terms of what specific types of decks are called. any help would be greatly appreciated. i really want to try and build a community of players locally but i need to be able to make it more simple and fun straight away im thinking.

I've only been playing a short time, but it seems like the core set decks are OK to learn the game on. Those decks also have a fair number of cards in them that you'd probably never use for anything however. I guess that's not so different from any other starter set in a card game. Its been my experience trying to teach others on those decks that they aren't really all that balanced though. Lanister still tends to wipe everything else fairly often, for example. For a good two player experience, I might recommend Baratheon vs Targaryian.. that's one pairing that seems to come out pretty close between two newbie players.