I've got an upcoming Hand of the King tournament and I was wondering what the forums thought about my strategy. So here it goes:

Use city plots
Hand of the King: Bran Stark (Core)
Deck: Unknown, but probably Baratheon
+3 Inn of the Kneeling Man
+3 Marya Seaworth
+3 Herald of the Stag

The objective is to get to the point where I am going through 2, 3, or 4 city plots every plot phase. Once that gets rolling I don't think it really matters what the rest of the deck is doing, it will be a consistent engine of control mechanisms. I might even run 3 Black raven and 3 White raven in the same deck just to make sure the Inn is active. Summer Targ is a viable option, with the Crown to make it Summer. Or Stark/GJ Winter. Up until now I have been using a Baratheon shadows deck to get this going (without the Inn). Throwing summer into it shouldn't be too difficult. I'll replace Valar with Building Season to get the Inn into my hand, and the Heralds can get me dupes of Marya or Summers Champion or another character as needed. Maybe I'll use the Cache as my restricted card so I can get a stable draw engine.

As a concept, how is this sounding? I don't think my meta expects it.

Honestly, I love the sound of it! I've been trying to figure what would be the best character to utilize Inn of the Kneeling man with, and you've likely found it. I'd be careful with the City plots though. If I recall, City of Soldiers might force you to kill your own character if the opponent doesn't have a target.

Ya, City of Soldiers has potential to backfire. That has happened to me once when I had Marya and Bran going around turn 5, but I just killed Bran and lost a gold token. Of course at the time I was using King Roberts Hammer with Marya with Bran - it gives the same result as Inn of the Kneeling Man (4 plots/round) but it targets Marya, and she can in fact be killed, so I think the Inn, once it gets going, is probably a little more solid since it works on Bran directly. I also used City of Spies on myself once so that I could ensure I drew into a Black Cells, which was awesome. It has not lost yet in Hand of the King, and I think its got some power; especially since your (almost) guaranteed to start flipping two plots a turn. You could throw in some Frostfang Peaks or GTM just for fun.

I've only played one Hand of the King game so far so I can't say how useful my comments are, but making sure you have attachment control seems very important. I Milked my opponent's Hand the first turn he came into play and made sure he had no way to get rid of the Milk; I wasn't playing a military deck so he couldn't use his hand for claim enough times to get him back out of play. He was using a 3 or 4 cost character though, might be easier with a low cost character like Bran.

Definitely and issue. That would be a way to use City of Soldiers and the copy plot to kill him twice. I do run Cressen to get rid of Milks and Frozen Solid in Baratheon decks. That would suck for your opponent in that situation lol