Skowza said:

That particular combination involves a lot of moving parts. I'm not so sure it'll be consistent or efficient with the current card pool.
Due to the difficulty of the setup, if an opponent ever got it going, I'd expect him/her to do nothing less with it.

It does, it's probably a pipe dream, but I've gotta try it a few times to see if it is even remotely possible... like all those silly KotS Viserys decks I've tried.

Now that agotcards has spoilers of all oldtown chapters, noone has comments on them?

I love in particular the plot that cancels enemy "when revealed" plot effect (finally good way to stop Valar if played at right time).

On the other way, I'm worried about the lanni attach that permits you to spend enemy power tokens on chars like if it was your gold... Isn't it a bit TOO powerfull against Brotherhood or Renown-based decks?

And you? What cards you like most, and what you don't like?

Skowza said:

That was essentially a Flight of Dragons-era, about 7 years ago, deck that used the first version of Drogon (a 6 Cost, 6 STR, MIL/POW monster that... oh heck, here's the link: http://agot.dbler.com/index.php?view=card&arsenalid=13064 ) who paired with the Crone to do the same... that was a slightly less gold extensive environment, but it was bomb-tastic... from what I hear.

Aegìs said:

~Obviously, anything that neuters rush is not a bad thing. Haven't the boards taught you anything? Rush is the ultimate NPE.

I really think the "darkstar" reveal attachment is much more significant.~Because Martell obviously needed more card advantage that ignored the draw cap.

All the Stark search tech is nice. Should help them with toolboxing decks. And likewise it gets around the draw cap.

Aegìs said:

It's too many cards spoiled in too short a time to comment on, it's overwhelming! It's a bit sad really, because we won't be getting exciting new card info for a long while to come. And that little bit of surprise and excitement when opening a new chapter pack is gone. (I know, I could have simply not looked at the spoilers, but I can't help myself). All the spoiler articles FFG posts in the coming months will be utterly unexciting. They really need to get back to releasing in-depth articles on their design intentions, their perception of the meta, etc. if they want to provide interesting reads.

I agree that spoilers ruin the excitement wait. That's why I don't know why in oturney they give stamps of future cards. In the internet era is normal that they fly over the seas immediately.

Gualdo said:

Because it's really cool prize. Do you really want them to stop this?

Rogue30 said:

Honestly, this year's trophies weren't as exciting...were they plastic? If the prizes weren't part of making the event "official," I probably would just skip the FFG prizes next time and invest a bit more in the glass trophies that LetsGoRed comes up with. (For example, smaller trophies for 2nd, 3rd, and Sansa, and possibly matching glass counters for first 15 participants or something.) For Black Friday, NYC does its own prizes, and for the same price as regionals, has a great glass trophy, gift certificates from the local store, and T-shirts with neat logos. There may also be an option to play (for cheap) without buying the T-shirt though....

For $150 (?), I was underwhelmed this year's regionals prizes.

The FFG regionals prizes were okay. The custom ones brought by people were where its at!

Fieras said:

I would have to agree they were just okay. Other than the deck boxes, there wasn't anything I wanted. The duel house cadrs were pretty cool. I never want the prints or uncut sheets.

Last year or two years ago maybe they had the leather deck cases for each house, plus the cool poker chips, plus the decks of playing cards (so-so) plus prints, plus pins I believe. For $100 or so I think. That was a good year.

Twn2dn said:

Couldn't agree more. The playmats are neat, but the price tag of everything isn't really worth it, in my opinion. I rather have cooler, customizable prizes or a lower price-tag.

I also think FFG should just spoil everything at once on their site instead of releasing card sheets at tournaments. It'd hurt CotW, but CotW has pretty much become a joke at this point. I think spoiling more cards earlier at the beginning of a cycle (i.e. all at once? one House per week? One CP per week?) would be more fruitful for the community -- competitively and casually.

Pre LCG era, they released expansions with more cards than the cp's. I think for the metagame it would be better if they revealed the entire set when the first cp went on sale. Or at least all cp's in the set that will be legal for Gencon.

Having the metagame change every month with a new cp I think is problematic during regionals season. The other idea of course is to set a seasonal legality in May. Then for the regionals, gencon and stahleck, what is legal and the errata are fixed.

And then events post-regional season and (non regional events) would follow current legality rules. (In some ways Black Friday could be the opening part of the "pre season" for us.)

Then again, agot is the only game I've ever seen where the world champion has randomly built a deck for the tourney discarding the deck he tested and worked on for the past several months (Mainn!). So maybe a protean metagame is perfect for most people.

I actually like the surprise of opening chapter packs, rather than spoiling the whole set. From a competitive player standpoint, it definitely is annoying, but from an excitement standpoint, opening packs creates a lot of buzz and encourages people to experiment. Maybe we just disagree on this point....

Either way, I very much agree that FFG's "spoiler card" articles are extremely lame. These are 90% marketing, with 10% substance. In fact, if Pepsi or Tyco Electronics came up with an article like this, everyone would ask "why would I go to your website just to read a 4 paragraph ad?" That reveals just how desperate this community is for a *real* journal entry of some kind.

I don't want to hijack this thread though...so back on topic. Some of these cards are great, and given the late release of so many FFG sets, in this case it's actually kind of nice to see some new cards!

Twn2dn said:

I realized I should be critical enough of a reader to be able to tell, but I'm sure someone better than I could immediately tell which articles are from marketing and which are from a designer/developer/producer.

Twn2dn said:

Hijacked!

Aegìs said:

I agree about Targ and Greyjoy, Skowza. Greyjoy gets a lot of specialized cards for a variety of themes that don't work well together. They need more versatile and all around good cards (like Baelor Blacktyde - great card!). I'm also saddened by the lack of maester support for Targ, but to be fair, there's not much in the books to build upon. Targ arguably has the best anti-maester tech, though, with their attachment control and ability to burn away key maesters of their opponent.

Love the Stark search theme getting a boost. This puts them firmly behind Martell and Lannister in terms of card advantage, I think. Martell also getting another boost in terms card advantage (~they really did need more ways to get around the draw cap), it feels like they're leaving Lannister well behind in second place. Other than that, I think Martell isn't get all that many exciting new shinies. Clearly they'll be the easiest house to run a dedicated maester deck out of, so there's that.

Baratheon and Lannister fall somewhere in the middle. Baratheon obviously got The Laughing Storm. Lannister gets Slander and Lies. They each get a decent Maester. Other than that, not too much happening for either house, it seems.

As for the maester theme of the cycle, it'll be interesting to see whether straight-forward maester builds will be common after the complete cycle has been released. A lot of the individual chains are very tool-boxy, so I think they lend themselves to a great variety of builds outside a dedicated maester deck.

Twn2dn said:

I believe when i was leaving the NY regionals you said hey take a card page or something else, i took the deck box. I just don't know what i would do with a spoiled card page outside of cutting it up and using it as my actual cards. Whatever happened to glass and stone house cards, different power tokens, hell even different type of themed card sleeves would be nice. Im sorry but a play mat, a pin and a page of spoiled cards just don't do it for me

jack merridew said:

On the maesters cycle, I think Saturnine and Skowza are mostly right about how the house breakdown works. In terms of Martell though, I think Prince's Plans is *MUCH* worse than the unique attachment, which is a 2-gold attachment that can be played on unique characters only and still has a conditional trigger. Given the rise in maester builds, I'm expecting to see a lot more attachment hate played, so I expect attachments to be even weaker going forward. Honestly though, Prince's Plans triggered once to bring back 2-3 Martell events (Burning, Cyvasse, etc.) AND an Orphan could easily swing a game...and imagine drawing into 2 of those to recycle them. I think people should watch that card carefully.

In terms of Targ, I agree with the general sentiment that the house got less than most of the other houses, though Shadow Seer and some of the other toolbox cards will still give it a boost. I still think the main problem with House Targ though is the lack of solid, non-conditional effects that don't require combos to be powerful. For example, Targ removal (burn) requires combo, as does its draw, etc....and they still don't have a competitive location discard effect (though war-crest location discard might work in some cases). Given the rise in uber powerful locations over the past 1.5 years (and continuing trends, it appears), this is a pretty big weakness. On the other hand, if you're a combo player and want to try out strange or crazy builds (Balerion-centric, Viserys + attachments, "Hill" decks like the one Dobbler played at Kubla, or other random stuff), Targ is proving to be hands-down the best house for that. I'm not sure this is the direction I would prefer, but at least it adds variety.

I see Greyjoy differently though. I don't think Greyjoy needed much more to make the choke build very competitive, or even a rush build. The 1-gold, 2-save location is *huge* in my opinion. That will allow GJ players to save Wendemyr, Iron Mines, and Risen from the Seas until they really need them. More importantly, this is card advantage, because it saves two cards for the cost of one card. With these additional saves, I can't imagine any GJ player fearing Valar or 2-claim military. Moreover, Baelor seems like a huge boon to GJ, especially when playing against Martell. Maybe Greyjoy didn't get as much as other houses, but they did get (in my opinion) exactly what they needed to boost their competitive builds. Too bad this location probably won't be available for GenCon though (given that it appears to be in chapter pack #5).

I'd really like to see Greyjoy get some better characters at the 1 and 2 gold cost. They have some really interesting unique and 4, and 5 gold characters, but they don't have the kind of cheap characters that Martell and Lannister have. I see Martell and Lannister as dominating the useful cheap character market.

What does GJ have? Boatswain is really nice, Ambitious Oarsman is OK in certain situations, you have the 2 cost Kingsmoot Hopeful and Sea Raiders but they prevent you from playing a lot of locations.

I also think that putting all these Warships at 2 gold makes them unplayable. Refurbished Hulk doesn't really help because it's limited and only helps you play locations - which means you need to run more locations to justify using it and that makes your deck unbalanced and extremely weak to Fleeing to the Wall and other location hate. Warships at 1 gold with abilities scaled to their cost is something I'd really like to see.

Twn2dn said:

That's true, I didn't think of it like that, probably b/c I've been working on GJ Holy builds for the past few weeks and I have more save than I know what to do with (Salt Wife, Wendamyr, Risen, Damphair, Tarle, Iron Mines).

More throughts:
Search and Detain is nice, especially if you can flip it outside of the Plot phase. One of my meta buddies runs the Maegaery that forces opponent to choose a new plot, he screws me up all the time with it, so Search and Detain would be a nice surprise against his Bara rush - bye bye Bobby, his dupe, and all his power. I don't really play Lannister, but I could see War of Attrition could finding its way into a lot of decks; the only real downside is the low gold, combo it with Lady Genna for some really powerful hand control, your opponent isn't even going to try to win your Intrigue challenge - Lannister could be the new Bara Asshai deck.

The Archmaester's Wrath in Martell seems a bit too strong to me. Given that their refugees are Maesters, the board control potential is brutal, a bunch of weenie Maesters can take out your opponent's entire board, then you can kneel Maesters of the Sun to save yours. If opponent doesn't Valar after that you still have board control, and if he/she does Valar, you just save again with Maesters or NE, maybe toss out Darkstar or marhsall cheap copies of The Conclave. Yea, its a Dominance Phase effect and can be Paper Shielded, but drawing into it first turn could be a game-winner.

Oh, and 1 random Kingsguard character? A pretty good one too, compared to most of the rest of them.

Skowza said:

Oh.. I get it now. (smacks forehead) TftN + DragonPit + even a single recursable Forever Burning = massive location hate.

Heh. Yep. Cool.

I thought I would like the new GJ 1 cost save location - but it sucks in set-up, and again doesn't protect vs. discard. I will jus keep running Iron Mines thanks