Hey i have never made a shadow deck using the Agenda, im trying to build one right now with Targaryen, but does anyone have a template for how many shadows cards i should be including? how many is too many? how many is too few?

thanks in advance

In general, I'd say you want enough shadow cards to make your agenda worthwhile. I'd put that number at somewhere between 10-15 cards with the shadow crest and perhaps some other cards that support that mechanic (such as twilight market, kingdom of shadows, etc). I'm assuming you are shooting for a 60 card deck size for this advice.

I think if you use this as a base, you will be able to tweak from there until you find a balance for how you want your deck to run.

I'd say 15 is about right. In terms of shadows cards, I would start cutting them (Like any card) when you find yourself not bringing them out of shadows in lieu of other better cards.

Also, if you care about things like "Do x every time a card comes out of shadows" then play cards like venemous blade and syrio forel that recycle and go in and out of shadows repeatedly.

Targ may be able to get away with a few more Shadows cards now that Shadow Seer is available...

I've never built a Targ CoS deck, but my Stark Winter CoS deck has 26 shadow cards. The Stark deck that won the French nationals had 20. My experience with very shadows-heavy Stark CoS decks is generally positive, but you're a bit in trouble if the opponent runs King's Law and/or Fleeing to the Wall. Still it's great fun going all out with Shadows, if quite demanding on your concentration and difficult to play properly. I think Stark is probably the best house to run CoS out of (Hidden Chambers is huge, plot circulation with Bran is evil, you have surprisingly many KL locations, and you can run Frozen Solid). I guess Lanni would be a good choice because of their in-house kneeling shenanigans and TotRK, and Martell, too, because everything is good out of Martell. Can't say much about Targ, haven't played it; played against it once and wasn't impressed, but one game doesn't tell you much.

I've been playing a Targ CoS deck recently, I run about 24 shadow cards and I must say it works pretty good so far. It's slow, but you get a lot of control cards and can burn most annoying characters.

Well, I'd say if you aren't running Summer for draw then your options in Targ are pretty limited, so base it on that. You'll be stuck with in-House draw unless you plan to use PC as your restricted card, so you'll need 2-3x KL and lots of cards to set it off.

Skowza said:

I was planning on using PC as my restricted

Thanks for the input everyone, i ended up with about 20 shadow cards and hopefully can utilize shadow seer well enough to get one card in a challenge phase, also im a huge fan or warlock of qarth, even though it is an ally

Running a shadows deck means that to really make use of the agenda there are a few OOH shadows cards that are a must have in the deck. Here is the basics of how to start the deck...

OOH must haves with quantity-

Black Cells(3)

Alchemist's Guild Hall(1)

Qyburn(1)

Tyrion Lannister(1)

Venemous Blade(2-3)

Then there are other must have cards -

Varys(1)

King's Landing(2-3)

Twilight Market(1-2)

Kingdom of Shadows(3)

Then you have the Targaryen cards that work the best

King's Landing Assassin(3)

Dragonpit(3)

Warlock of Qarth(2)

Shadow Seer(3)

Aegon's Legacy(2-3) I'm not as sold on this one since it is a Dominance card only but you can probably get a lot of burn out of it in one turn.

Shadows decks can be very gold intensive so you will need many cheap characters to compensate and a lot of gold production. Card draw in a deck like this will pretty much be limited to King's Landing and Jhogo from the Brotherhood cycle. Then again you could forgo the Venemous Blades and run Pyromancer's Caches.

Hope this helps.

Actually helped a lot forgot about the black cells

But i put 3 copies of Tyrion in, any reason for just 1?

Well...I just figured that only running one copy would allow you to have more room for some cheaper characters that you could run and take out some of the stress of the shadows gold intensity. I know Tyrion is the mack daddy of shadows but if you are putting in black cells and guild halls then you should be shutting down at least 2-3 characters per turn not to mention the ones you will be killing for claim and burning down with flame kissed or dragon skulls and you should be able to win without him. You certainly could run three. There is nothing wrong with that and it would make him **** near immortal. I say try it out and see how it works with 3 and drop it down if you think it's clogging the deck.

~Nathan