There were a lot of decks at GenCon this year, with a surprising (in my opinion) amount of diversity. I thought we might be able to do a small introspective while people work to publish their 2c1c episodes and their tournament reports.

What cards did you expect to see that you did not? What cards did you not expect to see, but turned out to be surprisingly effective? What cards would you say were the most effective cards in the tournament, and why?

For my votes, even though I didn't go, I would say that the card that didn't show up as much as I expected would be Dragon Lore. No one has posted a real TR yet, but I would have expected someone to post a story of, "Then he kept recurring Balerion on me!" and that just doesn't seem to have happened. As for cards I did not expect as much and the most effective card vote both go to Ghaston Grey. While I've seen it in action, I've never really been impressed by it until Erick played me with it. It sounds as if it was one of the money cards of the tournament. One reason for this could be the fact that it is somehow not limited to once per turn (or kneel to use). This means you could potentially remove four characters from challenges (Viper, Arianne, Edric, Doran), and use Martell's other tricks to make other challenges ineffective. Another card I did not expect to see but was pleasantly surprised to hear about was Red Vengeance. I talked with Dobbler about this briefly, and the card is just super-effective, and uncancellable with the standard Paper Shield/He Calls it Thinking combos.

Tin Link just makes attachments even worse then they already are. So Dragon Lore would get hit by tin link.

Ghaston Gray was fantastic because it could deal with maesters...even with Leyton on the table. It's not important that the location doesn't kneel (doing it twice would be a lot and I never did that) what makes it even better is the noble doesn't have to kneel. So you can cyvasse, attack, defend, etc...with the noble and then bounce them. Once you hit 3 reducers and Edric in hand...it would be a tough game to lose.

Ghaston Grey Was definitely money.

Greg made REALLY good use of Narrow Escape, and from what he said, it was money ALL day. Combo'd with vipers bannermen, ouch.

Using copper link to make tin link a raven, then using tin link to discard a season was money too.

Frozen moat to blank dragons was hot too. Kraus wouldn't likely have made it to the final melee table without it (or 3 of them, lol).

Rhaenerys' Hill won me at least 3 joust games. Of course, Hatchling Feast was amazing too. Of the 7 joust games I played, I regrouped the hill 3 times and feast twice. So I guess you could say that Regroup was an MVP as well.

And for the record, it turns out Regroup + Rhaenerys' Hill is a pretty mean combo.

Lead Link was probably the "money" card in my deck. With Robert + Threat from the North I generally got to wipe your board at no loss to myself. I pulled this off in all but my two losses in the preliminary rounds.

I wound up using Bronze Link + Pale Steel Link repeatedly to protect my intrigue icons on Robert as well, it saved my from cyvasse at least a few times.

Kings of the Sea Viserys was my MVP in melee. I won 3 of 4 games with 7+ attachments on him, including one game where I marshalled 17 gold worth of cards to grab the win.

That being said, I was matched against TWO treaty decks. Talk about a card you REALLY don't want to see when your gimmick deck relies on viserys to win.

Intentionally Anonymous said:

That's freakishly clever. Smells like a Dobbler up in this thread.

Burned and Pillage was tough coming from the Greyjoy Winter side of things. It was impossible coming from Bruno when he had craghorn, murremure, and the like stealing any chance I had to marshall a single card.

My money cards in my Joust deck:

Red Vengeance

Narrow Escape

Knights of the Hollow Hill

Reinforcement events that became stealthy, renown characters

Ghaston Grey

Parting Blow

Southron Scavengers

Dobbler said:

You gonna post up that decklist for all to see? I always love to see what kind of crazy shenanigans that you come up with Greg. It's like Christmas morning all over again.

Red Vengeance

and Inn of the Kneeling Man, which I only added to the deck when I counted and realized I was @ 58 cards 20 mins before leaving the hotel. This was invaluable when I actually got it out.