Wildlings were overpowered. I admit that. But, after splitting the "The North" agendas, and the ban of 'Blood of the first men', Wildings have been all but taken out of the game (Except for the occasional Gilly or Sixskins). I am, or would be, a Wildling loyalist, because I follow their cause more than any. I miss them

Would it be all so bad if they just put 'Blood of the first men' on the "Restricted" list? Would Wildling then be playable without swarming the Joust scene? Any thoughts on this?

anavasoothed said:

I would take "Blood of the first men" from the banned list and errata it so that it can only be played with the neutral house faction. I think the most powerful wildling builds had cheap inhouse solutions like burning in the sand or frozen solid together with cheap but powerful wildling charachters. Of course such a step needs a little bit playtesting.

sorry for the double post.

Old Ben said:

Not to step on your toes, really, but as opposed to what? An agenda that allows the player to gain 1-4 gold in the first turn if he wins 1-3 challenges (in average), and that, on top of it gives the players a semi-permanent solution to ... well... characters and attachments, the things that actually make you win the game? (In case you missed my point, I'm speaking of The Maester's path.)

Actually, now that you brought the real issues of Blood of the First Men to light a small comparison between it and The Maester's Path is in order, I think:

- both of them can be played in any house;

- they both require a dedicated, well-thought out deck for them to work;

- they both give a significant gold advantage to it's controler with almost insignificant drawback - albeit with the Maester's Path you probably have to be a *little* carefull;

Can anyone point me a reason why is the Maester's Path not banned from play? A real reason, please; I don't count "not everyone likes to play with Maesters" or "playing well with Maesters is much more difficult than with Wildlings" as reasons. Flavor and player's compared skill sets are moot points (IMO, of course) when deciding to ban/restrict/errata a card.

@tovra.pt: So your point is that the maester agenda is the wildling agenda reborn?

I haven´t played against a lot of maester decks so i could primaly judge on my own deck building experiences. From that point you could be right that the maesters agenda provides a too big bonus without having a real drawback (just as long as you don´t pack 12 chains under agenda). On the otehr hand i think the agenda and the necessary cards have been released only for a few weeks. So we haven´t see much counter strategies yet. Also the enviroment might quickly change if e.g. the Lannister box holds a repint of Queen Cersei´s command.

I would like to see two revisions to the North agenda in general.

1. You may mix any of the 3 North agendas together instead of the current version of you can only use the two wildlings or the three night watch agendas.

2. Blood of the First Men should be changed from banned to restricted (along with The Wildling Horde becoming restricted)

anavasoothed said:

Wildings are still good, they are just toned down. Getting a 9 STR deadly stealth army for 5 gold instead of 2 gold is still really good, just not insane good. Here's a wildling deck I built that I have had great success with: http://www.agotcards.org/deck/v/1597

I did see a wildling stark deck that I liked rather well at GenCon. But it was mostly stark with wildling accessory. There may be a scene for them still. But I'd at least like a few more wildling cards. Perhaps some of the other named dudes like Rattleshirt or something. The new book presents some new wildling material as well. Even with the current restrictions in place, I could live with that.

I used to run them out of greyjoy as well, but I might do Stark or even Martell now. I'll give it a shot.

My question is have you tried runing them without Blood of the First Men? I've seen some very annoying and strong builds. IT does require actual thought than just grabbing the armies and and unique characters and filling everyhting else in with the best cards from whatever house you are playing now. This is a Good Thing. #MarthaStewart

Old Ben said:

Oh, no, although I can see why you assumed it - the decks they lead to are quite different in strategy; Wildlings are brute force, while Maester's (the more common builds, not talking about Maestered Bob Rush) are all about finesse. My goal in the above post was to understand why exactly isn't Blood of the First Men (BotFM) on the same situation that The Maester's Path (TMP) - banned , restricted or errata'ed (sorry about the spelling). If the logic behind the banning of BotFM is that the bonus resource is too much of an advantage when paired with the other two Wildling Agendas, I don't really understand the difference between it and TMP.

Actually one could argue that TMP is as good as a reducer while there are attachments on it. The thing is, it has the potential to be much faster AND is a real and virtual card advantage engine by its own - be it by the cards that puts into play that don't come from your hand or by the different and repeatable effects those cards have. It's a big plus. Wether or not this is reason for altering whatever aspect of the TMP the designer's see fit to do, it's a bonus similar (and some may be, given the proper dettachment from a year ago when the metagame everywhere was wildlings, inclined to say a step better) to BotFM.

If BotFM were to be restricted (simply unbanning it would be too much, I think) Wildlings would probably be tier 1, instead of the tier 1.5 that they appear to be now. Not they are not strong (they are better than most of the sub-themes of each house - House Dayne?), it's just that - obviously - they would be much better. Even so, without the draw power of Val they would be toned down from what they once were. Add to that the fact that decks ARE stronger now across the board (that is to say practically all Houses), a repetition of what happened a year ago would be unlikely, probably.

But the designers probably know best, and it's their plans for the game that count, not my vision, limited by the here and now. *shrug*

Penfold said:

I have. Stark Wildlings with Massey's Hook OOH, Jeyne Westerling, Robb King and Mance Rayder, and Pyromancer's Cache. Maybe i went wrongly with the direction, or maybe I'm just a poor player, but I only saw moderate success (as opposed to my Maester's Martell, for example). The deck is awesome in the Hand of the King format, but outside it is... lackluster.

I retract my request. As is, Wildling Martell is fun and cool and effective. Woot! I'm back baby! Yeah!

Good to hear that! Maybe I should try switching the house then Although I'd figure you'd have a bit of a problem because with Stark you gain 2 more Wildling Characters... but maybe that doesn't make a difference.

I'll try it out and see what goes from there

I played the Targaryen Wildling deck at Gencon. I liked it but have since abandoned it for Targ Maesters. How fitting for the discussion at hand.

I also played the fellow with the Stark Wildling deck at Gencon in the Joust tourney and "raped" him hard (His words, not mine . But then I went up against 2 Martell summer decks and a Martell Brotherhood and just fell flat. Then beat a girl playing Targ Dragons and dropped at 2-3. Of course it doesn't help when you draw the first 28 cards of your deck vs Longclaw(playing Martell summer) and 14 of them are locations. Oh well.

I knew I wasn't going to beat Martell Summer with that deck but I still played it anyway. I think in the current environment that Wildlings are a little too cost intensive. With cards like A game of Cyvasse and Ghaston Grey it is just not something that is a smart play right now IMO. Against anything else you'll probably do OK. Greyjoy choke mght also be a bad matchup. Maesters are just a better choice. They are so cost efficient and the chains are amazing toolbox control.

tovra.pt said:

I hope they don't ban TMP. I think it's a great agenda. Maybe a bit to powerful? Yes. But I would rather like to see some love for the older agendas or some really powerful new agendas than banning or nerfing the essence of the current cycle to death.

They could nerf The Maester's Path by making it so you can only put the Chains on Printed Maester cards. I think that would be much better than a straight ban. OR it could be the first Restricted Agenda.

sWhiteboy said:

Or you could just ban The Apprentice Collar...

FATMOUSE said:

I can´t see why everyone seems to be so eager about banning/restricting/etc the apprentice collar. At least it´s an attachment and there a dozen ways to remove an attachment.

FATMOUSE said:

I like this idea.

Old Ben said:

It's not that I'm eager (can't speak for others), it just solves all the problems/concerns everyone has brought up with The Maester's Path and Chains that are going to have to be addressed at some point anyway.

It doesn't take long to see that Maester's Path can easily be broken.

Example:

1. Play Robert Baratheon (TTotH), then win two challneges.

2. Add a Apprentice Collar and Gold Link to Robert (from your Agenda).

3. During the turn 2 Marshaling phase, you can have, at least, 8 additional gold.

You can do a similar thing with Threat from the North and Lead Link. This essentially gives you a one-sided Valar Morghulis.

I think people are getting their panties in a bunch over nothing. Maester decks are hardly as overpowered as Wildlings were last year. Yes Maesters are very strong and consistent but hardly unbeatable like wildlings were. If the Maester Bob deck had of went 10-0 at Gencon then sure maybe I could understand this thread. Or if more than 30-40% of the field were running Maester decks then there may have been a problem(here's looking at you Martell Summer). But that didn't happen and the tournament champion deck did lose twice in swiss so it's not unbeatable. Is it a very strong deck and incredibly annoying? YES. Does Apprentice Collar need to be banned? NO. Stop whining.

The Maester decks are all very fragile. They are based around Voltroning a character up with tons of attachments and hoping that said character does not get removed from play somehow or in the Maester Bob deck's case, the Apprentice collar does not get discarded. When all those chains go away and you have to spend valuable time and resources getting those chain attachments back(if you can) and it greatly reduces the effectiveness of the deck. The Bob deck is probably the most resilient of all the Maester decks since it can be so hard to get Robert off the table with the tons of dupes and Eddard Stark being in play. Not to mention the two turns of Power of Blood. So I can see the complaints aren't completely without warrant, but they are still a little prematire at the moment.

I think if ANYTHING needs to be done I would say that you errata the agenda to say that you may only put the chains on a character with the printed Maester trait. That I would be OK with as it would be in line with what I think a good agenda should be. It would reduce the power of TMP decks just enough to still be top tier but not an auto include if you have no other agenda.

I like Maesters as they are though, so my vote goes to leaving it alone.

FATMOUSE said:

See, it seems to me be that people are not even looking for in-game solutions to deal with the apprentice collar, or Robert, or the maesters path. They had the experience that Bara maesters makes a strong deck and start to, *pardon me* "cry" for banning, restricting etc.. Most of the cards in the combo are not even out for more than 2 months now and it looks like it´s a little bit too early to ask for errata/bann/restriction. Just take 5-6 months time and let´s see if it´s really a problem. I guess people will be more prepared for the deck type at the next tournaments.

~Obviously Martell summer decks had a problem with the Bara maester deck, but that´s not a sad thing in my book. ;-)

If they need to nerf the agenda/chains, I could live with the apprentice collar having the printed condition trait as errata.

FATMOUSE said: