I'm aiming to "limit" (most likely for no more than a year if that...) my AGOT collection to:

• 1 (possibly 2) Core Set(s)
• All deluxe expansions of Core Houses
• Full cycle Defenders of the North (already have the first two, waiting for the reprints of the others)
• Full cycle Brotherhood without Banners

Now, I figure those will give me good grounding for general deckbuilding but how will I fare with just those cards if I want to get "serious" with tournaments and whatnot? I've never actually taken part in leagues or tournaments of any card/board/miniature games before and those maester builds are terrifying from what I hear. Will I be equipped?

Also, will the Cycles give me enough to try to throw together a Greyjoy or Martell deck without their deluxe expansions?

Any thoughts are hugely welcome..

As a vaguely related footnote, I was browsing Dabbler looking at Targ DotN goodies and noticed a unique character called Stalwart Shield. When I wiki'd him, I discovered he was only introduced in Dance with Dragons (I've only just finished Feast )... How did the cardmakers know about him back when they made the card?!?

Mylo said:

(1) Unlikely, to be honest. For starters, you won't have those houses' basic resource-generating locations. Second, you'll lack most of their major unique characters (No Asha Greyjoy, Victarion Greyjoy, Balon Greyjoy, The Red Viper, Ellaria Sand, Arianne Martell, Doran Martell... etc, etc). While you might be able to cobble something together (and use proxies to stand in for the basic resource cards) I'd advise that skipping KotS and PotS is a bit of false economy.

To my mind, the better solution would be to pick them both up, then to either skip the deluxe expansions for the Core Set houses (giving each house a relatively equal basic cardpool) or to drop one of the cycles of expansions (in my personal opinion DotN is the weaker of the two cycles indicated). If that leaves you with spare cash in your budget then packs like 'Refugees of War' (particularly that one), 'Ancient Enemies, and 'Sacred Bonds' are all fantastic individual packs that each add high quality standalone cards to all six houses.

(2) Our man Stalwart Shield appeared in the preview Daenerys chapter from DwD that was released years before the book itself. In a tribute to GRRM's painstaking attention to detail, he got a card designed and printed before the rest of the book hit shelves.

(3) I'm going to leave the tournament tips for people who are actually good at tournaments (i.e. not me). I suspect that 2 Cores, PotS and the Brotherhood + DotN cycles might get you close to a killer Martell Brotherhood deck, but I'll let the people who know chime in on that.