berto said:

Even the "best" case scenario where you don't have it, where you've thinned your deck by 1 Obara, 12 card draw, 1 viper removed from deck and have an influence providing location (not a very likely scenario). 46 cards remaining, 3 of which are your event. Chance to draw one in the 5 cards, ~30%. Chance to draw one in 2 cards ~12.5% Chance of having the flea bottom scavenger to draw those extra 3 cards on turn 2 ~12%. Weighted chance to draw a "No Use for Grief" on turn 2 = 14.6%.

Overall chance (with aforementioned assumptions) to have No Use for Grief by turn 2 (cumulative) = 66%. Of course, there's no guarantee you still have your Red Viper in play then...

Who will keep red viper on the board without event card? BTW how did you calculate chances ?

berto said:

Riders of the Red fork can be chosen and put into play as well?

SummerSeaCaptain said:

Indeed.

SummerSeaCaptain said:

Yes, they can be chosen.

Use the Nuclear Viper, so when he dies, everyone of your opponents characters gets wiped out as well. Resist putting any major unique Sand Sankes down until afte rthis. Play Narrow Escape or Retreat to add to the shenanigens. You could also play no-kneel viper with some piddly claim soak taste for blood x3 and put them in a position where they are forced to kill him for fear of you using him to win the game.

All said and done a cool deck, but as of yet no one has been able to prove it is a competitive deck.

-Istaril said:

I'm quite good in math especially in probability area. Counting chances is quite difficult as we have several different options which should be considered. Can you send or show me your calculation. I will check if they are valid and you take all options into account.

You've drawn some flack over issues of tone in the last few days, Berto. In this case, I feel you're accusing me of incompetence because the math is "complicated" - if that's the case, I'd rather see you calculate the probabilities and, if your numbers disagree with mine, then you definitely have reason to doubt mine and we can go over them. If what you're looking for is an explanation as to my method, see the previous post (or, in one word, hypergeometric distribution).

Regardless of your intent (misconstrued or otherwise), I'll chose to assume it was benign and leave the above as a cautionary wording as you should try to be more tactful on the boards. I have to re-create my work, so I'll do it throughout the day when I have time.

Assumption: You'll only mulligan if you don't have "No use for greif" (Intuition says this is clearly the best strategy)

Part 1: The chance of having an influence provider (If you have 11 in your deck, as my deck does).

The chance of NOT drawing an influence providing location in the 7 cards you'll have after any set of mulligans, plus the two cards you draw (parameters N=0,Z=9,X=11,Y=60) is 13.8%. Errors introduced by assumption: If you have an Obara Sand mulligan, Y would be 59.

The chance of NOT drawing a flea bottom scavenger OR Red Viper (Allowing you to summon-season a flea-bottom) in the first 7 cards (Z=7,X=6) is 45.8%
The chance of NOT drawing a flea bottom scavenger in the next 2 cards (Draw) (Z=2,X=3,Y=52) is 88.6%. Error: again, if O.S.Mulligan, Y=51.
The cumulative chance of having a flea-bottom scavenger in your hand after draw is (1-0.480188)= 51.9812

The chance of not drawing an influence providing location in the three cards provided by Flea Bottom Scavenger (N=0,Z=3,X=11,Y=50) = 46.6276%. Error: again, if O.S. Mulligan Y=49

Weighted totals 48.0188% chance of having a 13.8% chance of not drawing an influence provider. 51.9812% chance of having a 6.434602% chance of not drawing an influence provider.

Therefore the total chance of NOT having an influence provider after your 9-12 card draw, from a deck that has been thinned by one thanks to summoning season is 10.0408%, and the chance of having at least 1 influence provider is 89.9592%.

In reality, if you have both a flea bottom scavenger AND a red viper, you could use Summoning season to search a paramour.

Part 2: No use for a hand with No Use for Greif

Chance of at least one NUFG in 1st 7 cards = 31.543%
Chance of at least one NUFG in 2nd 7 cards (cumulative) = 53.1363
Chance of at least one Obara in 2nd hand 7 cards = 31.543%
Chance of at least one NUFG in 3rd hand 7 cards (cumulative) = 63.8773 (Y=59)

Weighted chance of at least 1 NYFG NUFG after all mulligans: 56.5244%


Part 3: Please Draw a NUFG

Plot phase searches for a Red viper if you have none, a Flea Bottom Scavenger if you have a Red Viper, a random character to thin the deck if you have both. We can essentially use the same calculations as in Part 1.

Thanks a lot for this info. I will look through it ASAP. and let u know if I found something.

It occured to me I did actually make a mistake; a summoning season for the viper puts you at 6g, which allows you to get the viper (5) but not play Flea Bottom Scavenger. If you happen to have a Sunset Sea AND another influence providing location/character, then you can get away with it, but the flea bottom scavengers are actually far from integral to the deck.

Guys, guys, you 're forgetting a very important thing: the KL Viper's ability cannot be used when running an agenda. Thus, forget the easy 2 influence from the Brotherhood agenda. Now, you probably need something like The Red Keep to pay for No Use For Grief, which probably means that you need Building Season as well (and imagine an instance where your opponent would pick Aegon's Hill! The horror!). Now, excuse me but a deck based on a combo which requires to:

1. Find the event,

2. Find the influence,

3. Find the Viper,

4. Kill the Viper,

5. Run at least three copies each of Nymeria, Obella and Tyene Sand -9 cards that is- that YOU CANNOT PLAY till you have 3 influence and the Viper on the table, as well as the event in hand,

6. Not run an agenda, a bad idea if you play Martell,

is extremely fragile in my book. Fun, yes, but only for casual play. Such a deck would be obliterated in a competitive environment.

I consider the Valar plot + the Brotherhood agenda + the PotS Viper to be infinitely more trustworthy. But then, you have to carefully judge your choices: is it worth it to kill the Viper for his bastards?

Yeah, but nobody needs the KL Viper's effect for anything, do they?

Ratatoskr said:

I was referring to the wipe-the-board-and-then-put-the-snakes-in idea.

Like I said, much preferable if you went for Valar.

Serazu said:

My memory of the details of this thread is a bit shaky, but has anybody really proposed using the effect of KL Viper for this? Because that would really be too fragile, I totally agree with you there. IIRC, the argument was mostly about if it's worth building a deck around No Use For Grief. The general consensus was, if memory serves, that the combo is too fragile, with berto as the very vocal minority claiming that the combo is very viable and seriously imba. But I think even he always based his assessment on using PotS Viper and KotHH. I personally am among those who believe the combo is too fragile to be viable competitively, even with KotHH, but if you can pull it off, it's totally worth killing the viper for three non-unique and five double-duped unique tricons with Stealth, Deadly and Vengeful. No contest.

Yeah, sure. The thing is, of course, that, if your opponent hasn't played his Valar yet, it wouldn't be such a good idea to put non-unique snakes on the board. I think this combo would be a nice SECONDARY addition to a casual Martell deck. Just use the three aforementioned snakes x 3 plus the event x 3. The rest of your deck being as casual as it can be. I do not consider a Martell deck mainly dependent on the snakes combo to be much competitive. In casual play, perhaps.

Just in case anyone still cares; my math was wrong again, in that while the odds of drawing the flea bottom scavengers were fine, you actually can't play them unless you got a sunset sea (or drew both a Viper and a Flea Bottom Scavenger, and played a 5g plot), as your summoning season (4g) + agenda (2g) is tied up for 5 to play Red Viper.

If you lose an intrigue challenge that turn, you have a chance at losing NUFG. If your opponent plays Fury of the Stag, your viper is stolen (and can be kept alive by Power of Blood). If your opponent plays Power of Blood, you can't pull off the combo. The list goes on. Let's not even consider a Viper who isn't immune to events/character abilities.

The deck can work, and the sandsnakes aren't entirely useless even if the combo fails, but yeah - as we've pretty much all stated, it's not competitive.

Personally, I can't wait to see how Berto gets on with this build at Stahleck.

In fact, Berto, I'd like to take this opportunity to ask you to promise to write up a short tourney report of your time at Stahleck.

Regardless of how you place in the rankings, I know that you'll be taking a genuinely interesting (and different ) deck with you. I'm fascinated to hear how you get on.

... and then suddenly A Nest of Vipers and Dorea Sand existed.

By my reckoning, those cards (Everybody gets renown! To the Spears on a stick!) take this combo from ' improbable and not that great when you do ' into ' still really unlikely, but completely insane in the rare event that you get it just so '.

Allow me to put my hand up and admit to moving from the " Har de har, that'll never work. Lolz ! " camp, and into the " If you sacrifice a couple of goats to satan, and then get lucky, this could possibly win a few games for you " camp.

My gf & I have been playing for about 6 months now, she has stuck with the stark deck from the beginning, while i have tried most of the others. I have used the No Use for Grief build several times and due to some minor plot issues (we only have one core set and several people want the same ones from it) I have found the build to be competitive dispite only pulling the combo off once. Though my gf now hates the Sand Snakes & is very vocal about people killing them once they enter play individually or together.

Forgot to mention I would also like to see a write up of how this deck performs at a tornament

Capussa said:

It's a complete no hoper.

A good build with a good pilot will probably pull off a couple of omghax wins in early rounds when facing off against decks that can't/don't disrupt it. But sooner or later they'll inevitably crunch into cancel effects like The Hand's Judgement / discard effects like Confession / unfortunate intrigue challenges that yank the copy of No Use For Grief that they were holding onto. Once that happens the deck is just a pedestrian Martell deck that isn't running a finely tuned suite of characters and events, which makes it dead meat versus decent tournament builds.

Long story short, it's not consistent enough to win a serious tournament; but it could well pull off a handful of hilarious wins.

It's not technically under "No Use" but it's for use with, so I thought I'd not start a separate thread (which I'm sure means I will be chided for not doing so):

If I have multiple copies of Obara Sand * in my hand after my first mulligan, can I remove more than one of them before my 2nd mulligan? Or is the text such that removing the first copy precludes activating any additional copies?

*If Obara Sand is in your hand after your first mulligan, before you place any setup cards you may remove her from the game and take an additional mulligan.