A few months ago I first saw a preview for the HBO miniseries, a Game of Thrones. It looked epic. Throw in Sean Bean and Peter Dinklage and I was ready to watch. I had no idea about the books or the world, but was supremely interested in the show. As it went on I continued to grow more impressed with the story and the world surrounding it.

A month or two later and I am demoing the Lord of the Rings LCG at GenCon. When I got home I ordered both it and the Game of Thrones core set online. As soon as they came in my group and I were playing Lord of the Rings. After nearly a month of a Game of Thrones sitting in my office, I took it to game night and we played... Whoa.

Absolutely love the game and am now considering picking up the books, because I don't want to wait on the show to continue to see what happens next and to get my hands on more cards! Now, deciding what to get as far as the books go is easy. But deciding where to go next with the card game... not so easy. I've known about GoT for a long time just hadn't ever played. I know it has a history as a ccg turned lcg and I know the basis history of the game. My question is this, for a player who just bought the core set and wants to get to the point where he can be competitive, what do you buy next?

I know new chapters packs come out regularly, but are there some old ones that are really just great ones to pick up early on (and then you can fish through the rest if you decide you need cards from them)? Do you buy the other deluxe expansions? Are there maybe 6-10 chapter packs that are really great to start with?

Thanks in advance for your advice.

Zach

Welcome. First and foremost, you probably want to buy yourself a second Core Set. That's pretty much the universally agreed-upon best second purchase for this game. With one Core Set, you're playing with truncated 45-card decks, and stuck with some pretty ho-hum cards. A second Core Set lets you double up on everything. Two copies of all the plots, double all the resource locations, double all of the good characters. With two Core Sets, you won't be building competitive decks just yet, but they will be much stronger than the 45-card decks you start with.

As for chapter packs, there is one absolute clear favorite: Refugees of War. Absolutely pick that pack up as soon as you can. There're some other good cards in the pack, but what you want are the refugees, zero-cost, 2-str, 2-icon characters for every house (and a 1-str, 3-icon neutral). The chapter pack contains 3 of each kind of refugee, and they will go into virtually every deck you ever build.

The Deluxe Expansions are also great purchases. They will obviously principally help build stronger decks for one specific House, but there's usually a number of strong neutral cards, and most of the plots that come in the Deluxe Expansions are quite good in a variety of decks.

After that, you can choose specific chapter packs for specific houses, like I found the second pack in KL to be exceptional for martel with lost oasis, targ with tears of lys, lannister with the shadows cersei, and condemned by the council

Getting a sense of what's in the various chapter packs and Deluxe Expansions is an absolutely fantastic way to figure out what to get next.

There are a couple sites out there with great resources. The simplest and most straightforward to use is agot.dblr.com, it's an excellent search engine for the game.

Not everyone's a fan of it, but I think agotcards.org is the best resource the game has. The major shortcoming of it is that it requires registration to use, but if you don't mind that, getting in there and searching through the cards will do wonders. Every single card in the LCG-pool has a rating, and most of them have some excellent discussion going on.

Finally, there's cardgamedb.com, which I feel is the weakest site in some respects, and the strongest in some. They have a search function, but it's not quite as easy to use as Dabbler; it does ratings and comments, but it's nowhere near as extensive as what you can get from AGOTcards; and they have forums, but it's not as active as here. What they do have is the best deck building tool online, which you probably won't need until you've picked up more cards.

A quick caveat on chapter packs: when you can, make sure to get packs printed with 60 cards to a pack. All chapter packs have 20 individual cards; initially these were printed out with 10 cards in a pack being singles, 10 cards being triplicates. Starting with the Brotherhood without Banners cycle, all cards started getting printed in triplicate. That cycle, and the most recent, The Secrets of Oldtown, are the only ones available right now in 60 packs, but later this month the King's Landing cycle is getting reprinted in 60 packs, and The Defenders of the North cycle should follow probably in November or December. The first two cycles, A Clash of Arms and A Time of Ravens, haven't had a reprint announced, though some of those packs are definitely still worth getting in the 40-card packs, including the Refugees of War pack I was hocking to you earlier.

I'd seriously suggest to read books first because there are many minor spoilers and some major ones on the cards.

This board really needs a sticky function. I think the "I just bought the core set, what next?" is the most common question, at least since the HBO show.

HoyaLawya said:

haha! Nice. Good idea. Or, they could just include a sleeve in the core-set box with that exact topic discussed.

although they'd have to say, "Buy another core set" which could lead to an infinite loop in the more algorithmically minded, lol