First, a confession.

Monday night, a tragedy so shocking the 2008 NY Giant's first round playoff loss and even the demise of the Witch-King by Merry, the hobbit, pale in comparison... My first league match ended in defeat by none other than Chris M aka Stag, the pseudo-lord.

His Summer Baratheons against my Winter Lannisters. Kneel effects once so effective against the stags are now neutered with the vigilant keyword. Stag jumps to a good start... 2 in house characters and 2 income locations versus my 2 traitors (scavengers of kings landing) and a street of steel. We both reveal uneasy truce as our plots; I marshal first and play a carrion bird, a winter raven and save 2 gold for the military challenge while Stag marshals all his gold into characters. Not realizing that my 2 gold to initiate a military challenge goes to stag's gold pool leads to disaster, as he uses his newly found gold to swing a military challenge back at me and subsequently gains a +1 character advantage that I can never quite overcome. Even with the winter -1 card draw disadvantage, Stag manages to top deck like a magic pro, finding maester cressen to knock off my milk, and later pulls a renly's courtier that neutralizes my castellan. His carrion bird eventually knocks off my white raven, and I'm forced to Valar a turn too early. Stag easily recovers, makes a summer's champion vigilant, and the game is over by plot 5.

With a first round loss I'm out of contention for storyline voting, but the rust has been scraped off and I'm ready for the rest of the tournament. My deck starts working better, I make fewer mistakes and I finish the night 3-1 with wins against bara (no agenda), targ summer, and greyjoy winter. Thankfully Paul, our meta's other lannister player pulls off a first place win against Jason, our new nightswatch, and honorably places his YEA votes for Tywin Lannister and Lann the Clever.

One thing is clear, in this semi-constructed/semi-draft format known as league play, the power curve is down. After 3 rounds, no one remained undefeated. However, there's still enough variability between houses and enough complexity with the raven mechanics to keep the game interesting for most of us.

So, if you're interested in making an evil deck for league play, here are a few things to keep in mind:

support of the kingdom, streets x 3, seas, in house chamber, in house gold location x 3, distraction, milk of the poppy, maester aemon, shae should go into every deck. Add bodyguard to the list if you have enough lords/ladies, jon snow/ghost combo if you're not military icon heavy (ie stark), seductive promise if you're not lannister, and lion's gate if you use the summer chapter pack.

unless you're running a fine tuned summer deck with good plot gold, your location ratio should be higher than what you're used to. And with limited draw options, adding more locations to your deck will get you that 4-5 card setup allowing you to draw into your deck faster. I ran 8 locations, a weaponsmith and a steward and was still struggling for gold (though it was a winter deck).

One of your chapter packs should be the song of summer or winds of winter. Baratheon and targ players should run summer (summer's champion/red warlock) while lannister players (who would otherwise have the gold/draw advantage) can pick winter (which includes the surprisingly useful lannister traitors) to meta against summer decks, or summer purely for the broken lion's gate. Running the summer or winter agenda itself isn't absolutely necessary, but running x3 carrion birds is.

Last but not least, trait mannipulation... old nan, rhaegar's harp, lion's gate. Nan and the harp go from useless eye-candy to becoming in-house must-haves because of the carrion birds and their ridiculous ability. Finding ways to recycle the harp (lady daenery's chambers or red warlock with barristan selmy) makes me nostalgic... ah, memories of the pre-rotation era....

Finally, everyone should consider abusing the zero cost, non unique lion's gate all they can before it gets errata'd. How long before people start getting sick of house lannister with x3 lion's gate, x3 carrion bird, and x3 you killed the wrong dwarf? Hopefully NYC will never get sick of it, bwahahaha.

Actually, despite your first round loss, you nearly made it into the final round; I had to use the third tie-breaker to separate you and Paul (Red Terror) for the second slot in the final round.

I agree with you on resources. I was using White Ravens to turn on Winter, which would mean one less gold counted, so even more so resources would potentially be scare. I think I had 12 cards in my deck that either provided gold or acted as cost reducers.

I don't think Nan was ever eye-candy; there is some valuable trait manipulation that can be done in standard; if you're playing Stark (so don't have to pay an out-of-house penalty) in standard I think there will often be good reasons to include her in your deck.

The Military storyline for Thorns Tywin certainly got people animated. People love him (these are people who generally kick puppies and steal lollipops from children ) or hate him. I think that is the marquee storyline for this season.

Is Lion's Gate in the chapter 3x? (I'll have to dig that out and check). You Killed the Wrong Dwarf certainly isn't in the Core Set more than once, although perhaps you are talking from the perspective of building LCG or standard decks and not League decks.

Sithlord Threadkiller said:

Actually the Giants lost in the Divisonal (2nd) round of the playoffs. They got knocked off by some team that couldn't beat the Cards...just sayin'