Hi all,

I've been wanting to run a Greyjoy deck for our meta melee and 2v2, but I'm having a tough time deciding on a theme for the deck. In our group I usually face Targ (my wife loves Dany, the Dragons, Jhogo, and has a pretty decent burn) and Bara decks. Yesterday afternoon we played a 2v2 and got destroyed. Our opponents, both Targ decks, controlled my Tully deck and my Martell partner was playing that house for the first time and couldn't really offer much support until the end. With so many dragons on the table, I was kicking myself for not having a Greyjoy deck with
Horn of Dragons ASoSilence ready.

I've looked through many of the decks posted here and at Cardgamedb.com and it seems that people are going with winter/choke strategy with Greyjoy in melee these days. Others are using the Holy strategy with some out of house cards. My problem stems from my card pool, however. I don't have any of the Ravens cycle, and thus no reliable way to change the seasons, nor access to the
Kings of Winter TWoW agenda.

Here are the chapter packs/expansions I have access to:

Core Set x2
Kings of the Sea
Kings of the Storm
Princes of the Sun
Lords of Winter
King's Landing
Queen of Dragons
Brotherhood without Banners

I have a couple of CPs from each of the following cycles:
A Clash of Arms
Defenders of the North
Secrets of Old Town

With this card pool, what would be the most effective way to develop a Greyjoy deck for melee and 2v2? Looking at the available themes, it seems I could go Raider, discard, holy, or warcrests. Any suggestions? I apologize if this should only be posted in the deck building forum. Moderators, please feel free to remove it if so.

Thanks,

porkins

With that limited cardpool I would say that you have three options for well working gj melee deck.

1) Unopposed. One of the well known gj melee builds which relies heavily on your ability to push from practicaly no power to 15 in one turn. Cards to use in this would be scouting vessel, intimidate, renown, saves, pretty much anything that is well costed that help to get challenges trough unopposed.

2) Holy. You really don't need too many OOH cards to run it if any just the keycharacters like aeron damphair, disciples, priests, maybe even prophets. In deck like this your main focus is on the holy characters and power of faith plot. You should also have bigger focus on saves as this deck relies heavily on that your opponents characters are going down, yours arent. Use valar offesively and add few cards that trigger from unopposed challenges and give you more power.

3) Save. This build basicly is a combination of the two first, but here your main focus is on characters that are good at gaining power and a really heavy number of saves. So the trick here is to play it like you would play baratheon, have dupes, have many additional saves and renown. This can result in a match where you are ignored for military challenges as they can see that you have many saves up as the other opponent on the other hand might have non so many times its just better to challenge someone else instead of you.

The problem with 3th one is that burn will destroy you so I would also use a very high resource curve on it with many reducers so that you can throw too much strength on the board for a melee deck to burn. Holy deck really doesn't care about burn too much as the characters are only bouncing a lot and the unopposed can take surprise victories out of thin air if your opponents aren't really careful. Tactic for dragons, use your valar very offesively, if you see a dragon or dany without a save try to get rid of it as fast as possible even with valar, if you get that dany out its most of the times worth it. Many things depends on what decks are on the board with you so try to adjust tactics accordingly.

For 2v2 I really cannot give advice as I have yet to play the format.

For melee I personally would never run a choke deck as it is one of the fastest ways with mill deck to gain everyones hatred. So with choke you have two problems, you cannot choke 3 persons and you are painting a huge target on your head for everyone. In 2v2 it might actually work better. With greyjoy you have the best ending plot that there is rise of the kraken and you should always use it as it allows you to most of the time be the first player on a turn when you are going for the victory and want to be first. Also it will make gaining power a lot more easier for that last run to victory.

Thanks for the advice, Ire!

I ended up building a deck hybrid unopposed deck with heavy saves and some discard tech. I tried to include as many characters with intimidate as possible, and then locations and that either boost or take away STR, or let me stand characters back up. I had a hard time deciding which Euron to use, but settled on the latest one to help with draw and discourage attacks. I'm also using the KOHH to pay the influence cost for the Salt Wives.

I gave the deck a test run last night and it did well vs. my wife's Targ Dragon deck. Granted, she had some bad luck with the draw, but I still went 3-1 for the night against her.

Thanks again for the advice!

scouting vesssels are the best warships for unopposed. you should run them 2x in the deck. all you need is 1 on the table to keep players from defending. if salt wives is the only card you have with an influence cost, i would recommend replacing them with another low cost character or a power grab event since tthis is a melee deck and not running an agenda. the lack of setup from kothh is too costly for gj who has lots of cheap characters and locations allowing for good card advantage on setup, especially compared to targ.

Ire said:

Another good thing to do with Holy decks is run Driftwood Crown from Mountains of the Moon. That will give Balon an intrigue icon _and_ not kneel for the rounds with Power of Faith. It's also good for the other renown characters like Euron & Asha... or someone who gets it with Longclaw or Captain of the Iron Fleet.