Greetings,

I have just started on this game and we play exclusively melee. What I was looking for was a general theory of deck building for melee. I've seen the post from someone about joust that was very interesting but was not helping unfortunately. To help you a bit answer my question here are a few topics I'm looking for:

-Number of cards: should it stay always at 60, can you sometimes go over, what are the exceptions, etc.

-Card types ratio: what's the usual ration of characters, gold production and other cards you often see in decks

-Unique cards: how many of each usually?

-Gold cost: low vs high, the cons and pros of each, etc.

That's about it for now. Thanks for your help

JN

-You always want to trim your deck down to 60 cards, or as close as you can get (it can be difficult deciding what should go). That way you have a better chance of drawing your more powerful cards.

-The rule of thumb is 30 characters, 15 locations (9-10 of which are resource locations), and 15 events/attachments. Events and attachments are grouped up because you can't use them in setup so you don't want too many. This can vary a lot between decks though.

-You can include as many different uniques as you want, but including duplicates can be dangerous. If that character dies those dupes are useless, and in melee you have 3 other players looking to kill your characters. So only include dupes if the character is very important to the deck or you have ways to save it.

-Gold cost is tricky, and depends how many resource locations you have and how much gold is on your plots. Low cost characters are better in setup and to choose for claim but high cost ones are obviously more powerful. I would say at least half of your characters should be 2 cost or less.

Meestho said:

God i love Melee, i agree with most everything Alando said about deck building, but it really depends on what type of melee deck your building, are you trying to quickly get 15 power while your opponents has no idea what happened or establish board control and use manipulation to pick on the bones of the weak until you hit 15? how many other players are going to be in the game and do you all play different houses or does each of you play your own house?

melee games can go long so i tend to value repeatable reducers like fiefdoms and the streets over the discardable seas, i would build the deck for resets, assume 3 valars will be in the game so you might be looking at a lot of board wipes and in melee higher costed cards become targets for your opponents so while putting out Euron Crows Eye might help you win some challeneges it will also make you a target so make sure you have enough "weenies" to back him up

These days my ratio's look like this

30 characters (+-2)
2 In house attachments (mainly to have something/anything for winter stores, any more than this would have to be vital to the strat to warrant being put in)
3-9 Events (You might put more if you have a good draw engine, but you're still risking your set up if you do)
9-14 Gold producing/cost reducing locations depending on your character spread
Any left over space can go to utility locations & maybe extra characters

Unique characters only ever 1. unless its a combo deck, then 3. or if they are going to be holding your power (I don't recommend this in melee).
Unique locations/attachments, 2 if its kind of important/really good, otherwise 1.

You might think this would make an inconsistent deck, well... melee is an inconsistent game, having a range of choices in your hand is good. also things are more likely to randomly die (especially if they are important to you), meaning dead dupe draws.

Gold costs really depend on the deck & house. generally i will either play a range of 2-3 cost characters, OR a 4-5 cost characters (with dupes), and a bunch of 0-1 cost characters. its all about balance. Having fewer high cost characters isnt a good position to be in, not only will military claim hurt more, but you wont have the actions to oppose and/or make challenges. i imagine joust is fairly similar in that aspect.

Try to have an even icon spread, having a single standing 1str intrigue icon automatically makes you a less appealing target than someone without int icons. but not only that, you will also get to take cheap shots at those without icons. I know for some houses you have to make the effort to include those icons (stark with intrigue), and sometimes your options aren't that great... but its worth it.

General Strategy
Melee is fairly rushy, compared to joust which i find to be more about resilience.

Often you will find the option to swing military in a certain players direction and wipe out the rest of their characters. you usually do not want to do this. It wont give you any significant benefit, and it just opens up that player as a punching bag for all the other players to benefit from. Table balance is a concept you have to consider... you don't want to be leagues ahead because you will only become everyones target. It should be in everyones favor to let everyone else have a significant defense (naturally there are some decks which can flourish when there is an open target, see Stark Siege).

But in that sense melee allows for more delicate, combo decks to be played. Intelligent players shouldn't be attacking you if you are behind (unless its free unopposed power), so decks which need a round or 2 to set up can sort of work. Just don't forget its a race for power.

This post is longer than i thought it would be... but there you go.

Thank you all for your tips. I see that about everyone has the same general thought on how to build deck but that it all changes in the details. I'll see how it goes and come back with more questions if I have troubles.

Thanks again

JN

Some sort of suprise power grab options are usually a good thing to fit in so you can go from not looking like you are going to win this turn to winning, else next turn sees you get a kicking.