Not only have I never played it, I've never even heard of anybody who has. So, has anybody? Is it any good?

I think we played this at some point in 3-player… it was pretty fun when playing with Baratheon (one copy of each of the competing Kings) and a decent mix of the different themes, since Baratheon has quite a nice spread. Before that we tried this out with Targaryen (2-player). Utterly horrible, since somebody just get's a synergy of some kind going and can easily control and win out.

I'd guess that Martell and Lannister could create some interesting Civil War games as well? Stark would probably end up pretty boring, with the one who has better and bigger pieces of meat winning, while Greyjoy probably doesn't have a wide enough pool for this, since mill and choke don't really form an interesting basis and they are quite a large portion of the cardpool. Season-based effects should also probably be minimized, as much as possible, regardless of the chosen House.

We played it for the first time last week. We have been pursuing ways to balance the fun factor for both competitive types in our meta. One of us (Matt) really pushed for this and coralled a six player game using Lannister. I didn't expect to enjoy it but I did. The group will try it again today.

Not kidding, I love this format! I don't think I've had as much fun with melee outside of this. Our group has now played with every house and we're due to start over again, we ended with Greyjoy with the titles and the kingsmoot. Whackyness ensued. Lannister was the least fun because I put too many kneel effects in the deck. Targ was the most fun because I only added a little bit of burn but lots of ambush bouncing.

The key to building a good civil war deck is balance. IF you put strong attachments in the deck, THEN you put a in attachment control. IF you add lots of kill effects, THEN you need some save effects.

Adding unusual subthemes is great, we really got to explore banners and holy crests during a couple games. Beware of cards that are too powerful for the envirnment like Silent Sisters and Rheanys's Hill. Avoid unfun themes like kneeling and burn, some is ok but too much drags the game out to a stalemate. Recursion cards are a must in Civil War because you know what will be in your opponent's dead and discard piles. They are very powerful but if you add some foils like event or location control they will be taken care of quickly.

We've even gotten to the stage where we have 20 card subthemes that we can add on the fly if folks vote for them. All in all this is a ton of fun format.

Clu - if you're attending days of Icen & Fire - bring a couple of these civil war decks with you - I'd play in downtime. I view this format as the heir apparent to Draft.

We should organize something at GenCon for this…with beer.