So far the Lnnister's are undefeated. Me and 2 friends have played about ten 1v1 games and it seems Lannisters beat all comers. I do not have a record, just memory. It seems the Lannisters are able to bury the opponent in Gold and Marshaling more Characters. Then they attack the hand and remove options and then it's doen!

Help?

This is using the Core Set only, sorry. No EDIT function here?

Core Set only is a little odd for joust (though it works it was designed with multiplayer in mind).

Here is some advice.

Stark: Start slow with characters, try to get resoures form you locations and drop valar turn 2. use your kill effects wisely.

Bara: use your knights and their plot based immunity. Also Renly's and Axel Florent's self standing ability is good.

Targ: hardest to come up with a distinct strategy as they are pretty versitile. Targ as a lot of good characters and actually uses both streams of income (gold and influence). However, you probably need to be more comfortable with the game to use them well. Burn (killing a character with 0 str) is your firend.

Lars said:

No, no, NEVER drop Valar turn 2, especially against a house that has access to gold and card draw. They should be able to beat you every time. Save Valar for turn 3, or 4 if you can manage. Then you can really hit your opponent where it hurts. Playing Valar too early can be a mistake you canot recover from. (No offense, Lars. It just has never worked in my favor that early)

Lars said:

Targ is considered the best house by many in the core set, and their burn strategy is awesome (a kill when STR=0 is nearly unsaveable, and STR reduction to begin with makes a difference). If playing 1v1 make sure to switch out the Kill a Character chosen by an opponent plot; that will ruin you everytime.

Ia gree with JJ.

An early Valar against Lannister will lead to a loss more times than not. One of the reasons i despise the Plot is because it is and always has been one of the Lannister players greatest weapons (surpassed only by one other Plot, one I fervently hope we never see again).

JerusalemJones said:

none taken. different strokes.

I find valar bites me in the butt more later then it does early. My suggestion was to play slow on characters and build up the locations to be able to get the gold after the vala. PLus lanni's gold in LCG is mostly character based (they don't have any extra godl propduicing locations then the other CS houses). My goal/though process was to have 2 turns worth of the lanni players characters to nuke with little effort on your part.

I wouldn't go past turn 3 becuase the lanni players ability to spring back up is still just as viable and you've gone thoruigh some more of your charcaters and might not be able to recover as much. Last time i played lanni i was amrtell and had the char advan. early so tried to push valor back to turn 6 or 7...then got screwed by it as it juts focused the lanni kneel to the 1-2 chars I played after the valar.

Heck I'd drop it turn one if i had all locations and they had 2 gold producing characters on the setup...

Cool, thanks for the words. I was Bara most recently, and Robert kept getting knelt by the whores! Great for laughs, bad for winning. He kept beating my hand down, swamped me with characters, and I couldn't get enough Knights on the board. Soon I had 2 cards/round, and not enough characters to survive a Challenge phase. I think I'll try the Targs next, they look like fun.

With Valar back in the mix, I've taken to heeding the advice Melnick gave a few years back -- all your characters are expendable. If I am building a deck around a particular character, in the current envirnoment that is not going to work. Unless you are Targ, and playing To Be A Dragon (I am starting to hate that card; thank god the league is over this week, so I will only have to face it one more time).

Waiting too long with Valar can hurt as well, and the hope is really to get your opponent to overextend their characters before you play it, so you get an advantage. Sadly, more often than not when I play it I am forced to play it earlier than I would like -- being Martell in LCG means you don't have as much easy access to gold, and I refuse to run a +1 gold location for 3 gold. Just the crossroads and our Summer Sea, thank you very much.

Tian of House Zi said:

I find this always happens to me against the Lannisters. Best thing to do in response is to have a Distinct Mastery to stand him back up, or even better, a Vigilant Stag from Change of Seasons.

Stag Lord said:

Lol, but could we maybe have Anarchy in the Streets back, pretty pretty please?

Also, as far as Valar goes, I've got to agree with JJ. All characters need to be treated as expendable. That said, I think Baratheon really has a good shot at keeping characters on the board at the moment. One of the worst matchups I've played so far was against a Baratheon deck built around uber Renly. Dupes, Lightbringer and Bodyguard make him darn near impossible to kill. His immunity knocks out half of my kneel. His standing ability helps him recover from the other half, and Hunting Spear makes it very easy for him to win challenges.

Also, I find that running both Valar and Wildfire is a habit that I just can't seem to shake. Running both resets just really throws some people off. And what do I care? Everything I have is expendable.

As far as that goes, to be honest, Stark kinda has 2 valar's. Stark can kneel 2 and kill all attacking characters, and then come at you with a higher claim challenge with winter is coming. I think the core set with Lannisters is just that they do have the gold advantage, and even in the LCG format, definite draw advantage. Card draw to me, is the hardest thing to come by in the other houses. But I think timing your valar/lethal counterattack/winter is coming, to where you do it at just the right time to where you can take a good chunk off of them, works very well. And lethal is a great just blow to the face when they think they just kicked your butt in a challenge (IMO)

Much of the Start strategy & tactics discussion involves Valar. Is it possible for Stark to be competitive in LCG without Valar?

I have resisted including Valar in the decks used by my newbie playgroup because it often leads to negative play experiences for novices.

Dr.Cornelius said:

I'm a novice myself, and I've been trying to teach a couple of other novices. I find Valar oddly liberating. I make a point of explaining how it works ahead of time, and I make sure my opponent knows if it's in his plot deck (or mine), and I explain that it's important to keep some characters in your hand so you can rebuild after Valar hits the table.

The benefit, for both of us, is that we keep fewer characters on the table, which simplifies the challenges phase. And sometimes, if the challenges phase is clearly giving my novice opponent a headache (after we each have five or six characters in play), I'll play Valar just to clear the table and simplify things again.

Dr.Cornelius said:

Valar is a good plot but with the stats 2/0/0 it is balanced very well. If you need to slow down your opponent you can use it but in that round you will not do any harm since you have no claim and you will not propably marshall as much characters as your opponent just with 2 gold.

It is used primarly for Stark and Greyjoy in non-LCG games since the have a bunch of saves that can give them advantage. In LCG play all the Houses have some saves that they can use to help them keep something on the table. So Valar is not a must, but I would recommend a reset in every deck. Maybe Wildfire Assault will be better choise in some decks.

Rozy said:

There is no question that each house should include at least one "comeback' plot like Wildfire. But the question remains - is Stark competitive without Valar, or does it require an offensive Valar to compete with the top tier LCG decks?

Before the coreset was released I played a Standard Stark deck that didnt have Valar (just Wildfire) and I think I played good with it.

Not sure if this is the right discussion to post this, but as it's quite close, I'll just post it here.

I've been running the LCG now with only one copy of core set and one copy of each chapter pack (except for regugees yet), trying to keep all 4 core decks evenly matched and even building a winter greyjoy on the side. This means you have only one copy of valar and wildfire assault, so the choice of where to include, while still maintaining the balance is a bit of a problem. Since others might face this as well, I'll comment on this a bit.

I've ended up with having valar in targyeren, with recycling attachments, Pentos and rhaegar there to combo with it. Also the Queen's knights and Disgruntled Mercenaries are good with Valar. I even have Westeros Bleeds also in my Targyeren, since the needed influence is otherwise hard to come by. My Stark deck has been more than competetive without a need for any resets, mainly due to having maximized it's killing potential otherwise using icy catapults, events, berserkers with midnight sentries, several copies of Bear Island and of course Robb. Lannister has kept it's original Wildfire Assault due to thematical reasons, I find the idea of Lannisters having some key characters but treating other troops as expendable very nedly. It also seems to balance out very nicely with Stark and Targyeren, since Lanni gets all the best control elements (card draw, gold, kneeling etc.). Having plots with good amounts of gold helps put weenies on the table to be used as cannon fodder.

The problem for me has mostly been with having the Baratheon compete with these other three decks in joust. Targyeren's plentiful resets and Stark's killing power play merry hell with my idea of a fast power rush renown deck (using Fox's Teeth combined with high iniative plots), while Lannister control is quite able to neutralize my most valuable characters and walk around me otherwise.

So the idea of having a reset in all decks sounds good, but is not possible if you want to run all decks with just one core set. The work-around for this would of course be to buy two core sets, but somehow this goes against the idea of the game being LCG (imho). So balancing the decks so that some have resets and some don't seems to be a key issue in such an environment.

If anyone has good ideas for improving the baratheon deck or balancing the decks out better, do tell.

Side-note: I built Greyjoy to be a winter resource denial with lots of good weenies (carrion birds etc.), haven't tested this more than once, so not quite sure if it's up to par with the others. Any ideas for this one are also welcome.

BTW - just to report that i think Lannister has one every Joust event we have had for the past three months. i think unless we get some cancels and more location control, they will continue to be way overpowered.

Stag Lord said:

That´s really surprising me, it´s my impression that Targ and Lanni are on the same eye level in the LCG as well as in the standard format.

I think well-built Stark can win. Their plot rocks vs. lanni, they can actually get some card draw, and their control cards can really hurt Lanni. They have issues vs. the locations, but Bear Island is just crazy.

Old Ben said:

I'm not seeing Targ as close. Teh To be Event helps a little, but Lanni can easily outrdaw them. Recurive burn is very card intensive, and lanni has the gold to pump out enough characters to get around even the endless atatchments and infinite Forever Burning (which actually considering targ's gold curve in LCG isn't as inifnite as you think).

In Standard - its a little better fo a matchup, but everyone matches up better with lannister in Standard.

And I'm with Rings too on Stark in L:CG. I think those are the two best Houses in teh LCG format at the moment. And a lot of it has to do with locations and events. So maybe the metagame will osrt this out down the road when we get a balanced format with future CPs.

With two strong players in the NYC meta playing Lannister in joust, building "against Lannister" is playing significantly into my deck construction. Rule by Decree is a must have. Fleeing to the Wall is a near-must have. And it's nice that the Stark Fury of... plot is anti-Lannister, although often I don't get the most bang from it since I need it in my plot discard pile early so as to activate the To Be a Wolf events (pretty much an auto-include, regardless of opponent). Northern Scavengers also have made it into a few decks (cheap cards if you can get them in your setup and then a chance to hurt Lanni players later in the game makes them somewhat attractive). Although I haven't gotten War Horn out of my decks and into play much, I'm starting to think that War Horn may be necessary to deal with some of Lanni's brutal locations --there are several good reasons for Stark to build winter themed decks anyways.

One thing about Stark in LCG is that, to me, it seems to lacking any worthwhile non-resource "effects" locations when compared to the other houses. There's Bear Island, but adding it pretty much means you build for it and that isn't compatible with a winter themed deck and you lose access to some very strong neutral cards. I haven't tried to build a Bear Island deck taking into account the most recent chapter packs, so maybe it's more viable now. The Kennels would be fine with a direwolf themed deck, but that theme seems to be more fun than competitive. Gates of Winterfell is great in standard, but a crap shoot in LCG.

LetsGoRed said:

Ranger of Winter is reason enough! Although "The Long Winter" can set your opponent back by an unreasonable degree, too.

LetsGoRed said:

Northern Cave could be interesting in a Winter deck. I haven't tried it, but the ability to "overcommit" your attackers, then pull them back after defenders are declared seems like to offer some possibilities. But yeah, fewer options for location-based effects in Stark-LCG.

I'll add my vote for bara (~in yet another thread). With three different people in our meta playing them regularly i've seen a lot of variations of them, and they've all been pretty solid.

Summer makes them ultra fast for lcg.

Vigilant provides some protection from castellan (really lanni's best card right now) and helps get around the other kneel and speed.

Winter has the basis of solid control. Stalker in the shadows should get some more chalk time on these boards. With the ability to win an intrigue challenge and then assaisnate a charcater of your choice....wowzer.

Oh and bara steal is back. Fury/seductive/support/men with no king...

Well, Bara does have the odd distinction of being the House in LCG that has more than one distinctive build....