dcdennis said:

It's good to have dreams.

mathlete said:

~A true statement, the veracity of which you highlighted nicely by adding it to a post that did nothing much besides complaining about TMP.

Ratatoskr said:

Some people sure, but we've definitely gotten more complaints about TMP than usual. The major issue with TMP is not only that it is overpowered, but that said overpowering incentivizes more people to play it, so it also increases its exposure. I could care less if the agenda is OP. I just want some damned variety. I am sick of playing against the same agenda over and over again.

Ratatoskr said:

beaten to it

Kublacon Gaming Convention (aka Fieras) said:

Kublacon Gaming Convention (aka Fieras) said:

This. Except change 'playing against' to 'losing to'.

dcdennis said:

~If you're the rest of the DC meta besides Dennis change 'losing to' to 'defeating'

In all seriousness, if you look at the break down from regionals there were plenty of non-maester decks that won tournaments and/or placed top 4 at every regional. Sure it's strong. That's why it's the most popular agenda. There are tweaks that would probably level it off a bit too. Still, there are plenty of decks that can perform very well against maesters. Either earlier here or in another thread I listed off several from the top of my head. The fact is we have many houses with competitive builds right now, and that's pretty rare.

HoyaLawya said:

Said another way, you can add TMP to many, many decks without having to design the deck around it. It is the most popular agenda because it can be added to a whole lot of decks as an afterthought.

I know that a lot of people say that happens, but I haven't seen a very successful 'tacked on' Maester build. The ones I see winning are Bara Maesters, Martell Maesters and Targ Maesters, all of which definitely take advantage of their maester-ness. That said, I know Eric B won a big tourney with the Lanni 1-chain maester deck, so maybe it's just that it's not a West Coast thing.

___

finitesquarewell said:

The problem with Maester's is that its heavily supported relative to other agenda's. There are 16 cards that support Maesters including 2 plots in addition to the 12 chains. Maester's are also frequently tied to the Learned crest and there are 12 cards that work for Learned including 2 plots. 3 out of 4 of the plots are also really good. Many of the other support cards are also very useful.

Compare TMP to Summer which is fitfully supported. Targ and Martell have a number of very good summer cards, other houses not so much. Still Summer works with everything because of the bonus income, bonus draw and ease of setting it up. Even then, Summer is inherently risky. An opposing Winter or Maester deck can shut you down. There's no equivalent counter to Maester's except for maybe another Maester deck. The season agendas and support were designed with opposing strategies.

Compared to Knights of the Realm its support is dwarfed by Maesters. There are only 9 cards that support Knights including 2 plots. There's no equivalent plot card to the very efficient At The Gates although there are a wide variety of Knight characters. There are also two specific anti-Knight characters vs none for Maesters. Some Knights have War Crests which is a decently supported crest type but I wouldn't say it has the same synergy that Maester-Learned has. Lastly KotR can be shut down by an opponent randomly having more Knights than you do.

I don't think TMP is overpowered although it should have some more in built counters to it. For example, why not have Knight specific cards that counter Maester's. This could represent the Lord's men disagreeing with their Lord's adviser. Or how about Holy cards that counter Learned or Maester cards?

I also think every other agenda in the game is both underpowered and under-represented.

ktom said:

well, there is drawback. in games without time limit it can be a very effective strategy to do nothing but kill off maesters, so the chains are stuck on the agenda, while the other player has the option of slowly winning the game bit by bit. and if a deck is good with direct kills, a TMP deck stands almost no chance against it.

I really can't see how there is disagreement about Maesters anymore. They are way too efficient, way too easy to play and have warped the meta-game at this point. I guess we'll see what happens at GenCon but at this point, I no longer care.

I haven’t played since the middle of June and I barely pay attention to the forums anymore. Frankly - it is because of maesters. I am tired of building decks specifically to deal with the agenda. I am tired of people discussing how OP the Agenda is at tournaments and meetups. It annoys me that every prediction made about the Agenda in early 2011 came true - and in spades. It is what it is. I am just surprised a little that the Maester thing has gone on as long as it has.

Again - it is what it is. We'll see what happens after GenCon - but I doubt you'll see big changes before.

Stag Lord said:

Sounds like the DC Hidden Agenda tourney in Oct is a perfect fit for you. /shameless plug

I wish I understood why people feel like TMP is so ridiculously overpowered. I think if it was as bad as people say we would've seen all the regionals dominated by maester decks, however that is pretty much the exact opposite of what happened. The environment today is HUGELY more diverse than it was a year ago. There are so many builds out of so many different houses that last year if you had shown up with a Stark deck to Gencon, most people would not have taken you seriously, flash forward to this year and there are 2-3 T1/T1.5 viable builds out of Stark, and if you look at the other houses it's the same story there. If maesters were half as ridiculous as people seem to think you would see the top 8s of most tournaments having a majority of maester decks, however that was not at all the case.

If anything the thing you see the most of competitively at the moment is Martell, which is frankly unsurprising since they have the best in house draw (often times that isn't even considered draw for the purposes of draw cap), they have the best reducer locations, and they have a fantastically varied and viable character base. Could TMP use some tweaking? Possibly, I could think of a few small changes that might reduce it's efficiency somewhat, however I do not think it's the end all be all agenda. Summer/Winter are both still pretty viable, as are Knights, KOTHH, and Seige.

The rationale that "I have to take this into account in my deckbuilding so it's clearly overpowered," is so unbelievably off base that I am not sure how to address it. If you are not taking into account what you perceive to be the threats in the environment into your deckbuilding you're doing it WRONG. You are ALWAYS going to have to account for whatever powerful or popular card effects are currently in the environment. The same way you can't ignore maesters is the same way you can't ignore stark kill, or gj choke, or targ burn. You HAVE to account for these things being a threat in your deck construction or you aren't really building a competitive deck. Last year the big whine was Apprentice Collar, and I agree, it did need some fixing, however now that that is fixed, why are we still harping on maesters. They are far from dominant, they are ineffectual when not built around in an intelligent manner, and as soon as the next powerful agenda/etc. comes out that will become the new flavor of the month anyways.

Wasn't it just two years ago that everyone was complaining massively about Brotherhood and how it was ruining the game?

fhornmikey said:

Less than. I started playing right before Regionals last year and remember seeing a ton of complaints about Brotherhood being too strong. As a result, I quickly made that cycle my top priority just in time for everyone to say Brotherhood was dead.

Personally I don't see maesters too powerful (more of boring flavor, but that is completely different discussion). But what I do not like at all is the tin link. Attachments have always been very fragile and usually giving your opponent a chance for 2 for 1 card advantage. The other problem is that most attachments don't have the setup keyword which makes them take same space with events. Then incomes the Tin link, repeatable way to destroy attachments easily. I just feel like this cards presence is destroying a complete card type all by itself. The matter gets even worse when you take into account that the maester player can tutor it off of his agenda whenever he feels like he really needs it.

Search and detain has been one way to try to push attachments more in the environment, but it has created its own thing where its **** flexible to fit many situations. I don't feel like it has succeeded too well in trying to power attachments.

Maybe the game could just a simple Dissension-like event for Maesters. Tack on another trait like Traitor or Bastard to give it a little more diversity. Bonus points if the picture on it is Barbrey Ryswell sucking on a lollipop.

playgroundpsychotic said:

Or perhaps a "Kneel 3 or 4 influence and a Mercenary character to kill all Maester's in play." Maybe we can use a poisoned coin to do that. Poor Pate.

Hmm, interesting FAQ… I'm glad it's out, for sure.

Love some of the clarifications and/or changes

yep, I think overall it was probably the best way to handle it. I am assuming we will hardly ever see search and detain now however.