i love the books and just got into the game of thrones lcg and want to get to a point that can enter tournements (for fun dont really plan on winning) but wondering if get just the core and the expansions be able to make competetive decks i dont want to spend a ton of money on chapter packs and get only two cards really use in each type of deal. also if i get the martell expansion (since really love them for some reason even though rarely in the books so far) is just that core deck fairly well built alone? any help be greatly appreciated (:

If you don't care about winning, you can play with whatever you'd like, I suppose.

If you want to have some level of fun, and win a few games, you need (I would argue) at least 2 core sets, and 3x of almost all of the cards that have been printed to date. True, some winning decks right now only use cards from a small handful of chapter packs and expansions, but tomorrow things could be different.

There have been a few threads about this as of late; with the card pool getting larger and larger, the buy-in fee for new players is increasing. If you want to go to a tournament and have a chance at winning some games, you need a lot of cards, you need to do a lot of deck testing leading up to the event, and you need to keep your ear to the interwebz about the latest deck building trends.

The short answer is "yes, although it might take some additional creativity."

mnBroncos said:

I think it is very common with this game for a group of people to get together under either a commie or a daddy model. In the former, everyone pools money to buy the game and its expansions communally, with "first dibs" offered up on houses and settled via roshambo or similar method. In the latter, one person obsessively buys everything and then lets other people build/sleeve decks so that they have friends to play with!

Unless you are extremely creative, you're unlikely to go to a Joust or Melee tournament with just core+an expansion and be able to place well, though I think it's overstating the case to suggest you will be last place every time. A lot of this game revolves around not making crucial mistakes, and on manipulating the meta-game (the multiplayer titles and game board). That being said, a lot more of this game revolves around cards - and the fewer cards you have, the less options you've got.

However, with YOUR FRIENDS, you can play with whatever cards you have available, and have fun every time - it's a level playing field! So long as everyone has access to the same cards. We actually got started with chapter packs, since you get cards for each house. We pooled our resources to buy a full cycle ($75 versus $150 for the 6 deluxe expansions) and got hooked from there. Also: fun of "unboxing".

If you want to play at a high competitive level and not feel like the guy with no Lotus or Mox in a cash prize Type 1 MTG tournament (e.g. a guy losing largely because he was neither lucky nor rich), you will need more cards. Maybe not all -- but all the ones to support an efficient build, which will likely require multiple copies of the core set (2-3), multiple copies of the first chapter cycle (same), one copy of the remaining chapter cycles, and the deluxe expansion for your chosen house. Blessedly, you could probably trade in one Mox and get that. I recommend using some online deck-building tools (I use cardgamedb). You can both make decks filtering only to the sets you own, or make decks filtering to everything and then go buy the necessary sets.

Reading more closely, a good player with Core+Deluxe+some budget for pre-scouted chapter packs (Say, 5-6 of them) would be able to do respectably and plausibly win/2nd, particularly in melee, especially if you scheme specifically against the current flavor of the month (which you can determine by taking a look at the match reports on various websites).

All my other comments still apply, though.

If you want to play only martell, you may be able to build a competitive deck with the martell core set and multiple chapter packs, just target those that have good martell cards.