I come from a background of playing the WoW TCG back in the day when Upper Deck ruled its glorious progress. However, since then I really haven't played any of the TCG/LCG's as I've been avoiding spending the money, being in grad school and whatnot.

Recently, I was able to pick up a core set of the game, however… and I'm very excited about playing aGoT. That said, I'm a bit confused. I've been trying to figure out what house I want to play from a mechanics standpoint (as I'm not super familiar with the books… I haven't had time to read them yet. I refuse to watch the tv show until I've read the books).

If you were to categorize the different houses in terms of control, rush, etc… how would you do so?

I'm pretty sure that the decks that I had the most fun playing in WoW TCG were classified as control/rush decks. Are there even classifications like that in this game? How do people choose what House to main with? The only reason I care about choosing a specific house at this point is that I want to get to the point where I can be buying some of the chapter packs for a House, but don't have the money to get them all right now. Specializing seems like something that would be a good idea right now.

So I suppose the general question that I'm asking … is how do people choose what House to play the game with? And keep in mind, that I'm a fairly casual player who will be mainly just messing around with friends here in the area, though I don't mind playing something that's considered tournament worthy in case of my local game store actually adding in aGoT game nights (instead of just Magic).

Play Bara. It gives you the rush option with holy or knights, and the control option with shadows or asshai.

How or why do people choose a House in aGoT? 3 considerations: Theme, Play style and Playability.

Obviously, if a person is a fan of the books, they may choose to play a house simply because they like that house's characters in the books. However, even without knowledge of the books, aesthetic and personality hooks for the houses can be pretty compelling -- Stark's white wintery flavor cards and fantastical wolves may just pluck a player's fantasy strings more than Bara's more straight forward medieval Knights do.

Control v Rush v Aggro is a little more nebulous in aGoT because every House has access to those build types (sort of) and it's more a matter of how a House implements those play styles (and, possibly, how many cards a player will have to buy to do it) that colours a player's like of them. For example, Bara is the most obvious (and arguably the most competitive at it) choice for Rush but Stark Siege, GJ Unopposed, Lanni PBtT, Unkneeling Martell and Targ True Heir decks can also be tooled for similar speed and 'shoot for the moon' strategies. If a player wants to play control, would they rather remove their opponent's character icons (martell) kneel their opponent's characters (lanni) blank those character's card text (stark) or steal the opponent's gold (GJ) ?

Lastly, house preference also comes down to how easy a house is to play (in a certain way) and how expensive it is to get the cards to play it that way AND how competitive that style is compared to your friends' decks. Stark winter is a very very good control format. However, it can be very difficult to pilot and can contain cards from a broad sweep of the card pool. That may simply turn a player off to it.

Stark tends to be murder and aggro. It tries to kill your characters outright with its control build. It also has a rushier build that focuses on gaining power by winning military challenges.

Lannister tends to be kneel control. It tries to kneel opponent's characters to make the big guys ineffectual. It also has a semi-rush build with Power Behind the Throne from the Lanni box that focuses on power gain through intrigue challenge and intrigue based card effects.

Greyjoy tends to be about unopposed and choke. Its control build is based on reducing the amount of resources in the game and trying to make your opponent's resources run out before yours do. It can be built rush focusing on unopposed or holy crests as well.

Martell tends to be pure control with an alternate rush build. Martell's control build is based on a lot of unique card effects and controlling your opponents icons. They have a rush build based on the Maester's Path as well.

Bara tends to be about power challenges or asshai characters. They have a control build based around asshai characters that focuses on winning challenges/dominance with asshai characters and doing nasty stuff afterward. It's generally intrgue heavy. They are also a solid rush house with lots of characters with renown and ways to get power fast.

Targ tends to be about burn and dragons. Their control build focuses on effects that reduce characters strength and often times killing 0 strength characters. They have a rush build focused on dragons.

I think this is a pretty accurate assessment of the houses, but at the very least someone will come in and tell me how wrong I am and give you their opinion. LoL.

mdc273 said:

nope! that's a reasonable breakdown of the houses There are more options, to be sure, but that gives the OP a Control AND Rush idea for each house.