<inside joke>Casting out a line here, let's see if I can catch me a whopper </inside joke>

The use of agenda's are really what make this game outstanding (imo). Without agenda's, each house, and the player's of said houses, are extremely limited on the type's of builds that they can use. Currently I'd say there are 3, MAYBE 4 build types per house, almost none of which are viable T1 builds, without an agenda. This is evidenced by the FACT that you rarely if ever see an Agendaless deck win a Major or even regional tournament. Instead of seeing this as a good thing, that agenda's are what player's like and thats why they are using them, why is it that the designer's apparently see this as a bad thing, and seem to be trying to shoehorn players away from agendas with several of the new cards. Yes I understand there seems to be a push to make agendas optional by making no agenda a viable deck, but I don't understand WHY. Players like agendas, agendas are good, lets encourage players to NOT use agendas. One of those statements doesnt fit.

…Discuss.

disclaimer: I deliberately wrote this is a point to be discussed. Clearly I have a bias towards agenda use, but would like to get a good discussion going with the meta about how other's feel on this topic. Should agenda's be the norm? do you feel annoyed that if you want to be T1 you currently must use an agenda?

I think the new cards aren't meant to discourage the use of Agendas, but make them an actual deck building decision(i.e. there might be an actual drawback built into an opponent's deck) and to support non-Agenda builds. The provide even MORE variety!

FACT: What makes this game outstanding is the Plot Deck Mechanic, Source Material, and the community. Take any of those away this game just isn't as good, and possibly does not survive. I think the game could survive without agendas.

Response to Agendas: In a world without agendas you might actually see more tier 1 deck types. Rather than getting the decks main effects from the agenda you would get them from the cards themselves, possisibly making deck building and tactical play more important As it currently stands, cards that cannot slot into an agenda deck are automatically rendered tier 2, which I feel limits the variaty of tier 1 decks. There have been many discussions in the past about agendas, and I always felt agendas should be rare and have strong negatives. Since that is not how it's worked out, I think there probably needs to be more just to increase the number of tier 1 decks. Anyway those are my quick thoughts.

___

Kid Gruesome said:

Kid Gruesome said:

Actually I think the new cards are designed to discourage the use of agendas. Agendas are supposed to have large drawbacks making there use questionable. The fact the every tier 1 deck has one basically indicated that the negatives are not strong enough. The new cards may help add to the negative side of agendas, so they are no longer automatic, and even playing them might be risky. At least that is my hope.

tofubones said:

Says who?

They should have more agendas; maybe a trait-agenda, so you could actually make tully's good. Or an agenda, and I am just making this up, like this:

Agenda: Death

Put 5 death counters on this agenda at the start of the game.

After you reveal a plot card, remove a death counter and then choose and kill a unique character, if able.

If you have 0 death counters, you lose the game.

That might be overpowered for rush decks, but you get the idea. I just think the agenda, aside from the maester's path, are all pretty bland.

I'm going to agree with the idea that cards discouraging agendas are more in place to create decisions. That's the why of it from my perspective. No longer is the Maester's Path auto-include. If you want to make a Kindly Man deck, you can't include the Maester's Path. If your deck has problems against Cavalry Flank, you have to consider if removing the agenda does more damage than being beat up by Cavalry Flank. More deck-building decisions lead to more variety. When you know there are a bunch of cards out there that can pound your agenda, you reconsider.

So why discourage? So that you have to think about it.

Now on the flip side, I agree with you that there is room to go too far in that discouraging direction where the environment simply is too punishing to agendas to play them. I don't feel like it's there currently and hope it never gets there. Agendas are pretty much the key ingredient to the diversity of decks since without them, the best deck is simply going to have a certain amalgamation of cards and there's no need to vary them. Without the Wildling Agendas, wildlings are pretty pointless. Without the Knight agenda, most knights aren't really worth playing. I doubt there would be ANY Maester decks if the Maester's path didn't exist. I don't recall ever seeing a Maester deck that relied on chains in the deck. Would Greyjoy choke be as appealing without Kings of Winter?

And to finite's point, a lot of imbalance resides in the design process. This is no knock on the designers. Balancing a game like this is incredibly time-consuming. And to make matters worse, there isn't a way to tweak existing cards that involves little to no effort on the part of the consumer. It requires reading the FAQ and knowing the errata. They get shafted when they make a bad card because they can't go take it out of print. Worse, people might complain when a card that FFG realizes is bad for the game is restricted or banned. Bad cards (for the game) tend to be incredibly powerful.

Also, @finite. What's an example of good agenda design? What's an example of mediocre agenda design? They don't even have to be real examples, make something up, LoL.

tofubones said:

You think there would be more tier 1 deck types without agendas? If the only effects are coming from the cards themselves, each house will have a single build using the most efficient in-house cards and possibly a few neutrals to fill in gaps. If a card is not good enough to slot into an agenda deck, it's probably not good enough to slot into a T1 agendaless deck. Instead of thinking of agendas as reducing the number of playable cards, I say it's the exact opposite. Agendas make cards that are otherwise not as good to be much better because of their synergies with the specific effects of the agendas. Take seasons as an example, do you really think people would be playing summer and winter decks without the agendas?

We all want a greater variety of tier 1 decks. Without agendas there would actually be fewer than what we have right now.

I like agendas and feel they are a great part of the game. I also like the fact that there are characters that benefit from your opponent running an agenda. I don't really care for the characters that do not work while you are running an agenda because I do not feel like they will see a ton of tier 1 play. Maege Mormont and Damon are perfect examples. I love Damon, and he is a great card no batter what, even better if your opponent is running an agenda. Maege on the other hand is very bad if you are running an agenda, but would have been such a huge boost to Stark SoW.

I have seen winter played ALOT without the agenda, because the characters that revolve around it are so good, Meera, Maruaders to name a few. I have seen summer in Targ and Martell decks without the agenda, but mostly summer does run the agenda, because it is so good.

<insert mandatory rings statement about agendas being the hardest card to balance here>

<insert my agreeing with that statement here>

Personally, I'd rather see house themes solidified a little bit more. More often it feel like I'm playing a bland agenda, instead of a thematic House of Westeros.

The problem with agendas is that they are used as shortcuts. In THEORY, they should add more variety to deckbuilding. In PRACTICE, one Siege deck is pretty much the same as another. One PBtT deck is pretty much the same as another. One Maester deck is pretty much the same as another. If not to build, then certainly to play against. With the exception of KotHH (and maybe Summer and Winter), tell me, honestly, that upon seeing an agenda on the opponents side of the field, you are not 80-90% sure of what their deck is likely to be trying to do.

So the new stuff is there to punish people for taking the shortcut, or reward them for doing something different. In an environment where people have evolved an attitude that agendas are all but mandatory, it shouldn't be surprising that the designers have come up with things to try to swing that attitude the other way.

I had a full post written up, and then I hit backspace, and then undo, and then backspace and then I cried myself to sleep. I think it's only happening with chrome…

The short of it is that the designers seem to want to make "Taking an Agenda" to be a choice, as well as "which agenda". I agree with that decision point - I don't think any decision should be automatic except those specified in the deck construction rules.

ktom said:

I will admit that decks with the same house and agenda will be largely the same and play the same. Contrast that to an environment without agendas and just a house card. When you see a house card that tells you 90% of the deck and all other decks with the same house will feel the same. With agendas, take Targ and martell as examples. They reach have summer, kothh, and maester builds. That's 3 builds per house as opposed to 1 no agenda build. In PRACTICE the few agendas we have actually do expand the number of builds.

Each agenda correlates to one new build for the house. Imagine there are 30-40 different agendas adding their own build to one or more houses. Not all would be tier 1, but we would have more than we do now. There are a lot of undeveloped or underpowered sub themes. New agendas are a great way to expand them, make them playable, and through the combination of benefit and drawback make them feel different from other themes/builds.

finitesquarewell said:

Yeah: I THOUGHT I saw this movie already. Starts out fast, but ends dully and predictably.

Excuse me while i switch channels.

HoyaLawya said:

There are a multitude of "no agenda" builds for each House. For example, Stark has Direwolf, Tully, "none shall pass" all-defense-all-the-time, Bolton, Armies, Kindly Man, and Winter Shadow. Off the top of my head. But no one puts any real effort into developing these decks into truly competitive builds, and instead the House is dominated by Siege and Knight decks.

You could write a similar statement for each House.

So, is there really only 1 "no agenda" build, or - as tofubones pointed out - are people not exploring the "no agenda" possibilities because they can't see beyond the powerful agenda builds (which they probably net-decked). (And no, that's not a slam on net-decking.)

I think this "only 1 'no agenda' build possible per House" argument, which is patently untrue, comes from the wrong direction. The potential exists for much more, but agendas are not, in practice, providing the incentive for people to explore the card pool. Instead, they are providing shortcuts by artificially focusing the House onto a single mechanic.

Stag Lord said:

I'll bite.

Agendas start in play and are effectively untargetable, making them easily the hardest card-type to balance.

This is proven by the seer amount of erratta coming out on Agendas. The ones not erratta'd? Usually recycled CCG agendas like Knight of the Realm.

Probably the least popular cards of the past few years include the North Agendas (mainly Wildling, NW just because it was so far inferior), Maester Agenda (going on two rounds of erratta and still not fixed) and the Winter Agenda (because income reduction and discard are SO much fun in a start in play card).

Do they add variety? Yeah, any card does, much less one that is always active. I can't disagree with that. However, being able to take a big dump on your opponent's cards would also certainly 'add variety' and I wouldn't like that either

Lastly, it can be done right as the CCG era showed (and a few in the LCG era - Stark's, Lanni's, Targ's are all well balanced but playable). More cards can be made to punish people for agendas. The cards can be tested very intensely siding with caution and erratta'd once or banned quickly. Unluckily, I don't think this game or gaming company has that ability/capacity - OP is such a small part of their sales compared to MTG or the such. They are always walking the line between making money (i.e. printing cards that rock) and balancing cards…which wins out? Rotation or restricting OP to blocks could help that…could not.

dcdennis said:

I don't know. The best I can think of are the Treaty and Alliance. Why are these not used more often? Because the penalty/drawback is very high and makes such decks difficult to build to overcome these drawbacks. The drawbacks for these are almost always present as well.
The Night's Watch North agendas have a massive penalty for a miniscule benefit.
The White Book has a big penalty compared to any reasonable benefit.

Siege of Winterfell has a reasonable drawback in that you can only claim power for your house during MIL challenges.
Knight of the Hollow Hill gives you a solid permanent bonus in 3 key areas by eliminating your ability to place Setup. That can be big.
Heir to the Iron Throne has a reasonable give and take by eliminating your ability to initiate a certain challenge type.
How often are you out-Knighted with Knights of the Realm?
The Brotherhood without Banners isn't really as much a give and take rather than an overhaul on game mechanics to allow you to use Brotherhood characters.
The Wildling North agendas has a huge penalty, but also provides a fantastic benefit.

The drawbacks for Kings of Summer/Winter are that you are not against the opposite season and that it is that season before you deal with the draw phase. That's how often a possibility?
The drawback for TMP is that you can get all your chains off your agenda before you can win. How often may that be an effective drawback?
City of Shadows doesn't let you claim power for unopposed unless you have a card in the shadows. That's not that bad a drawback for eliminating a deck building restriction.
Power Behind the Throne gives opponents a benefit for beating you in an INT challenge. However is that enough of a penalty for being able to initiate two intrigue challenges each round? The deck may not be all that competitive yet, but 4 challenges a round is great.

Some agenda's have a penalty that is always present while others only provide a penalty if particular situations arise. Some of these give and takes are relatively balanced while others it is definitely not. Agenda's that rarely need to deal with their drawback(or provide such a big benefit the penalty does not matter) are the most popular because rarely do they encounter the situation where the penalty overcomes the benefit. In an LCG, we are expected to adapt because we create the environment as players. However, if the currently used agendas are still difficult to beat, then why should people start moving away from them? In fact, more players probably start to use those agendas because they may feel that is the only way to beat them.

How do you try to balance or adapt to the current environment?

Create new agendas that may help create some more competitive decks to help beat the other agendas
OR
Create cards that specifically benefit from the opponents using agendas, or penalize the opponent for using one…

I agree with Ktom that it is not only one deck that exists per agenda/non-agenda house. Agendas provide deck building versatility, but it's not just one deck that is possible to create. Agendas are great for this game and I hope they keep making more to provide more deck building variety and potential.

I just see the "no agenda" encouragement as another deck-building option. Now instead of Knights and Siege, you might have Knights, Siege and no agenda all as viable Stark options. Now if they push it to the point that agendas in general aren't viable, obviously that's a problem, but I would say that the issue there is the same as the issue with certain agendas being too good currently--the problem is in card design, not in the general mechanics of the card type. Obviously it is possible to create balanced agendas with both benefits and drawbacks that are significant. If agendas are mandatory currently, that just means that some of the current agendas were poorly designed (and indeed I think, as I believe do many others, that TMP was very poorly designed, while other agendas like Alliance or TWB were equally poorly designed, just in the opposite direction).

@Ktom's response (I hate quoting, it wastes so much space)

I agree one of the issues with the game is a lack of variability in deck building. There aren't multiple optimal builds right now within each build. There aren't really multiple paths to victory even.

Everyone can say, "Hey, why aren't people trying this?" I have some weird builds that are excellent. I have a dragon kill deck. I have a Bara kill deck. It can feel like you're playing a stark murder deck when I get the ball rolling on both. The thing is, I have to optimize cards. I literally have a spreadsheet mathing out which options are the best. There is NO "well this card is interchangable with this card". There are only cards that are better than others. I've said it before and I'll say it again, about the only significant variance in this game when it comes to effects is the Seductive Promise/Die by the Sword/No Quarter decision. Those are about the only 3 cards that I feel are interchangable (and I feel Seductive Promise is very limitedly interchangable). There are probably more, and feel free to name them, but ultimately the issue is that there are just cards that are outright better and should be in your deck. That is the variation killer. When putting in a different card makes your deck weaker, you simply don't do it.

When you will see variation in decks is when there are multiple viable options in each and every card slot. Right now there aren't. Your decision isn't Peyton Manning or Tom Brady. It's Peyton Manning or Ryan Leaf. You don't choose Ryan Leaf. You just don't. We need a LOT more Peyton Manning or Tom Brady decisions. Then you will see diversity in the environment.

And if you hate Tom Brady and/or Peyton Manning, go ahead and substitute your QB of choice. I think we can all agree you don't want Ryan Leaf, though.

Totally disagree.

If cards are interchangeable in a deck, there is no real variety in the game. There is only variety in the titles and the art.

Or, to belabor the metaphor, "Tom Brady or Peyton Manning" is not going to create any real variety when the rest of the offensive team is exactly the same. True variety comes in changing the playbook, then finding the players who make those plays work. Okay, alternatively you can find the players who make things work, then rewrite the playbook to take advantage of their particular talents. The point is that changing the players is not the issue - changing the strategy is.

If there are multiple viable options for each slot, but the slots all fit together in the same way no matter what is filling them, you don't have variety; you have an assembly line. Multiple viable card options for each and every card slot in the deck isn't the answer. Multiple viable purposes for each and every card slot in the deck is. It doesn't matter how many different options you have for your "direct kill event" slot if you cannot come up with a deck that doesn't have a "direct kill event" slot; you'll still be playing the same deck.

That card that makes your deck weaker probably makes some other deck stronger, but people don't go out to find that other deck. And why should they? There is a proven, efficient path to victory (primarily aggressive control decks…) in this environment, so there is pretty much no incentive to come up with a different strategy.

That's the point I am making here. People come up with one strategy, then look for different ways to do the same thing (in the same or different Houses). It's a "path of least resistance" thing. When you're locked into a "fight fire with fire" mindset, no one thinks to look at what water can do.

Honestly, there are plenty of strategies that people are not playing, or trying to play. They're not as easy to build and to optimize, and a lot of them are far less forgiving on mistakes during play. So they are seen as "not competitive," when they probably could be if someone put the effort in to really make the deck efficient. That's one thing I think the CCG had over the LCG - considerably more variety of strategy that was worth playing. And without variety of strategy, variety of cards doesn't really get you anywhere.

HoyaLawya said:

Prove it.

No seriously, prove it. You are stating your opinion as a fact, I'd like to see you prove that in a world without agendas each House would be reduced to a single build of the most efficient cards. There is too much linear and non-linear design purposefully done in this game in my mind to be able to build a deck that is created purely around a matrix of strict values.

Now you could make a claim that each House would end up with a couple of builds based on the linear and non-linear designed cards which act as the core but the chassis of the deck would still be its most efficient cards… but that is exactly the situation we have right now, but the agenda is being used in place of the linear and non-linear cards, or occasionally in conjunction with them.

THe simplistic argument for no agendas equals more choices for T1 is that all other cards are still available, you just lose out on the agendas that people are using to provide an additional advantage.

And the idea that there is some mystical agenda that will bring diversity and numerous deck builds to each faction is ridiculous. Any such agenda would see a bunch of various designs, just like the Maesters Path did, and then each faction will settle on what is believed to be the most efficient use of it… boom and suddenly we have a single agenda knocking all the others out and each faction putting forward a single perceived top deck. Boooring.

That the Agendas are not perfect, and that they have varying abilities and strengths depending on which faction you try to use it with, and each faction can field decks with multiple agendas is a strength, that you apparently believe is a design flaw. Munchkins in rpg's say very similar things about everything being optimized and the system designed for min-maxing. They don't understand that weaknesses and discovering how to compensate for them spur creativity. That simple answers are more likely to kill it, and anything perceived as being very strong will warp the field as players gravitate towards it, but cards that people disagree on or even argue over whether it is good or bad or simply okay are what drives the creative process.

@ktom

Ironically I think we actually agree more than disagree, LoL

I see Peyton Manning and Tom Brady as too very different quarterbacks that most would consider to be equally great options. Maybe a better comparison would be Eli Manning vs. Ben Roethlisburger or Andrew Luck vs. RGIII. So I think that might have been a poor example on my part.

I'm going to keep going with football because the comparisons are easier for me. I want more decisions like that. I want to have to choose between Victor Cruz and Calvin Johnson, not being able to put both in my deck. I want to choose between Frank Gore and Darren Sproles, JJ Watt or Jason Pierre-Paul, Andrew Luck or RGIII. I have tried a LOT of builds. The cards just don't give you that flexibility right now.

For example, there really isn't an alternative to Northern Cavalry Flank. If you play Stark and don't play them, you're probably doing it wrong. I've played Stark a long time and I don't think there is any deck that would benefit from not having them. They are simply that good. You can say that a Direwolf deck might not need them, but my counter argument would be that the deck would be better if it found a way to fit them in. That's the kind of example we have in this game. There's no decision making on cards like that. I want to decide between having Northern Cavalry Flank or a card like Damon Dance-for-Me. There aren't enough equally good cards to pick from that you have to pick and choose how to make your deck. You have 20 great cards, 20 good cards, and 1000 bad cards. I'm obviously exaggerating, but I think that sentiment is agreeable.

And I think my No Quarter comparison missed the mark. That comparison was more to illustrate that it's the closest thing to parity in decision making. You can actually make a war crested deck or a unique deck out of Stark and still get a great kill effect whichever you choose. The cards look like they don't increase variability when it is in fact the opposite. Suddenly all those war crest characters are equally as viable as the uniques. You can run a unique light deck with a lot of war crests or a unique heavy deck with no war crests and both have access to the same powerful kill effect. Or you can run a power heavy deck and not pay any attention to your war crests and uniques and use seductive promise which is almost as good. 3 different deck types are now more viable because there are 3 cards that are roughly equal in power.

In an ideal world, there would be so many good cards that you might cut a card from your deck that another player chooses to play in theirs and both of those decks would be equally viable. We only get that through agendas right now. It's unfortunate. In an ideal world, the links would be just as effective in a Maester's Path deck as in a non-Maester's Path deck. Right now, I think you'd be hard-pressed to say that. Right now, Knights are really only good out of a Knights deck. Wildlings are only good out of a wildling deck. Maesters are only good out of a Maester deck. The agendas are actually becoming a band-aid for the lack of equality in card design.

Hey! That in itself might be a topic. Agendas are a band-aid for inequality in card design… Hmmm… I'll have to think about that more.

Northern Cavalry Flank is not an auto-include in Stark. Stark Siege, I tend to agree with, but it's really not a good fit in, say Stark Winter. It's an expensive character to use and there are better uses for that gold slot.

I agree with a lot of your post but not with certain parts because it is leaning in the direction of a lot of preference and intrinsic value to certain types of cards.