Sorry for the odd construction of the episode this week, but we've been trying to bring Greg back into the fold, so we had to record segments in different places, with a slightly different cadre of hosts. This week we look at some listener mail, discuss tournament etiquette, and comment on the brand new Melee restricted list.

i love how these episodes somehow always seem to come out the same weekend i need to travel an hour to get to my meta meetup. the timing is always perfect.

Some great points in this podcast.

Just ban TMP, Summer and Winter agendas and you would see a whole lot of new deck types.

I'm curious if you would actually see a plethora of new decktypes just for removing those agendas- particularly Summer and Winter. Those builds have quite a few powerful draw deck cards that hinge on it being the appropriate season. For example would you really see substantially different Greyjoy choke builds that didn't utilize the White Raven, Wintertime Marauders, and Ice Fisherman, or would you still see those builds being mostly the same with the exclusion of the Kings of Winter agenda?

Kennon said:

You probably wouldn't see very different Greyjoy Choke builds because there is a limited number of choke cards available so if someone wanted to make a choke build a handful of cards are obvious and necessary inclusions to build around. Summer builds though I can see opening up a lot more especially if some newer draw mechanics were introduced and banning TMP would just open up the environment a lot as it covers the weaknesses in every house. Over the years, I've seen quite a few builds use Summer agenda just because its simple draw whereas Winter builds seem quite a bit more specific and built around the handful of choke cards.

While I agree about the Maester's Path by and large, I'm curious about Kings of Summer now. You just said that you've seen quite a few builds use the agenda just for the draw. It sounds like these builds then (particularly given the fact that you're contrasting against Winter Greyjoy Choke) must have been substantially different from each other in order to warrant your mention in this context. Given that differentiation, it would seem that the original premise (that the agenda is restricting creativity) is actually inaccurate.

I would posit then, that a larger portion of what we want is to be able to quantify which decks are different and to what extent. For instance, while there may be a variety of substantially different Summer builds available, the lack of complete information regarding them (in general, I would say decklists) prevent us from doing much more than shorthanding them as "Summer" decks due to the visibility of the agenda card. Without a more consistent determination and dissemination of the contents of these decks and the context of their usage, I find it difficult to theorize beyond my own biased tendencies in deck construction.

Step 1: make a 51 card deck with no draw

Step 2: add summer agenda, 3x black raven, Sammy and carrion bird.

Step 3: profit with your new 'summer' deck

dcdennis said:

Exactly. Although you forgot Gilly 1x.

As far as I've seen (and done for that matter), Summer is just run as the most efficient neutral draw engine in the game… I was never a fan of the blanket non-raven immunity on White/Black Raven, since it sort of forced you to run at least the Carrion Birds just to have a small chance of negating the almost free card advantage. And if you're already running those, and don't have an Agenda for your deck… Why not join the team yourself? It always made me chuckle when people were complaining of TMP with a few chains as an easy 'throw in ' agenda. I guess we're just so used to the Seasons, that we don't even see them for what they are anymore.

I'm not sure if Winter and Maesters becoming so popular is a counter-swing towards the ease and effectiveness of Summer draw (since both builds have a good chance of denying the draw from Summer) or just coincidence that made Summer a bit more iffy in the environment. However, the two matters are definately linked.

Kennon said:

Its not so much summer builds as a whole that I find have gotten a bit old and boring but more the summer draw engine. Its the fact that summer just provides an easy draw engine that can fit into almost any house build as Drakey mentioned. Thats what is a bit old and tired to me. Its not really the entire builds that focus on cards that use summer because the cards and summer mechanics would still be available if the summer agenda was removed from the environment. Maybe a deck without the option of an easy summer agenda would have to go Knights or come up with another draw engine to compensate.

Of course banning the agenda isn't the only potential solution. For instance here in Cali, after Meraxes was released you almost never saw any Targ summer agenda anymore because Meraxes provided the consistent main draw engine for Targ builds. People might still run summer dependent cards on occasion but the agenda was no longer necessary for the draw engine. Maybe another solution isn't banning the summer agenda but just coming out with in-house draw engine cards that are just as efficient as summer so there is no need to run the old tried and true (and boring imo) draw engine.

I think this does touch on a greater issue with the whole LCG experiment. When cards are never rotated out, there is a great potential for power creep to keep new cards worth purchasing and being used in decks. Its hard from a design perspective to keep making horizontally competitive decks. This is why I love the new naval mechanic because it adds something horizontally to the game without just vertical power creep. Simply rotating out some old draw mechanics would necessitate new types of draw and that could open up possibilities for new and interesting draw mechanics. I personally prefer in-house draw mechanics that differ from House to House because that accentuates variety between the houses rather than having say 4 different houses running the same draw engine.

Glad to hear Greg on this episode.

I too am ready for some sort of significant limitation on the card pool, whether that's rotation or more restrictions to deck building. I still like the idea of limiting decks to 2-3 blocks + expansions. Maybe the best way to do it in order to encourage the most recent block is restrict a deck to Core Set + house expansion + cards from any 2 blocks + current expansion. This way, if there were only a few chapter packs out, then players wouldn't have to choose the current expansion as one of their blocks. This would also make the chapter packs more attractive in that new cards would probably represent a larger portion of any given deck.

Twn2dn said:

Although I'm generally skeptical of rotation, I do like the idea of "any two blocks + current expansion" rather than a "most recent x blocks" model. I'd be much more hesitant to invest in cards knowing that they have an expiration date.

edited for typos

Twn2dn said:

Yeah, I'm a big supporter of this idea - and last brought it up a few months back. I'll link the thread not to necro it, but so that you can have a look at some of the opposing viewpoints that were posted there at the time (although the discussion centered around the size of the card pool more than some of the other, just as important, considerations). I've actually tried building a few decks with a similar self-imposed ruleset. It certainly changed my approach to deck building. It also slowed decks down a fair bit.

As was mentioned, even if you don't believe there's power creep and acknowledge that we're still using old cards to great effect, the decks we played have become more efficient because of higher redundancy and greater support for those mechanics. Bara rush is faster not because of better characters, but just more "rush" characters to flesh out the theme. For rush decks in general limiting the card pool just slows them down, but for control decks you can drop below a critical threshold of "being able to control your opponent" and make the archetypes non-viable.

Note: Logistically speaking, the "restriction" would have to include either a "These cards can be used regardless of cycle" list, or allow more than one Deluxe expansion - as there are cards for other houses in house-specific deluxe expansions that would effectively never see play. A "not restricted by CP" list might include some Agendas (KotR, Treaty, Alliance, Neutral House, etc), a few plots, and a handful of neutral locations and possibly a few characters (eg. Carrion Birds).

Those logistics are why I see it being awhile before there's any such major shakeup of the competitive card pool. It has to be planned in advance, and the plan from the beginning was to never have any rotation.

I think limited to x blocks it's a great idea. It will shake the meta like no new cards, and even with the slight rebalancing that creates each new FAQ, it's hard not to admit deckbuilding is getting a bit stale.

Anyway, I think the game can surely support more formats, I mean, other games manage to have as much as four formats coexisting. It currently supports a really poor one like Melee, talking from the competitive standpoint. I gladly choose to play a limited to 2 or 3 blocks instead of Melee at every big tournament (Regionals, Stahleck and the like), even without getting to design any cool champion card

Being all the tournament scene community based as it already is (how many % of tournaments are organized by FFG?), I think if the format proves to be fun and balanced, which isn't clear yet, it may get popular real quick.

So why don't we try it, at Stahleck for example?

DC seems to put on 2 events in addition to the official regional each year (feb and oct.). Average attendance btw 15-20. That being said we attempted an alternate format a month ago and had our lowest turnout ever (14).

dcdennis said: