Viper Combo and Event Madness

Oberyn Martell has always been a type of extremes that doesn't leave anyone indifferent. He loses his mind when remebering the murder of her sister and nephews by Gregor Clegane. With the right combination, and a pair of "You Murdered her Children," he quietly puts himself in strength 52. We may think that putting toghether the right cards may be, but thanks to our friends Tyrell and the Annals of Castle Black the combo joins relatively easy. The hard part is to defend ourselves against the resources and obstacles of the rival.

The deck has an easy plan. During the first and second rounds we want to see as many events as we can and then replay them all in the third round through Annals of Castle Black. We play EVENTS LIKE CRAZY, events that allow us to draw, that cycle us, that look for the pieces that we miss, that look for defenses, etc. The deck plays 25 events and many give us drawng or are searchers, so you can get an idea of ​​the speed at which we can launch them. IN THIRD ROUND PLAY ALL OF THEM AGAIN and then we recruit Viper + Crown of Golden Roses + Seal of the Hand. We raise the strength of the Viper to 13 and play two events to double strength. We attack and attack, and for every 5 strength of difference for which we win challenge we take 1 power.

Against my hom'es wall or against my cat the deck is very solid. We always reach the combo. However, in real game and tournament is not competitive enough. All the houses have cards that plunge us completely into misery: Treachery, Nightmares, Winterfell, Craven, Milk of the Poppy, Melisandre (any version), an economic choke of winter decks etc. We have defenses and answers against some of these, but in practice if we defend ourselves a lot we take longer to fight and the opponent will be able to reach 15 ower. But I think the mechanics of the deck are interesting and original, and the plan to play events and replay them is especially solid. It is really easy to put together the cards we need with the Tyrell engine. The problem is to defend the Viper. Note that all the Hand's Judgment and Nightmares that we see can be used again in the first rounds to obstruct our opponent's game, and we will keep them available in the turn of the combo thanks to Castle Black. It is a deck that requires practice, but the system is caught fast.

Hear Aioria Roar!

Author: Benji

With Lions of the Rock will comes a powerful agenda: Rains of Castamere, designed by Álvaro "Aioria" Rodríguez. It re-introduces in Game of Thrones one mechanic that has consistently being restricted in V1: plot manipulation. Inside this article we will make a presentation of the background over the card, before analyzing the playstyle around it and the Schemes plot currently available.

Champion de France 2016 : The Young and the White Wolf

Left on Core Set with a sketch, the first cycle reinforced Stark by providing support cards. Wolves of the North finally provides them the lacking ones to build a complete mechanic. In the following, Stark Fealty becomes a dominant deck of the metagame, with a strategy relying on board construction, defense and focus toward power challenge.

Authors of the blog also worked on the archetype, and Benji's version was successfully played by the young prodigee Meilhem, who won the Championnat de France 2016 at 17 years ! Therefore, the  article is now a bit updated. 

Three is the New Two

Translation: Benji

The game has changed more than it appears.  A thing attracting attention is that the cost of cards (especially characters) has substantially increased compared to previous version, as well as plot gold revenue. It could look like the system is balanced (3 more golds at setup, many plots which can provide 7 or more golds), but in practice it does not look as a certitude.

I made a comment for last version on this article that an increase of one gold cost has not the same impact  from 0 to 1  and from 1 to 2 in a economic scale going up to 4 or 5 according to decks. Today we have more cards at 4,5,6,7 gold cost, so this effect is even bigger than before.  Any first edition player can appreciate that we are hardly able to play more than three cards per turn.  It looks as a symptom of the non-correlation between the increase in plot gold revenue and card costs. Plots provide 1 or 2 more gold, while characters with minimum quality now cost at least 4 (while we previously had way better quality characters at cost 3).

It’s a small introduction to the real topic of this article: the terrible number 3 in this second version.

Expectations on Valar Morgulis

Author: Benji

The emblematic card of AGoT V1 is back, but for which consequences? In this article, I explain my view on why Valar will require specific mechanics to be played, on contrary to V1. Then, I will analyze the consequences on deckbuilding and metagame, before concluding why I think Valar will harm the game.

Deckbuilding: Doing Numbers

In the past I already made some articles about deck building based on mathematics. One was about the setup (what is anachronistic currently) and other about the cost weight calculation in your deck, what can yet be useful.

For 2.0, we need to do new analysis since many of the “numbers” had changed for the game. Overall costs, gold income, limited cards & economy producers are quite different than before. The true is that, so far, we had not enough data to achieve solid conclusions. I assume that metagames are not 100% competitive at all, the limited card pool (383 cards for eight factions) and the “young” state of the game and the community did lead us yet to the “top decking” at all.

Anyway, despite that “perhaps”, this preliminary observations can give us a good point to start with.

7th Shades of 7th Economic Plots

Author: Benji

Plots dedicated at economy were marginal in V1: Plotlines provide the necessary gold revenue and were mainly aimed at designing overall strategy with plot effects. In a V2 putting emphasis on main characters, plot dedicated toward paying them became a must have. Several versions of economic plots has been released, all being variations around the value 7.

Let’s dig into their specificities on this short article.

Las tramas destinada a la economía eran bastante marginales en la 1.0. Las tramas en general daban el oro necesario para mantener el desarrollo de la partida y la estrategia general se centraba en escogerlas por sus efectos. En la 2.0 se ha puesto el énfasis en los personajes principales, por lo que las tramas dedicadas a poder jugarlos son obligatorias. Se han publicado muchas versiones diferentes de tramas económicas, pero todas ellas son una variación alrededor de un único valor: el 7.