Summer Burn v4

Possibly consider using the new summer agenda 'A Song of Fire' as a player using the new winter agenda 'A Song of Ice' will completely deny you the abilitry to make it summer and thus making your current agenda work against you

Possibly consider using the new summer agenda 'A Song of Fire' as a player using the new winter agenda 'A Song of Ice' will completely deny you the abilitry to make it summer and thus making your current agenda work against you

I'd say possibly not, as looking at recent tourney descriptions here on cardgamedb it seems that Song decks are pretty rare anyway, so you'll be trading in the bonus card each turn in most games for reduced function in one or zero games.

Depends on how you read the metagame, and its a gamble either way.

Other constructive criticisms...

I'd consider adding more / tweaking your influence, as you have a lot of influence costs to play, and a lot of your influence locations are discard-for-benefit. While Summer Sea is faster than Eastern Fiefdoms, its non-permanent Influence, so I'd switch the ratio from 2/3 to 3/2. I'd say also lose Shivering Sea and one Black Raven in favour of two Red Keeps.

I'd also review your characters, worry about any that cost 3+ in terms of how that might hurt your set up, and find cheaper alternatives unless they directly support summer or burn.

Thank you for your response. @Asklepios sadly we don't have the "Red Keep" for now^^

btw.
This is the Deck that i will use in two days. It's just a "little" Store Championship so nothing special but jeah.

Deck Built with CardGameDB.com GoT Deckbuilder

Summer Burn

House (1)
House Targaryen (Core) x1

Agenda (1)
Kings of Summer (ASoS) x1

Plot (7)
A Time for Ravens (ACoS) x1
A Song of Summer (ASoS) x1
Breaking and Entering (LotR) x1
Loyalty Money Can Buy (QoD) x1
Marched to the Wall (LoW) x1
Threat from the North (PotS) x1
Valar Morghulis (Core) x1

Character (30)
Khal Drogo (Core) x1
Viserys Targaryen (Core) x1
Viserion (QoD) x1
Maester Aemon (ACoS) x1
Carrion Bird (ASoS) x2
Ser Preston Greenfield (TK) x1
Killer of the Wounded (QoD) x3
Bloodrider (MotA) x3
The Titan's Bastard (Core) x1
Red Warlock (ASoS) x3
Queen's Knight (TWot5K) x3
Pyat Pree (QoD) x1
Missandei (RotK) x1
Horseback Archers (QoD) x3
Gilly (RoW) x1
Dragon Thief (AE) x3
Brown Ben Plumm (Core) x1

Location (14)
Eastern Fiefdoms (Core) x3
Khal Drogo's Tent (Core) x1
Lady Daenerys's Chambers (Core) x3
Summer Sea (Core) x3
The Kingsroad 29 (FaI) x1
Kingsroad Fiefdom (QoD) x3

Event (9)
Field of Fire (QoD) x3
Forever Burning (Core) x3
Westeros Bleeds (Core) x3

Attachment (7)
Sun Stroke (QoD) x1
Black Raven (ASoS) x2
Flame-Kissed (Core) x3
Milk of the Poppy (Core) x1

What do you think?

Okay. It seems i'm too dumb to play this right. I have NO CHANCE AT ALL
against all players in our group.
I lose hard against a Lannister with kneel and high mill/claim. I lose about 80% against our Stark and against our Baratheon Sails i never scored a win after about 15 games.
I'm so depressed I'll get on the last place on the tournament -.-

Okay. It seems i'm too dumb to play this right. I have NO CHANCE AT ALL
against all players in our group.
I lose hard against a Lannister with kneel and high mill/claim. I lose about 80% against our Stark and against our Baratheon Sails i never scored a win after about 15 games.
I'm so depressed I'll get on the last place on the tournament -.-

I don't think its an intelligence thing, more likely a card pool and experience thing.

While I'm by no means a great player myself and am relatively new to this game, I have the advantage of a near complete card set via my friend, and experience playing CCGs since M:TG first came out, which makes a lot of concepts like card advantage, resource curves and deck interactions second nature to me, even if the specifics of AGOT are new to me. I also have to say I've learnt a great deal from this website, and in particular I found this article http://www.cardgamed...concepts-r369to be the most useful thing I'd ever read on the game.

I think the first thing you want to do with a new deck is play lots of games with it before you get to a tournament environment, but that's just me. Without playing games I'd not have realised just how good Lannister hyperkneel is, or how disruptive Valar Morghulis is to almost every second tier deck out there, or the importance of your initiative values and of 2-claim plots.

Let me double back to your deck though, make some comments, and likely the very helpful and more expert players here will then comment on my comments...

House (1)
House Targaryen (Core) x1
Agenda (1)
Kings of Summer (ASoS) x1
Plot (7)
A Time for Ravens (ACoS) x1
A Song of Summer (ASoS) x1
Breaking and Entering (LotR) x1
Loyalty Money Can Buy (QoD) x1
Marched to the Wall (LoW) x1
Threat from the North (PotS) x1
Valar Morghulis (Core) x1

Ok, lets start here.

Targaryen and Summer is where we start. The first question is which of the two summer agendas, if either.
Targaryen are traditionally strong on burn, on attachments, are pretty good at miltary and power (though not the best at either) and weak on intrigue. They have the best keyword in the game but are influence reliant. They have some decent draw, but they're no Lannisters.
Kings of Summer helps boost your draw, Song of Fire is good in a Kings of Winter heavy metagame, and essential in a Song of Ice heavy metagame. Summer means more income for you and everyone else, and this naturally synergises with the draw, as you have more gold to spend on the more cards you have.

So, plot cards. You only get seven of these, so you want seven cards that are STRONG. Never just include plots because you think they have a kind of cool effect. Include plots because they strongly support your deck's theme or counteract its weaknesses.

A Time for Ravens : Kind of essential for a Summer deck almost always.
A Song of Summer : A strong enough card that you don't even need to be using it in a Summer deck, but even better in this context.
Breaking and Entering: A dubious choice, as Targaryens often won't be the strongest at intrigue, and while 3/4/2 is nice stat wise there's other 2 claim cards out there that will better match Targaryen Summer.
Loyalty Money Can Buy: This is a great plot card, no doubt, but I feel it belongs in decks that need to slow the game down. Given the theme of card advantage over time, it kind of makes sense, but even so I think there may be stronger choices.
Marched to the Wall: A decent utility card, for sure, but again its just "strong" not "strong and supporting my deck" so I'd think about it very carefully.
Threat from the North: This is a great synergy with Targaryen burn, but more on this later.
Valar Morghulis Worth including in any deck that isn't hyper-aggressive, as resets buy time.

So, coming onto the deck, you've basically got some cool things going on here:

Burn and recursion of burn cards through LDChambers and Forever Burning and the excellent Field of Fire, as well as some character based burn.
Influence-heavy resets and some clever characters that dodge resets.
Some good ambushers.

So what we're looking at, theme wise, is clearing the board, burning, zooming in and out of shadows. A general theme of attrition and board control.

The flaw here, I think, is trying to do too many things at once, and ending up not great at any of them. You won't draw cards as fast as some decks, you don't aggro as well as some decks, you don't rush as fast as rush decks. Its certainly up there with the burn decks, but it doesn't burn as well as Targ KotHH. Its got nice reset/attrition tricks, but less so than Martell/Bloodthirst or even Martell/KotHH. All in all, this is a slow growing deck, but without the defensive strengh to go slow.

So here's some ideas:

First direction: Go pure card advantage and strength on table. Strip out a lot of the burnination, throw in three times Summer Reserves, 3 x Fairweather Followers, and choose a lot of low cost high value Targaryen cards for better set up and better speed. As gold spending becomes more efficient, swap out plot cards for lower income higher claim ones.
Second direction: Go heavier burn. Add more influence, add more burn, remove anything in the deck that doesn't relate to burn. Take out the clever reset tricks and reset dodgers, and just go for efficient attackers and burn, such as tricons not kneeling to attack or cheap bicons (like Gilly, who you have).
Third direction: Go heavier reset. Add more reset tricks, add more reset resilient characters like Syrio Forel. Expect Martell/Bloodthirst to be better than you at resetting, and Baratheon recursion to be better at recursing, but otoh in a matchup against those deck, you'll be in a stronger position than most because of reset resilience. Probably not the strongest deck, but one that may thrive in a certain metagame.

Basically, don't try to do too many things at once with your deck. Build around one concept rather than several. Look for combos that generate off any combination off cards in deck rather than just specific pairs. Look for synergy rather than shagga.

Most importantly when picking cards, don't think "is this card great?" but rather "is this card great for my deck?". Hence while Bloodrider is an excellent all round card for Influence heavy decks, its not as good for a pure burn deck... something like Shadow Parasite is a stronger choice in that context. While Pyat Pree is a fantastic aggro card for a tricon deck, he's out of place in a deck that relies on resets and burn. While Kingsroad is great value for initiative and gold, its worth less in a deck that needs influence and has stronger locations to pick from, and is already generating a lot of gold. While Khal Drogo and Viserys cleverly dodge resets, they're less efficient if you're trying to burn your way to victory or use influence for your tricks.

Even a great card, like Marched to the Wall, can be a bad choice in the wrong environment as it goes against the idea of resets and it occupies a slot that might support your deck concept better

I really thank you for this clear and long post!
Now that the SC ist over i withdraw from Burn for now. I got 6th from twelve people. Overall i'm satisfied with the result. =)
I played against a Bara with some Shadows and recursion, Bara Black Sails (the one from our group, of course i lost but it was a close match), Martell Bloodthirst and
a very hard lose against a Lanni Hyperkneel. With a Cersei and two dupes in round one i was pretty helpless. In round two the game was over.

I must agree with a lot of things you sad. But not with all. Draw is pretty important. The Summer kingsroad is just there for draw. The income is nice to have but not critiacal. We thought that one is enough to include.
Marched to the wall saved my ass a lot of times. After a reset or something like that. Against the Martell Player i flipped one after his only Char was the Viper.
Loved the look on his face. Especially in a "Burn"/"Jump" Deck this is an essential Plot. On Pyat i have to agree BUT.
As you said, Targ is low on Intrigue. WIth Pyat i tried to cover that a LITTLE bit. But i just love the kill effect on him. Even if i flip Valar.
It's always nice to get the intrigue trough and kill a Keycard But i woulnd't include him next time.
And yeah, about the bloodriders. They are sooo nice but not that good in a burn deck. Allthough i canceled some critical abilitys. The Black Sail player wanted to use
Dale to get his damn Brightwater Man-at-Arms back. Again i loved the look on his face after i canceled this =)

My next project is a pure Jump Deck.
oh and btw.
As i stated a few times: I'm from Germany and we miss a lot of cards. Of course i would include Incinerate or Syrio. Or The red Keep. Sadly we don't have this cards. And im sure
we won't get them a while. As far as i know we get Conquest and Defiance first until the reprints will be translated :/

Oh wow, didn't know that.

At least every other German is playing with the same cards, so there's no disadvantage.

I guess a smart trick for the German metagame would be to look back in time to the tournament winners of the English metagame at the equivalent time.

Jeah =)
Another thought of mine was a Winter Aggro Control with more Control Kings of Winter, Winter Kingsroad
and some things to cancel. Or even a Winter Burn xD I'll keep you posted =)

Can you do greyjoy choke with your card set?

I'm actually in a similar place to you, as while the UK has access to all the card sets, my game group doesn't, as the player who owns all the cards stopped a cycle or two back, and another player who has just started buying into the game is only Bloodthirst onwards (plus base sets).

I haven't been to any tourneys yet, or bought any cards, but I'm getting addicted fast, building decks most nights of the week and playing twice a week to bring myself up to speed. Happy to say I'm definitely the best player in our group, but as I said, thats because I've been playing CCGs since day 1, rather than because I'm an AGOT expert.

The only cards I have regular access to are Greyjoy, Targaryen and Lannister ones, and I haven;t even seen most of the Baratheon or Stark ones except on the spoiler links, and I can confidently state that the player who took that half of the set has no clue how to build great decks or to play the game well.

Right now, I've found the strongest deck I can build with the cards available is Lannister Hyperkneel, though I've found Greyjoy Choke is a close second, and as soon as I can get hold of that upcoming Lannister event card that lets you reveal a new plot card I have some ideas I want to try out.

All in all though, playing much as you're playing, trying out different cards and decks and seeing what works.

Incidentally, re: your deck, did you find yourself short of Influence as I thought might happen, or was I wrong about that?

Hi,

the German card pool is quite special, in the way that we are missing many cycles, but not in a chronological order. We got Clash of Arms, Time for Ravens, Oldtown, Song of the Sea and Kingsroad. So looking back in the history still leaves you with some holes you got to fix yourself. Otoh, this is quite interesting, since you can come up with new deck ideas without having to worry about the true and tested ones of the English pool (at least not all of them^^).

From personal experience, GJ Choke has access to quite a lot of it's important cards in the German pool, in fact, I just played against it in the finals at our SC this past weekend.

Regarding the deck: As Asklepios already pointed out, the deck needs more focus. You lack the tools and card advantage to oppose some of the more basic strategies you are going to run into. I would probably try the reset heavy version proposed earlier, but thats mostly because many decks in my meta are quite soft to that. On a more general note, without having done the math, but it seems your deck can produce some rather poor setups, since you have quite a few cards you don't actually want to set up. Also, why are you playing Viserion, just for the ability to destroy zero cost locations? Maybe you could try out the new 3cost dragon with the Int icon to help on that front?

Regards, ocedy

Hehe thank you for your post =)
Btw. we CAN do ah Greyjoy Choke BUT... how do i say this. I just own Targaryen^^ We are a group of for people.
Together we bought the Core-Set and started playing. After a few games we chose ONE house we want to play with.
I chose Targ. Now: Whenever a Cycle is released we bye it and split it among us. ALL of the In-House Cards are distributed among us
of course. Only some Neutral Cards and Plot's are left. We "bet" on those or better said, we look them up and talk about them
Something like "okay, this card would belong in a Martell or Targ Deck. Who want's it more that the other card?"
Haha xD That must sound so stupid. So all i have are the complete Targ cards. Whenever i need some other cards we just "write" or even "print" them
to test it. For the tournament of course we take the real ones.