You want Arbor out ASAP, but don't burn an entire turn just playing it if you can't keep up with the board on Turn 1. Building Orders followed by Pentoshi usually works fine.
Olenna's Cunning really makes the deck play like Black Sails from 1st Edition, letting you search for whatever 1x is useful at the time. Your win condition usually has Queen of Thorns in play after/during your First Snow turn.
The deck draws a TON. I cut Littlefinger because neutrals are tight, but I can fairly consistently draw 2/3 of my deck and play most of it out. This archetype could be very strong out of Tyrell Banner to the Lion, too, but for now I'm loving Fealty to reduce all the good Loyal Tyrell cards.
FRINGE CARDS:
Rebuilding - Swapped for Calling the Banners, but it is great if you need to reuse a one-off card from discard by fetching it with Olenna's Cunning. Telegraphed if it is an obvious need, but sometimes your opponent has to choose between a character that QoT can cheat in or Tears, and that is never a fun choice. Found myself needing to play it for the gold too often, hence the change to calling.
Reinforcements - 1-0-1 sucks, even with the possible 5g recursion. With the Arbor making it a 4-0-1, however, this is an awesome Varys-recovery plot. KoF is an all-star, and you want to use him early to apply pressure. This lets you play him freely and Varys later, but it jammed up my plot choices early and would force me to use Clash or Jousting at sub-optimal times.
Marched - When you play Varys, this is amazing. I don't find myself always needing to play him, though, and plots are tight. I can't bring myself to cut him, but I can't bring myself to include Marched either. Tough call for me.
Power Behind the Throne - The Arbor helps the stat-line, but it still feels like a win-more card for this deck with so little renown.
Winds of Winter - 2 claim helps speed things up. The deck does feel a little like a grind because there isn't much power grab aside from 1x LSR (may go to 2, but KoF is the only great target unless you are closing the game with Arbor Knight), so 2 claim is helpful.
Every neutral ever - Geeze neutrals are hard to slot in. Wish I could make room for a couple Wildling Scouts, for example. Same for Bodyguard, Hand's Judgement, etc...
Bear and the Maiden Fair - This was in my first version, but felt unnecessary.
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4 Comments
Very interesting! Will you take this to a tournament? And write a report, hopefully?
Thanks!! I may end up taking a version of this to a tourney, but I'm having a hard time deciding if Fealty of Banner of the Lion are better.
The Banner gives more renown and big characters to capitalize on the econ advantage, which is something I constantly found myself wanting when playing the deck.
Fealty lets you really leverage Queen of Thorns more consistently, and I think she is an absolute all-star in the First Snow meta. That said, for now she isn't putting in many closers so I'm not sure.
I have seen a few very solid Banner of the Lion lists, so I'll try that next and see how it plays. Once we get a couple more renown characters for Tyrell I think it will be very powerful, and Mance and his Wildlings in the Stark Deluxe could possibly make this work depending on what they do, since the Arbor gold is there to pay for it.
Really enjoying this list currently.
As a toolbox I think Mare in Heat is necessary.