All Things Shagga - Marwyn Hand of the King

Here we go again, fearless readers! This week, All Things Shagga makes a return to a particular play variant that we haven’t explored in some time- the Hand of the King variant. The official rules can be found on Fantasy Flight Games’ site here, but for those who don’t want to head over there, I’ll summarize it by saying that you build a deck around a single unique character who will be separate from your regular draw deck and will eventually enter play on turn X, where X is their gold cost.

The Cards:

Archmaester Marwyn- The main man here, Marwyn is the one that we’re entrusting with actually running the kingdom while we’re enjoying the power of the throne- ie. our Hand of the King. Marwyn is not a cheap character, so it will be a little while before he earns the necessary gold tokens, but just think about how awesome that ability is when you can kill him off repeatedly in order to trigger his powerful plot copying effect! In HotK, he’ll just lose a gold token and leave play instead of entering the dead pile, where he’ll be ready and willing to come right back into play so that he can be triggered again as soon as you take gold from the opposing Hand or count gold during the next marshalling phase.

City Plots- Ok, so we’re just going to go ahead and list these in a chunk, because you’re probably all getting to be quite familiar with them now. They’re already some of the most powerful plot effects in the game and they only get better as you include more of them. In regular play, they can constrain your plot reveals and make them a bit predictable, but with the ability to trigger others that have already been used, I think we open up some nice additional flexibility.

Poisoned Coin- Of course, we can’t always count on our opponent to make a military challenge so that we can kill Marwyn. Instead, we need a way to do it ourselves. Poisoned Coin provides a great way to do that if we can stand Marwyn. Sure, this will happen every standing phase, but with some of our other effects, we can cheat that earlier in the round. If that doesn’t go according to plan, it’s also a reasonable deterrent/removal card that can hamper our opponent when played on their characters. As well, it can be recurred with Bronze Link and/or popped into play as a surprise with Pale Steel Link.

House Umber Berserkers- These are the other main way to kill Marwyn, and while they offer a bit less fiddly combo potential with the various chain attachments, they’re a much more straightforward version that can kill Marwyn during marshalling, which should be early enough in the round to really make those City plot effects count, as well as enabling our strategy while setting the opponent back quite a bit more in dead characters or lost gold on their Hand. And their Hand and deck almost certainly don’t benefit from being killed like ours does.
Follower of the Many-Faced God- What Stark Maester deck would be complete without this little workhorse? He can stand our Maesters in Marshalling to get extra use out of the more powerful chains and as a nice little side benefit, can be played after we use Flea Bottom to reduce the cost of a character coming into play so that we can stand them and use them that turn.

Thoughts on Play:

This will be on the slower side for Hand of the King decks that I had been seeing when I was last able to play. At the time, two or three cost seemed to be the sweet spot for Hands. Of course, being a more expensive Hand does give us the benefit of being able to challenge against the opponent’s Hand and steal their gold tokens earlier to power him up, since you can only attack a Hand while it’s in play. In fact, with our plan to keep killing Marwyn as soon as possible, we can likely knock him back out of play before the opponent is able to attack him and steal a gold token for their own Hand.

In that early game though, the rest of the deck should play like a fairly normal Stark Maesters deck. The City plots give you quite a bit of control to help slow the opponent down, but we’ve also included a bit more plot manipulation outside of Marwyn. Stark has access to probably the best City plot combo piece right out of the Core Set- Bran Stark! Also, since we’re playing Maesters and will have one on the board turn one thanks to At the Gates, Citadel Law gives us another way to accelerate the City plots and pump them to higher levels of effectiveness.

One plot in particular might be a bit of a surprise, however. I’ve opted to include Wildfire Assault instead of Valar Morghulis for a few reasons. First, if we accelerate plots, it can sometimes leave us in a position where we’re forced to play Valar where it hurts us more than the opponent. Second, that time we’re forced to play it, we may well wipe off our Maesters, and really we aren’t playing all that many, so I’d like to have the option to keep them around. Third and lastly, it gives us the capability to kill of Marwyn while leaving our other characters. Coupled with the additional ability to control whatever characters the opponent has left on the board thanks to Marwyn’s copy ability, I think Wildfire is the right call for us.

The Deck:

Deck Built with CardGameDB.com GoT Deckbuilder

Marwyn HotK

Total Cards: (60)

House:
House Stark

Agenda: (1)
1x The Maester's Path (GotC)

Plot: (7)
1x Wildfire Assault (Core)
1x At the Gates (GotC)
1x A City Besieged (CD)
1x City of Sin (AToT)
1x City of Soldiers (TBoBB)
1x City of Spies (SaS)
1x City of Spiders (TftRK)

Character: (27)
1x Archmaester Marwyn (MotA)
1x Lucas Blackwood (GotC)
1x Ser Kyle Condon (APS)
3x House Umber Berserkers (BoRF)
1x Bran Stark (Core)
1x Maester Aemon (Core)
1x Maester Luwin (FtC)
1x Maester Vyman (TWoW)
2x Oldtown Advisor (GotC)
3x Follower of the Many-Faced God (CD)
1x Brienne of Tarth (PotS)
1x Damon Dance-For-Me (VD)
2x House Tully Recruiter (Core)
1x Osha (AKitN)
1x Reek (MotM)
2x Riders of the Red Fork (FtC)
1x Sansa Stark (AHA)
1x Ser Jorah Mormont (PotS)
1x Shaggydog (Core)
1x Yoren (THtW)

Attachment: (15)
2x Ice (Core)
3x Poisoned Coin (THoBaW)
1x Apprentice Collar (GotC)
1x Black Iron Link (MotA)
2x Bronze Link (FtC)
1x Gold Link (TIoR)
1x Lead Link (CbtC)
1x Pale Steel Link (FtC)
1x Valyrian Steel Link (HtS)
2x Frozen Solid (LoW)

Event: (6)
2x No Quarter (TBC)
2x Citadel Law (MotA)
2x Distinct Mastery (Core)

Location: (12)
1x Frozen Outpost (LoW)
3x Great Keep (Core)
1x Harrenhal (ODG)
3x Narrow Sea (Core)
1x Street of Sisters (Core)
1x Street of Steel (Core)
1x Shadowblack Lane (Core)
1x Flea Bottom (TGM)