All Things Shagga - The House That Shagga (Deck)Built

All Things Shagga - The House That Shagga (Deck)Built

Deckbuilding can be an intimidating process, especially for newer players. The sizable number of cards allowed in the LCG format can be a lot for even the most seasoned player to handle. Even with card databases at a player’s disposal, building a successful deck can already be a daunting task. But what happens when a shiny new combo comes along that a player wants to exploit? Do they simply pull a few cards out of a normal build, throw the combo in and hope that it hits? The simple answer, in most cases, is no.

This week, we’re going to examine the differences in how deckbuilding for a Shagga is a much different approach than deckbuilding for a Jaime. While most Jaime decks tend to have a central theme and a lot of cards that synergize well together, Shagga decks are more based around a very specific combo that can be devastating to the opponent’s chances of winning. There are several questions that a player should ask themselves when building a Shagga based deck. To examine these questions, we will look at a few combos involving everyone’s favorite recently unrestricted card, The Laughing Storm (GotC).


How powerful is the combo?
The first consideration that a player should make is simply how powerful a combo is. If you are going to focus building an entire deck around getting a combo to go off, that combo should hand you the game in most cases. A great example of this is the combo of The Laughing Storm + Citadel Law (MotA) + Any Cheap Maester + Rule by Decree (Core) + Threat from the East (QoD). The idea is that you play The Laughing Storm and a cheap Maester on the setup, kneel the Maester as a pre-plot action to play Citadel Law, and reveal Rule By Decree. Because you now have played an event, your opponent has more cards, and has to discard to four. Then, for your normal plot choice, choose Threat From The East and choose to discard first, causing them to discard another three cards at random. The second part of the effect does not happen because a player (You, with The Laughing Storm) was unable to complete the first part. This leaves your opponent with one card in hand before they reach the first draw phase of the game. Obviously, this can almost hand you a win before you even make a challenge in many cases, unless your opponent had an amazing setup. If your opponent happens to be playing the popular Knights of the Hollow Hill (MotM) agenda, there’s probably little point in them even playing the game out at this point.


Then there are combos that you don’t need to build around, but can enhance any other idea. The Laughing Storm along with Val (RotO) is a particularly potent card drawing engine that fits into virtually any Baratheon deck. Even without the rest of the combo, Threat From The East is an easy plot to add to any deck involving The Laughing Storm, as the 4/6/1 stats are excellent and the effect can be beneficial even without The Laughing Storm in play.

How reliable is the combo?
Now let’s take a look at reliability. The big combo that I talked about above is anything but reliable. There is no way to search for cards for this combo, since you need to have the cards on the setup. Even if you run three copies of The Laughing Storm, three copies of Citadel Law, and several cheap Maesters, any Mathlete can tell you that the chances of you getting The Laughing Storm and a Maester in your pre-setup hand AND having Citadel Law in your hand after the re-draw is not in your favor. On the other hand, the previously mentioned combos with Val or with Threat From The East are far more reliable as they require much less to work, can happen at any point during the game, and each card in the combo is strong enough to play on it’s own.

How reliable is the rest of the deck?
Another thing to consider when building a deck around a large combo is how many slots the combo is taking up in your deck. The large combo we have been talking about takes up, at minimum, about 9-12 slots in your draw deck, plus two plots. This is a significant portion of your available slots when you consider that you really are never building a 60 cards deck, but a deck that is 60 cards minus the obligatory support locations that every deck needs. Finding the balance between how many cards you can devote to making a combo work, how many plots you can devote to finding the cards you need (such as Summoning Season (Core) and Building Season (Core)), and how many cards you need for a backup plan if the combo gets shut down is tricky. This brings us to our next question.


What are you really trying to accomplish?
The amount of a deck that you can devote to making a combo work is just as influenced by what you are really trying to accomplish as how powerful the combo itself is. In most cases, Shagga players are looking for fun and innovative ways to win casual games, not to win every regional tournament they play in. Their concern is not so much their overall win-loss record with the deck, but if they can manage to get the combo off and shock their opponent on a semi-regular basis. Try to remember that when building a Rube Goldberg device of a deck, there are going to be times where one part simply doesn’t work very often. When this happens, try not to get discouraged about the combo. Go back to the drawing board, look for ways to make it more efficient, and keep looking forward to the look on your opponent’s face when you crush them in that innovative way.