All Things Shagga - The Top Shagga: Tales of Champions

This week, All Things Shagga turns its attention to the Tales of Champions cycle, bringing us one closer to returning the bi-weekly decklists that you all know and love. The ToC cycle brought two new keywords to the game and a plethora of new melee format centric cards and a smattering of cards built to expand previous themes that had turned out to be a little weak. It’s also the first chapter pack cycle of the LCG designed after the switch over to Damon as lead design. Let’s take a look at how the Shagga cards of this cycle compare to those that came before.

Lyanna Stark (ODG) - Lyanna operates on many levels here. At first blush, she pushes another small theme of the set with her punishment of non-uniques. As well, she offers up a fascinating figure from the books that we see just in flashbacks. The Shagga factor, though, comes from what would normally be a penalty. Enter Killer of the Wounded for a card that suddenly turns this drawback into a positive. Since the Killer is non-unique, it can immediately stand itself once it kneels for any reason, because it will immediately have its strength lowered by Lyanna. At first, this could be abused several ways, but for our example here, I’ll suggest putting an apprentice collar on the Killer, so that you can load up on chains. While the Killer has since been limited to three times per round, and of course The Maester’s Path cannot move chains directly onto him at the moment, the potential was there for a time to generate gold every phase, return every attachment from your discard pile to hand, give a trait to everything in play, or whatever combination of attachment effects struck your fancy.

Satin (WLL) - Satin, of course, was one of the featured ways to breathe a little new life into a trait based theme deck that hadn’t ever quite taken off. Unfortunately for Neds everywhere, Satin still didn’t seem to be enough to put Night’s Watch on the map. Fortunately for Shaggas everywhere, it turned out to have a very different, very interesting interaction. Once again, get Lyanna in play along with a Killer of the Wounded and Satin himself. Now find any way you’d like to give the Killer the Night’s Watch trait. Once you’ve done this, feel free to kneel the Killer to deck every player in the game! Man, I can’t think of many more Shagga things you could accomplish, but sadly (or maybe fortunately) the Killer of the Wounded has been toned down to bring this sort of zaniness into line.

Queen's Guard (TBC) - Ok, so in many ways, this was probably supposed to be an attempt at bringing Jaime styles of kneeling control decks to often wild melee format and sure, it does accomplish that as I witnessed at the World Championship Weekend most recently. It also turns out, however, that this unique brand of passive trigger turns out to be a big draw to Shagga players as well. There’s just something quite fun about getting a Queen’s Guard out and a Flogged and Chained on an opponent’s character and then playing a Castellan of the Rock (not an uncommon occurance). Getting to kneel four characters each time you play any one Lannister character or location turns out to be a pretty great feeling, and looking for as many triggers as possible and thus as many passive kneels as possible, turns out to be an awesome feeling.

Robert Baratheon (TGM) - Party Bob here is this cycle’s obligatory “WOW!” effect, and boy does he pull it off in spades. It’s harder to find a more impressive effect than making each of your opponents fulfill claim instead of just the one. Here the melee keyword shines as Robert just gets bigger and harder to defend as opponents add characters to the party. Of course, most players are going to be looking to boost his effectiveness, so any of the standard methods of building an uber character apply. Feel free to give him stealth, deadly, joust, another instance of melee or anything that you might like.

Rickard Karstark (WLL) - This time around, Rickard fills the role of Shagga card that didn’t quite get there. Looking at his abilities and particularly the no-agenda clause, it becomes readily apparent that this is a character who was designed for players to build decks around. Of course, in melee he shines the best, as four players making military challenges greatly opens up the number of times that you’ll be able to trigger his ability. As well, you might be able to eke out a little bit of extra power by using Winter is Coming to raise your claim as well as the claim of other Stark players at the table if you’re in a pinch. In joust, I think I’d feel a little more confident in being able to boost my own claim with something like an out of house Pike Phalanx backed up with some of Stark’s war crests. Conveniently, this also puts an awful lot of pressure on your opponent as you clear their board and assumedly take advantage of that extra claim on the intrigue and power challenges as well.

There you have it guys. All in all, I think this was a very Shagga friendly set on first release, though it quickly necessitated further errata to the cardpool. What do you guys think? Should we eliminate these multicard, multihouse loops? Has anyone put together a working Rickard Karstark deck?