First Tilt - Character Matters

Welcome back to First Tilt, a column dedicated to helping new players learn the strategies that will help them win the Game of Thrones. If this is your first time reading this column, we recommend you start with the New Player’s FAQ which addresses many common questions and provides links to a wide variety of great articles and resources.

This week we continue with our discussion of basic deckbuilding concepts. Our topic this week: characters! No, not who your favorite characters are from the series, but rather the importance of character cards in deckbuilding. How many do you include? How do you determine which characters go into your deck? What’s a good number of high cost characters and so on.

Basic AGoT deckbuilding principles hold that a typical deck should have about 50% characters. This is a guideline, not a hard and fast rule, but generally you’ll find that when the rule is deviated from the deivation goes in favor of including more than 50% characters, not less. If you think about the underlying principles of the game, this makes sense: because A Game of Thrones, while it may be a game about claiming power and securing the Iron Throne, it is also ultimately about the people fighting for and claiming that power. Not just from a thematic perspective (you have to have someone to claim the throne, and that person needs troops, informants, and followers to rule over) but also from a mechanics perspective, as the AGoT LCG is clearly centered on character cards, with a large chunk of the rules focusing on their abilities and interactions. The large amount of mechanics dedicated to character cards is understandable, because characters are almost exclusively the main way to gain power (dominance through having more wealth being the notable mechanics exception, but good luck with that if you play no characters!).

If we think about the various card types in AGoT, we find the following:

Plot Cards
Location Cards
Character Cards
Attachment Cards
Events

Putting aside plot cards, which are mandatory and form their own deck, we can see that the only way to win a game with the other cards is by including characters. Even powerful locations, like Aegon's Hill (TTotH)and Bear Island (AE), can only get you so far without character support, and they can’t get you the win as most locations don’t typically claim power (with some exceptions, e.g. Corpse Lake (TBC)). Attachment cards are typically attached to characters (and some locations), so they can’t claim power on their own. And though Events can be quite powerful, they too tend to need character support to get you power. All the burn cards in the world may leave a scorched mess on your opponent’s side but aren’t going to claim a win for you without any characters to take advantage of the burn, and those Event cards that give you power tend to do so based on Challenge Phase occurrences, the Challenge Phase being where your characters fight it out.

On the other hand, let us consider a deck made entirely of character cards and what do we see? That a deck made up 100% of character cards (and plots, of course) can win without support from other card types. It may not be competitive, it may not win often, but what it can do is face off in challenges, which are the main way of claiming power. As inadvisable as it may be, you can pretend that every other card type doesn’t exist and still have a chance of winning.

You can even selectively exclude certain categories of cards and still have a shot at winning, as long as that category isn’t characters. For example, you can think Maesters make attachments useless and not include any attachments; you can fear the Newly Made Lord and not include any lands for him to claim; you can be afraid of Paper Shields and its ilk and not bother with events; but, no matter how much you fear Valar Morghulis, you can’t really avoid including characters in your deck.

And that’s why at least half your deck, especially as a beginner, should be character cards.

But, you say, not all characters are the same. Some cost more, and some cost less, and some are unique and some have certain traits...how to decide which characters to include? And that, of course, is a far trickier question. “It depends” is not a very satisfying answer for a strategy column addressing newer players, so let’s delve into some common considerations when it comes to deciding what characters to include.

Low Cost Characters - Most characters cost from 0 to 7 gold, and most plots are going to generate 0-5 gold. Once you get a location or two in play, you will likely boost your income/resource production a bit, but for most decks you’re not typically going to be producing double digit amounts of gold in any given turn. So if you play a 5 cost character, that might eat up all your resources for a turn, which poses a few problems: it leaves you with unused cards in hand, it makes that character vulnerable, it limits the number of challenges you can engage in, and it allows your opponent to outpace you on all these fronts when they play two or three characters for the same price. Even a 3 cost character might eat up most of your resources on turn 1 or 2. Hence, you do not want to have a deck filled with high cost characters, as that will exacerbate all of these issues.

The other problem you will face is that on setup, you receive 5 gold to spend, and every card played with this gold is a card you are able to replace, so you want to maximize the number of setup cards, as this will increase your resources in play and speed up your cycling through your deck (which means more draw and therefore more options). Because of these issues, a beginner deck should include a generous amount of low cost (0, 1, 2) characters. The more you include, the more chance you have a drawing them on setup and of being able to play multiple characters per turn once the game begins.

A general guideline would be: a few zero cost (Refugees are a great choice), a large number of 1-2 cost, a moderate amount of 3 cost, and very few costing 4 or more.

High Cost Characters - Of course, sometimes you just need to drop a bomb on your opponent. In AGoT, the “standard” cost for a “very good” character is 3 gold. If you’re paying anything more than that, then the card needs to be great. For the reasons stated earlier, you don’t want to clog your deck with 4+ gold cost characters. At the same time, you may want to include a small number of big cards for times when you have an ample supply of resources or for when you need a big card to bounce back or push through. Some times these cards will be the center of your deck: for example, Melisandre can form the basis for a stunning Baratheon Rush deck, and Euron Crow’s Eye is a beast who can provide a solid foundation to a Greyjoy melee deck.

There are also cases where high cost cards may not be as pricey as they seem: many of the newer 7 cost cards have reducers built in that reduce their cost depending on how many other forces you already have in play. Manning the City Walls (CD) is a plot that can make that 7 cost Army turn into a free play. But even these cards with reducers should be included in small amounts--after all, you can only include one copy of Manning the City Walls, and reducers that depend on having large amounts of other troops in play are of no help when those other cards are dead and you are looking for a comeback.

So feel free to include a few high cost characters, but be sure you think about why they are in your deck and how/if you’re going to pay for them when you draw them.

Icons, Traits and Crests - If characters are the crucial foundation to an AGoT deck, then challenge icons are the mortar that makes their utility stick. Make sure you cover all three bases, and make sure you are aware of the strengths and weaknesses of your deck. A Stark deck will not have many Intrigue icons, but it should still have a few. A Baratheon deck will likely be brimming with Power icons, so see if you can supplement that surplus with your abilities and cards.

Another area to keep in mind in selecting characters is trait and crest selection. For example, if you want to play Die by the Sword (LoW), be sure to include a good number of War Crests. And if you already have most of your characters selected, check to see if there are synergies you can capitalize on. If you find for example that you have a large amount of Knights, maybe throw in a few more and go with Knights of the Realm as an agenda.

Also, be sure to examine your characters for vulnerabilities. Mercenaries and Allies are traits that subject a character to a number of negative effects, so if you have too many characters with these traits then consider paring them down.

Uniques vs. Non-Uniques - When it comes to uniques, be sure to include three copies of any cards that are key to your deck, so that you can 1) ensure you draw them and 2) provide them with protection by duping them once you have played them. Beyond that, keep in mind that if you include one copy of a unique, you may never even draw them, but if you include three copies you may end up wishing for more variety and options. Three copies of Brown Ben Plumm (Core) sounds awesome, but when you dupe him twice you still end up with only one character in play. Whereas if you include a single copy of him and then include three Refugees, you end up with four characters you can put into play, providing you with much more flexibility in challenges.

At the same time, the most recent cycle provides incentive to stick with uniques and minimize non-uniques, with cards such as The Pale Mare (THoBaW) providing a big stick to wield against non-uniques, and some of the cost reducers in the big armies relying on unique characters in play.

In closing, there’s no right answer for how many uniques to include, but it is still an important consideration to keep in mind while building your deck--look at your deck’s focus, consider your strengths, analyze the trends in your meta, and make the choices that work best within all of these parameters.