First Tilt - Playing With a Limited Cardpool

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. You should also refer to the great thread dedicated to new players here on the forums.

Jumping into a game as established as the AGoT LCG can be intimidating for new players. With six house expansions and ten cycles of chapter packs (for a total of SIXTY chapter packs in the game and rising!), there are a lot of cards in the pool for new players to read about, see in play, and potentially purchase. One of the strengths of the Living Card Game model is the lack of randomization—players do not need to purchase blindly, hoping for specific rares, but rather can buy a pack and know that they have a full play set of every card in the set. This strength can also be a weakness, because at this point the LCG model does not feature rotation of tournament legal sets, meaning that EVERY card is legal, which in turn means that with every pack the pool of cards players need to know grows larger and larger.

If one were new to the game and wanted to invest in a full collection, it would run over $1000 if purchased new at retail. So yeah, that sounds pretty intimidating. But just like how you can go and play Magic with only some starter decks and still have fun, you can just as easily go and play AGoT with only a few purchases and still have fun—and maybe even win from time to time.

The biggest piece of advice I would give to new players is to not worry about the card pool and being super competitive, and instead focus on playing for fun. Build your decks with a focus on enjoying the experience rather than on winning Worlds. Put another way—unless you are playing in an actual tournament, your wins and losses aren’t going to net you anything of value beyond the experience itself. So enjoy the ride. And if your goal is to win a tournament, then accept that you need to invest money to be a competitive player—LCG means you can buy whatever cards you want without randomization, it doesn’t mean you can play and win a tournament with one core set.

Another thing to keep in mind is that all the cards in the world are not going to help you win on their own—you will also need to invest time to read up on strategies, to learn the card pool, analyze the meta, build careful decks, playtest those decks, etc. There are very few games where a new player can come in, without investing time/money, and be super competitive. And that’s ok, since few of us can be John Bruno or Alvaro Rodriguez. If you focus on enjoying the experience you can still have a good time, and save the worrying for later, after you decide you really like the game and have a knack for it. Then, once you know this is a game you love, then you can fret about having to spend a thousand dollars to have a shot at being the next world champion. (Note: This is an exagerration. You don't actually have to spend a thousand dollars to play top tier decks. A lot of top decks can be built with cards from the house expansions and less than a dozen chapter packs.)

Now, it is certainly easy to say “just focus on having fun,” but it is not so easy to implement this attitude when you spend hours building a neat Direwolf deck with some cool combos and then lose to A Noble Cause rush deck on the first turn of the game before you even get to your challenges phase. So instead of just saying “relax” and leaving you there, what follows is some specific advice on how to play for fun in a way that ensures fun for both players.

Provide the Decks – Many people get into the game without having an established community of players, and then bring their friends into it and provide the decks for everyone. In this scenario, who cares what size of card pool you have? Everything should be balanced by the shared card pool and the shared inexperience. If you only have some house expansions and not others, it can get a little tricky, but then you can share houses and draft for cards.

Provide the Decks Part 2 -- However, if you’ve just started the game and want to play against more experienced players but are worried about facing off against amazing tier 1 decks that will make you weep, ask your opponent if they’d be willing to play with a deck you have built. This mitigates the card pool advantage a more invested player might have. This also means you will be facing a deck you built, so you can see how another player helms it, and possibly learn about strategies your opponent adopts that you never considered when building the deck. You can also ask veteran opponents to…

Play Fun Decks – When facing players who have killer decks that you don’t find fun facing off against, ask them if they would be willing to build some “fun” decks to play with against you while you learn the game. Nedly decks are perfect for this, as are decks featuring themes that are not tier 1. These decks can still be fairly competitive without being overwhelming. For example, Clansmen decks, Direwolf decks, etc. Incidentally, the 2x core set decks and house expansion decks are great foundations to begin playing the game with and are fun to boot. You can have a great time with these, and they can be surprisingly resilient to the ever growing card pool. I still have a blast playing the knights deck contained in the Baratheon house expansion.

Intermission: MEMO TO VETERAN PLAYERS -- And veteran players! Please do go and build fun decks to play against new players, if you have not done so already. Yeah, you may be excited to have a burn deck that smokes characters the moment they hit the field, or have a deck that resets the game five times before round two is over, but c’mon, save those decks for tournament prep and organized competitive play. Don’t pull them out on someone who has a core set and one house expansion. And please, for the love of all that is (Greyjoy) holy, don’t play a choke deck against new players. That’s a sure way of driving people out of the hobby.

Now, if you have the card collection that allows you to build those awesome tier 1 decks, you certainly have enough cards left over to build some fun decks that you will still enjoy playing but that won’t crush the spirit of new players. We were all new players once, and stuck with the game because we found it fun. So find a way to make the experience fun for new players you play against!

Civil War – This oft overlooked variant is actually a neat way to play the game, as it helps you learn the mechanics, see the cards in action, but not worry about your opponent having “better” cards than you. See if your opponents are willing to give it a try!Rules are available here.

Melee – This one depends on your play group and meta. Melee can be absolutely brutal, where fresh blood is preyed upon and devoured quickly for turn two wins. Or it can be a fun negotiation-filled experience, where balance is achieved by players taking on the top dogs, so that no one stays on the top too long and no one sinks to be bottom too fast. If you have cool people you play with who won’t devour you, melee is a great way to find competitiveness through your deal-making skills rather than through your card pool. And a bunch of “terrible” cards can be quite useful here, such as the ones that let you pick an opponent to share a benefit, as they provide a great incentive for other players to befriend and support you.

Draft – Finally, the recent addition of draft packs to the game adds a much-needed option for people to have a competitive experience while being on equal footing in terms of card pool. This option has the added advantage of increasing your card pool as you play, and of teaching you to make the most out of cards one might otherwise have overlooked.