Greyjoy Knights of the Hollow Hill

Recently, I built a deck for the Chosen Few contest held by Fantasy Flight Games . I don't think my deck did that great in the proxy tournament, but there were a lot of possibilities with it. In any case, over the course of building that deck, I believe I really came to understand Greyjoy better than ever before, and wanted to write an article on a few cards that are clutch in GJ, and include my GJ deckbuilding theory.

Start with the house card. Let's just do Greyjoy and get it out of the way - it's more irritating to try to build a Neutral GJ deck than is warranted, I think.

For an agenda, there are several ways of going. Most of the GJ decks submitted to the contest were Kings of Winter (TWoW) decks, I believe. My deck, on the other hand, ran with Knights of the Hollow Hill (MotM). I did this because I felt that the primary problem with GJ was not that it lacked strength, but that the characters and locations are in general too expensive to be useful. With +2 gold every turn, this expense is nearly offset. But we need a little more effort from the characters themselves in order to get around the agenda's lack of start-up.

To do this, I focus a lot on saves and cost reduction. With the agenda, you get a crazy-go-nuts Maester Wendamyr (KotS). With Ambitious Oarsman (RoR), you can get out a lot of characters by playing with warships. Warships happen to be useful to GJ in the first place, so combining them adds a lot of strong synergy. I use Narrow Escape (KotStorm) as my restricted card so that if they decide to Valar Morghulis (Core) once I get some strong characters out, I can remain in the game. This card was not featured in my Chosen Few deck due to the restrictions placed on the decks, but it would replace my Risen from the Sea (KotS). Wex Pyke (KotS) *must* appear in any attempt at a competitive GJ deck - if your opponent doesn't happen to have a lot of crests out, you win a lot of challenges, especially if you get Support of Harlaw (KotS) on him.

For locations, I had decided to be warship heavy. In a non-Chosen Few deck, I would go Refurbished Hulk (OSaS) x3, Scouting Vessel (KotS) x2, and 2 each of Longship Iron Victory (KotS) and Longship Silence (ASoSilence). Finally, I would put a single Naval Escort (ASitD), which sounds less useful since there's just one, but can be incredibly clutch at times, so deserves a spot.

Other locations include the standard cost reducers (sans Shadowblack Lane (Core) - GJ doesn't have enough intrigue icons to make it worth it) and that's about it. There are quite a few locations right there, so I decided to stop at that (knowing full well that probably few decks would be packing serious location hate except other GJ decks, this was more of a meta call).

I was very event and attachment light in my deck. The reason for this is that most of the GJ events seem *really* strong, but end up being situational at best. A deck built this way need not actually have *any* events, if there's no room. For attachments, I used Driftwood Crown (MotM). This seems like a really odd choice compared to Support of Harlaw (KotS); however, due to the incredible lack of intrigue icons in the deck, plus the fact that Support or Harlaw cost two gold and Driftwood only cost one while providing a war crest (very useful with 2x The Power of Arms (Core)), Driftwood very quickly becomes my preferred attachment. Finally, if building a non-Chosen Few deck, Driftwood + The Power of Faith (KotStorm) is a pretty ridiculous combo.

This deck mostly eschews standard GJ decks. It doesn't bother with Winter because the cards that are good with Winter are generally pretty terrible if it's not Winter. I hate that problem. Plus, losing a gold for Winter makes the expensiveness of GJ even worse. Having said that, it *is* possible, just a tad ugly, to build a GJ Winter deck using Knights of the Hollow Hill. If you substitute in cheaper characters and go with the Raven draw mechanic, you are often much better off than relying on your Iron Victory and Silence ships. If there's one drawback to the deck I submitted, it's the lack of serious draw power.

So, in conclusion:
Using Knights of the Hollow Hill, you can effectively get around GJ's expensive costs. Using GJ's extreme saves and their standard cost reducers, you can effectively get around the lack of setup phase and the lack of gold-producing locations. Finally, I hope to have shown you a few interesting cards that you will think about in different ways, such as Driftwood Crown.

Kyle