Must all men die?

There are no easy solutions; but step one is to admit we all have a problem.

 

After reading all this, I am unconvinced.

 

Was Valar needed? Maybe, maybe not. I remember the big guy meta being oppressive, you're saying it was going to change even without Valar. I don't know. But Valar sure caused a shakedown of the meta, and I liked that.

 

Combo decks kept Targ in check, and those decks relied on Valar? To me this sounds like a stretch. Using the hate towards combo decks to substantiate your point about Valar - seems like something a politician would do 

 

Certain decks are unplayable because of Valar? Sure, but then again, without Valar some other decks would be unplayable.

 

Overall, a lengthy post, but the arguments are not very convincing. Especially since the topic (Valar) is not very hyped right now. Still, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts, it was an interesting read.

Totally disagree. Midrange decks do not shine because the win condition is a problem for them. And the win condition of a midrange deck is none. Decks who shined relied on big guys to gain renown and save them or passive power grabbing. 

Problem is not valar, problem is that other decks gain powers better.

Apart from the commentary on combo decks, I completely agree. Valar M as printed was a huge error that solved no problem, disproportionately advantaged certain houses in an unfair way, and simply increased variance in games.  The drawbacks of low gold, low reserve, and low claim are/were basically meaningless, and was a huge miss for the design team.   Like most of the bad decisions made in 2.0, the card was just printed to let 1.0 players get their rocks off on nostalgia. 

In my opinion, the biggest tragedy is that it heavily disincentives any attempts to put together interesting combinations of characters and character effects, especially characters that are difficult to save, like Dornish Paramour and Grey Worm.  And there are a whole lot of interesting (and potentially great) cards that simply can't be played because of the threat of Valar; King Robb's Host comes to mind––a very unique, interesting card with a powerful effect worth building around, but one that will never see much play because no one wants to dump all that power on an Army that could leave play at any moment.  There is a long list of cards like this.  It's a damn shame.

From melee perspective, Valar Morghulis is both pretty annoying (much higher risk of being played) and necessary, where the game stalls at everyone having full board. Yes, non-unique based theme decks (e.g. knights) suffer a lot, but all in all I think it's good to have VM, while it may be also good to put it on the restricted list.

 King Robb's Host comes to mind––a very unique, interesting card with a powerful effect worth building around

Indeed, unique So just use dupes.

I disagree with the premise of this article.
 
You have a card you dislike, Valar Morghulis, and try to justify your feelings by citing the general game balance.
In my opinion, this is putting the cart before the horse and not worthy of a scientific paper (which I assume you tried to write).
 
I would tackle this whole discussion from the other end, first establishing what "game balance" we are trying to achieve (e.g. all houses factions being equally represented in tournaments) and then getting empirical data exposing the problem (e.g. https://thejoustingpavilion.com/stats).
 
When talking about game balance in the sense I exemplified above, the number of tournament entries for each faction is not as important as the tournament success. But we still must not neglect it completely, since it would be unreasonable to expect a faction that nobody plays to get as many wins as everybody's favourite faction.
If we accept that the method thejoustingpavilion uses to measure success (Pavilion Points) is reasonable, which I do, than we have to look at the difference of entry to pavilion points.

At the time of writing this, these are the numbers:

Faction       | Entry-% | Point-% | Difference
--------------+---------+---------+------------
Targaryen     |  14.75  |  18.46  |   +3.71
Tyrell        |  15.66  |  17.76  |   +2.10
Martell       |  13.22  |  13.18  |   -0.04
Night's Watch |  10.51  |  10.37  |   -0.14
Greyjoy       |  14.42  |  13.83  |   -0.59
Lannister     |  12.10  |  11.34  |   -0.76
Stark         |  10.73  |   8.60  |   -2.13
Baratheon     |   8.61  |   6.37  |   -2.24

So we can see that Tyrell and Targaryen do better than they should, Stark and Baratheon do worse than they should.
What needs to be investigated next, is what causes those factions to do well or bad respectively. In order to get an understanding of that, we need to look at the decks and common card choices.
This is a little bit trickier, since http://thronesdb.com/ doesn't seem to provide any statistics the likes of "how many tournament winning stark decks run Valar Morghulis".

I will leave it to the reader to dig through all of that data manually. Here is my gut feeling about it:

• Tyrell has Lady in Waiting and Margaery who likes Lords to die, so they like Valar Morghulis.
• Targaryen only has one character they really care about, Daenerys, keeping one character save from Valar Morghulis is doable by holding back, so while I don't think they gain too big an edge from Valar Morghulis (since other resets often are just as viable to them), they aren't hurt by it either.
• Stark hates Valar Morghulis. Stark has plenty of Renown on way too many characters and almost no way to keep them from dying except for dupes and Bodyguard. Other archetypes, like Direwolfs, don't mind Valar Morghulis as much but are not as strong to begin with.
• Baratheon even has in-faction saves in the form of Davos Seaworth and Spears of the Merling King, and their theme of kneeling works better the fewer characters there are, so I would argue they actually want to like Valar Morghulis. They just lack enough good cards to make a deck out of it.

But all of this is a moot discussion. Valar Morghulis is in the meta, it is not going away (until it rotates out, of course).
So the only question worth answering really is: what do the underrepresented factions need to combat the overrepresented ones?

Because adding new cards to the pool is not only a possibility but a certainty.

Thanks @davedave, that's some interesting data!

@davedave: while I like your reply a lot, I find it hard to agree with it. The type of game balance you elaborated ist clearly distinct from the one meant in the article. The article diagnoses a certain lack of diversity in playable decks. If you don't have an answer to valar, you have a problem, much like in 1st ed. I personally can live with that, but at the same time I must admit that it's a shame that certain decks will never be viable in a valar environment. Direwolves e.g. suffer a lot from valar, contrary to what you said, because their big bodies cannot be saved. Non-uniques are only good in the valar meta if they are cheap and expendable or work well with FB. This effect of valar is also critisized, as AGoT 2nd ed should revolve around the important unique characters from the books. But the more removal we get, the harder it gets to keep the game this way. So welcome to a world of Shadow City Bastards and endless Second Sons...

I think I do mostly agree with this article. Maybe I am not objective, I genuinely hate decks that just wait for the opponent to build up and then reset everything, valar, varys, double marched, build up economy and locations... it seems to just drag on the game, making everyone wait for the big explosion, forced to play an hour at least, building up slowly...

 

And the point about "it's all about who has the most dupes" is so true. How often have u felt like this, that dupes were all that defined ur game? I think it is too often. Almost every time actually, all that matters seems to be who has more saves...

 

I think at the current state of the game there are enough answers to Valar, but I really agree that it is a very problematic card that should see some restrictions...