The First Tilt - Which House is For You: Stark, Lords of Winter

Welcome to “The First Tilt”, a blog dedicated to helping new players get their bearings in A Game of Thrones LCG. We’ll be covering a wide variety of topics, from what to buy, basic strategies and tactics, and getting acquainted with basic themes. The next six articles for The First Tilt are going to be dedicated to discussing the various Houses of Westeroes and helping you decide which house is for you. The first article in this series is going to be dedicated to my favorite House: Stark! So put on your parkas and grab a warm beverage, it’s about to get cold in here.

It’s really hard for me not to start this article by telling you to go read the freakin’ books already! (Oh wait…) You may be a fan of the show, but the show doesn’t help you get to know the characters of Game of Thrones the way the books do. To me (and everyone else I know for that matter), the best way for you to pick an AGoT faction is to read the books and figure out who you like the best. That’s how it worked for me. By the end of the first book, I was decidedly in the Stark’s camp with Eddard and Robb being my two of my favorite characters. So, let’s talk about the Starks for a bit and then discuss their in game flavor and themes.

House Stark is the most powerful of the northern houses. They can trace their lineage back to the First Men and during the age of the Seven Kingdoms, the Starks were known as the Kings of Winter. Strong and honorable to a fault, the Starks are a force to be reckoned with. Based out of their castle in Winterfell, the Starks are a cold and hard people from a cold and hard land. The Stark House motto is “Winter is Coming”.

When playing House Stark, you’re going to focus in two areas: Military and Power. Undoubtedly the Starks field some of the strongest characters and can lay a hurt down on anyone. The Starks primary weakness is Intrigue; the Starks are honorable and straight forward in the books and this reflects in the game. You won’t need to do those sneaky Intrigue challenges, but that’s ok. You’ll be too busy putting your opponent in the dirt to worry about Intrigue. The Starks are strong in a couple of traits as well. They have their House trait, Stalwart, which takes a character that was just killed and places it on top of your deck. They’re also fairly strong in the Deadly trait, which is useful in military challenges since it will force your opponent to choose between not defending the challenge or killing an additional character.

While there are several themes for the various houses, this entry will focus around three sample Stark themes. But don’t be afraid to try out the other themes (I really like the House Bolton theme from Brotherhood Without Banners cycle). Stark themes field a lot of characters, probably more characters than any other House. Let’s start with the Tully theme. Revolving around characters with the House Tully keyword, the theme is fairly straightforward: the more House Tully characters you have in play, the better. One of the built-in themes of the Lords of Winter expansion, the House Tully theme is primarily defensive. Build up a large collection of characters and use them to landslide defend various challenges. This theme is reinforced with blanket Strength bonuses, and the location “Riverrun” which gives all of your House Tully characters 1 power if you didn’t lose any challenges at the end of the challenges phase. The Blackfish is a great offensive card if you can get 3 or more Power on him, which is easy with his Renown trait. Once he has his 3 Power, your House Tully characters do not kneel to attack; allowing you to keep up a strong offense and defense.

The next theme we’ll discuss is also from the Lords of Winter expansion: Direwolf. The Direwolf theme is more of a novelty theme, meant more for flavor than effectiveness. (If this doesn’t make sense to you, then PLEASE READ THE BOOKS ALREADY!) However, this doesn’t mean the Direwolf theme is ineffective; it’s just a more challenging theme to win with and is nearly impossible to win with in Melee. The Direwolf theme revolves mostly around the Stark children and their wolf counterparts. The Direwolf theme can have some great synergy as the Stark children will often lower the cost of their perspective wolf and the wolf will usually gain some bonus by having their child counterpart in play. The Direwolf theme revolves almost exclusively around Military challenges and benefits greatly from the agenda “Siege of Winterfell”. Most of the Direwolf cards have the Deadly trait and gain the Stealth trait through the Stark location “Wolfswood”. However, the real key to the Direwolf theme is location “Winterfell Kennels”, a non-unique location that will allow you to spend one gold during the Marshaling phase to search for a Direwolf card and put it in your hand.

The final major theme for Stark is the Army theme. The Stark banners can raise a powerful host and this is reflected in the game. The Army theme revolves around the Army keyword and focuses on getting out powerful characters and putting a hurt on someone. The Starks have a lot of ways to reduce the costs of their Characters, which is great since most Army characters are incredibly expensive. Robb Stark (KotS version) will actually kneel to reduce the cost of any Stark Army card to zero, and this ability can be used in any phase. And seeing as how the Starks have several events that require the War Crest and that can result in a direct kill, this theme is brutal on other character heavy decks.

Finally, there are several plots cards that Stark players will consider a must. “Building Season” will allow you to hunt for a location, “Summoning Season” will allow you to hunt for Characters. “Valar Morghulis” is great because the Starks are good at rebuilding with most of their themes being Character based and “Storm of Swords” is favorable for any Military heavy deck.

Well, that about wraps it up for this entry. To sum this up, if you like direct kill, lots of characters, or are big into Military challenges, Stark is for you! Next time we’ll be discussing Lannister and what all money can buy you.

Thanks for playing along,
Ben