The Things I Do For Win -ter

Things I do for Win-ter
I like to win ugly. Ugly decks win several turns before the end of the game by slowly squeezing options away from my opponent. This is the basic theory of playing control decks. Control decks disrupt opposing characters, locations, and cards in hand. However, control doesn’t automatically mean a Jaime player or mean that control is the only game a Jaime will play. Jaime plays anything that wins.

For the Win-ter (FTW)
Being able to play more characters than your opponent during a game equals more wins. What gets lost is the forgotten art of income location disruption. Playing a white raven is the easiest way to dominate a game.

All the way at the bottom of Cardgame DB deck builder there a section called Graphs and Other Information. From the graph can find the mean cost of characters in a deck. Further down is the Average Plot Income (API). Don’t forget to bump that average up to by two if they are running Knights of the Hollow Hill (KotHH).

A white raven in play does two things, instantly drops every ones API by one point and counter acts a black raven. Once the API drops below the Mean most abundant of characters in the opponent’s deck cannot be played. Looking at the decks below only the KotHH keeps the API above the mean cost of characters. The Bara and Stark deck are sporting over one full gold difference which translates to a full lower gold slot not being able to be played, 3 cost for Bara and 2 cost for Stark.

Here are a couple decks that I pulled at random (first deck listed from each house at the time I wrote this):
Baratheon; Mean 4 gold, API 3.571
Dreams of the Wall
17 unplayable characters out of 26 after winter API 2.571

Greyjoy; Mean 3 gold, API 3.286
Ironborn Unopposed
17 unplayable characters out of 30 after winter API 2.286

Lannister, mean 3 gold, API 3.000
Golden Death v2
15 unplayable characters out of 31 after winter API 2.000

Martell KotHH, Mean 3 gold, API 5.714
Martell KotHH Agenda
4 unplayable characters out of 33 after winter API 4.714

Stark, Mean 3 gold, API 2.857
Epic Siege

Targaryan KotHH, Mean 3, API 4.857
Targ KotHH House of Pain
5 unplayable characters out of 27 after winter API 3.857

All of this theoretical talk translates into your opponent with a mitt full of unplayable cards, which is less options, which equals more win for you.

Location Control
A way decks can wriggle their way from under a White Raven is playing gold and reducer locations. Every deck has them but, you know that already. What you might not know is the sheer amount of location control every house has access to. Blow those things up before your handy work has been compromised. Here is an older article about location control that I should update once a year. I guess we should look forward to that in the near future!

Things I Do For Win: Location, Location, Location

Hand Control
To combat KotHH Jaime needs another weapon to pull from his arsenal. How do you stop dudes hitting play when your opponent can afford them? Remove the characters before they can even hit play. There are few options here without really stretching your deck resources to accommodate them. However, Kings of Winter agenda only needs one thing, a White Raven.

White Cloak Arsenal: Hand Control

Putting It All Together
The basic idea is to keep the opponent's gold production down while sniping cards from their hand. The opening play is Rule by Decree to drop them to four cards, six after draw. During the next few turns just try to steal or blow up their locations. Penny, Alannys, and Kings of Winter should be stripping their hand. After Valar you should have a mitt full of gas while they are looking at a very sparse board.

Inn of the Kneeling Man will be a lynchpin in many games getting double duty from Penny, Alannys, Wex, Painted Dogs, and Tommen.

Lannister Winter Location Control