2 Champs and a Chump- Episode 149

Strangely, I enjoyed the resource discussion. I guess I decided "include 12" and then forgot to ever look at that part of my decks in any more depth. Here's some things, though, to perhaps keep in mind while building a resource base:

1. Your deck needs to decide between income acceleration and income reliability long term. Some decks want Seas and such and other decks don't. Some decks want the boost from the Streets and other decks want the long term gold from a Kingsroad. Decide which one you are! (you guys touched on this)

2. Limited is a bad keyword, except when it's not. So, yeah, you want 5 limiteds to avoid setup problems and clogging your hand, but you sure are excited to have that keyword on there when somebody Favorable Grounds your board or plays a NML. It's there for protection as well as having that drawback. Don't discount that!

3. 9 income locations, Darryl? Wow. That is ballsy. I suppose it depends on the deck, but man, I think I'm too in love with expensive cards for that to ever happen for me

Thanks, guys. These kinds of fundamentals are really helpful to someone just dipping thier toes in the game.

@Kyle, we were in fact still playing when you recorded this!

For those in Chicago..

I would like to say that we play AGoT every week on Tuesday from about 6pm - 12am at Dice Dojo. The store stays open late and there are always a broad group of people playing various games all night long. We usually setup shop in the back room.

Still listening, will update this comment as I go.

- Valuable resource discussion (no pun intended). Exactly the right sort of discussion I think, as I found myself changing my mind with the different arguments that were being made, back and forth! I guess it ultimately boils down to gold vs consistency - Kyle correctly noted that Streets will pay dividends the turn you play them while Kingsroads won't until the third turn, while Daryl focused on the fact that gold is always useful. For me, I'll look at how many cards I need the gold for, and also how effective each street will be (while being more generous with 2-for reductions like Flea Bottom and Street of Silk).

One aspect of resources you didn't touch on was the plot deck, which I think is most important. A Lannister deck (or any other deck I guess, but Lanni is the go-to in my mind) that runs the City plot chain will most likely need more resources than one not doing so, since only* A City Besieged goes above 3 gold in that plot deck (especially when typically the other plots are Cersei's Scheme and Valar). Meanwhile if there's no City plot chain you might be finding room for other plots with more gold and thus be able to cut resource locations from the deck. On a similar note to this, a deck with a Summer theme can afford to tread lighter with gold since it'll be using that +1 boost, and a Winter theme will likewise need more gold.

*Aware that City of Lies can be an effective 7 gold sometimes, but you get my point.

- I want to re-highlight the point Buz made about Limited not being that bad. In the current meta, protection from Favorable Ground is a major asset - Newly Made Lord to a lesser extent since it's less common but still around.

As far as the drawback, the most principle time it matters is setup. Since I'm a boring maths nerd I did some calculations (from first principles, though I'm sure this would have been easily discovered if I'd bothered to google it) and figured out that the chances of getting multiple limited cards if you have a 60 card deck and include x limited cards (x > 1 obviously) is as follows:

(54 + 6x)*(54-(x-1))*(54-(x-2))*...*(54-1))/(60*59*...*(61-x))

(Note: I'm sure that's wrong and Hynes will explain how, but I'm guessing if it is wrong the approximation is close enough)

Now, I'm guessing non-maths people can't (be bothered to) understand that, so here's the layman's terms version, a short list of the chances of drawing at least two limited cards on setup for various values of x:

2 - 1.2%
3 - 3.4%
4 - 6.3%
5 - 9.9%
6 - 14.0%
7 - 18.5%

As you can see, and unsurprisingly so, the badness of the keyword becomes exponential. The percentage increase of going up from 2 limited cards to 3 is half that of going up from 6 to 7. I could get proper Maths-y here and talk about why that is based off the formula, but I'll spare everyone's patience.

It depends on how big a chance you're willing to take on weakening your initial position, I think. Limited cards often offer better value because of the perceived downside (a downside that barely exists if you have few), and that Favorable Ground immunity is nice - Nightmares can remove it, but then the opponent's spent an extra card too.

Also, sidenote: I know someone who wasn't running any Limited cards because of the perceived downside, even though the downside literally doesn't exist if you only have on card with it!

- Uniques discussion good stuff, Brienne was the exact character I thought of for the "two of" role myself. Still listening to this bit, will expand it when finished.

Is Andrew's deck list posted anywhere?

@Darryl Snow Crash is an awesome book. One of my favorites. Although my absolute favorite by Neal Stephenson is Anathem.

I'm liking snow crash. I'll make sure to check out Anathem.

Cryptonomicon is really good too. It's not what you'd call tightly plotted, kind of a shaggy dog story, but a very fun ride.

@JCWamma, yes, you and Kyle are right that a Kingsroad isn't generating additional resources until the third turn if you're looking at those resources in a purely aggregate whole game way. In practice, however, I think it works out a bit differently because you don't get to keep that total running from turn to turn in a usable way. If I didn;'t have anything else to spend that 1 gold for a KIngsroad on during turn one, then I've effectively used one card to move that gold from one turn to the next, thus increasing my available gold on turn two. Sure, 0 cost reducers still do that on the first turn you play them (provided you have something to be reduced) but in a lot of situations, gold production like that isn't as bad as it sounds at first. Plus, the Chambers, Kingsroads, KIngdoms of Shadows and such have additional effects in the game beyond just gold production, so that's worth considering as well.

Great note on plots, however, that we didn't really touch on like we should have to fully round out the resource discussion.