2C1C- Episode 178

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Total Cards: (81)

House:
House Stark


Agenda: (1)
1x The Siege of Winterfell (LoW)

Plot: (9)
1x At the Gates (GotC)
1x Marched to the Wall (LoW)
1x Rule by Decree (Core)
1x Spending the Winter Stores (QoD)
1x Siege of Riverrun (KotS)
1x The Winds of Winter (TWoW)
1x Valar Morghulis (Core)
1x Winter Festival (WotN)
1x Respect of the Old Gods (LoW)

Character: (45)
3x Arya Stark (CoS)
3x Catelyn Stark (LoW)
3x Guard at Riverrun (LoW)
3x House Tully Recruiter (Core)
3x Knight of Harrenhal (TBC)
3x Maester Luwin (FtC)
3x Riders of the Red Fork (FtC)
3x Robb Stark (LoW)
3x Hungry Mob (CoS)
3x Eddard Stark (Core)
3x Jon Snow (Core)
3x Bran Stark (VD)
3x Direwolf Pup (Core)
3x Ghost (TWH)
3x Hodor (Core)

Attachment: (12)
3x Crown of Winter (LoW)
3x Frozen Solid (LoW)
3x Shaggydog (LoW)
3x Grey Wind (LoW)

Event: (6)
3x Direct Assault (KotStorm)
3x Winter is Coming (Core)

Location: (18)
3x Frozen Outpost (LoW)
3x Great Keep (Core)
3x Lord Eddard's Chambers (Core)
3x Narrow Sea (Core)
3x Street of Steel (Core)
3x Street of Sisters (Core)
 

A Clash of Arms: Old Nan, Jory, Gates of Winterfell

A Time for Ravens: Bolton Refugees, Jeyne Westerling, Northern Cavalry Flank

King’s Landing: Hidden Chambers, Northern Steel, Peasant Defenders

Defenders of the North: Frozen Moat, Osha

Brotherhood without Banners: Reek,  Roose, Dubious Loyalties

Secrets of Oldtown: Lucas Blackwood, Guardian Wolf, Rickon Stark

A Tale of Champions: Harrenhal, Rickard Karstark, The Last River

Beyond the Narrow Sea: Damon, Maege, Poisoned Coin

Song of the Sea: White Harbor Dromon, Moreo Tumitis, Swamps of the Neck

I'm not sure how I feel about giving every attachment the setup keyword, but I'm definitely a fan of triggered effects that can't target a character with an attachment. 

Were you going to post the updated Martell DWDW with Negotiations?

As a Martell player, I really like this 2W1W deckbuilding. How long are you guys going to keep revisiting and tweaking it?

Yeah, I'd agree on reconsidering setup on all attachments - that'd kinda be a last resort for me.

I actually think the core deck you're proposing is excellent - it's avoided many rules question cards, could potentially avoid moribund (no self-referential/leaving play abilities built in), and should be 'easy' to pick up. It looks like a great starting point. It's also pretty good from an art standpoint!

I might have a few quibbles with your CP selections (I'll comment some more tonight). I'm not a great fan of trait manipulation (Old Nan), for instance.

My Call of the Three-Eyed Crow is mostly just humour, but actually, if the proposed reboot gets rid of the moribund state (entirely feasible), oddly enough, Cot3EC works as written (*gasp*), and, in that situation, it's not a bad card for the game - nedly, you don't keep attachments/power on your card, but a surprise.

Great series, though, guys, I really look forward to hearing you look at the other houses. It's a bit odd because the odds of them doing this exactly are slim, but as a thought exercise it really makes me look at the card pool in interesting ways.

Haha, just got to the bit where I get slopped for tearing your episode apart. I'm such a disappointment. 

I can try though;

Control changes are rules nightmares, Lucas would need re-templating to avoid the moribund state and creates some of his own rules issues, you've gutted the (fun) Bolton theme! How are the Bastard's Boys not on the list? Damon is a dead boring deck-building decision. Refugees too. 

Satisfied? 

I still really liked the episode

I think actually allowing attachments to be "set up" and then restricting some from it via keyword would be a really good idea.

It gives you the ability to make a lot of attachments playable, while allowing you to also print strong attachments that you can only put on during the game.

I think actually allowing attachments to be "set up" and then restricting some from it via keyword would be a really good idea.

 

It gives you the ability to make a lot of attachments playable, while allowing you to also print strong attachments that you can only put on during the game.

That's actually a great idea. The exact inverse of what we currently have.

i'd prefer more setup attachments (only ones that go on your cards though) and more that are like the dothraki weapons that you can ambush in surprise element to them would be nice as well. Or just more powerful ones right now they don't see play because they can't be played in setup and then most events are better as non-setup cards. 

I wouldn't mind having "Ambush" types of attachments from Setup.  In fact, I wouldn't mind the same type of event card that does something to the opponent specifically for coming out during Setup.  No, there isn't a framework event timing-wise for this right now, but it could be a fun, secondary effect of a card.  "Bum Rush!  After this card is revealed during setup, choose an opponent's character.  That character has diarrhea until the end of the round."

Keep in mind, we actually already have a mechanic for setup events; shadows. You could use that instead.

I would run more attachments if there were more cards like Abandoned Forge, only better. Just think if you could manage to search out 5 Condition attachments from your deck in the first turns - instant answers for problem characters and locations.

I haven't finished the episode yet (I'm partway through the Martell section at the moment), but I did have some thoughts on the Stark refresh set, and the refresh idea in general:

Firstly, for what I think you were going for, I think you broadly chose an excellent selection of cards. There were definitely some I disagreed with strongly (specifically there's no need for Old Nan, Bolton Refugee NCF (seriously WHY??), Hidden Chambers, Reek, Dubious Loyalties or Damon (this one's actually worse than the Flank for me)), but I think that for a small cardpool that leaves a lot of deck options available.

However, to be honest I disagree with the whole way you've gone about this. Saying that everything from the Kingsroad cycle onwards would be legal is exactly what I don't want to happen, because the more recent cycles and that Kingsroad cycle in particular emphatically reinforce the status quo. They are based around taking existing themes and saying "these themes are themes you have now". You are saying Baratheon, Greyjoy and Martell are stuck using their new agendas, that the Kingsguard will always be around providing easy neutral draw, that hodge-podge elements from every cycle ever will be preserved.

In the 'cast you talk about Night's Watch and Wildlings using up a bunch of space, for instance, even though it's pretty much universally accepted that the Night's Watch theme is awful. Why are we preserving that and carrying it forward? If we want to look on the refresh idea as positive (and I for one do), a major advantage is we can get rid of dross subthemes like that and reintroduce them correctly.

But that's not the biggest disappointment for me. When you talked about how you'd be able to help change the meta to be healthier, I thought "oh cool, does this mean we're going to discuss the implications of possibly removing Valar Morghulis from the cardpool?". I don't even necessarily want Valar Morghulis to go - I honestly don't know either way, and was looking forward to hearing a no-doubt lively discussion on the pros and cons. But nope, not only is Valar a part of the game still without even a moment's thought for entertaining the possibility of it not being part of the game, but it's actually SO ingrained in our thoughts that we're going to give it in every single house's core set just to make absolutely sure that you can't entertain playing the game any other way.

There was a discussion about what would happen if we restricted Valar on the boards a while ago, and I stated at the time that while it was an interesting proposal, the cardpool had been developed around it for 12 cycles or whatever. Now is the perfect opportunity for that to not be a problem. It's not as if the game has always relied on Valar - Kennon should know, he's a CCG era player after all. This is not a sacred cow or a game identifier or anything else, it's a card that could be included or could be not included.

Also, minor gripe but talking about how you'd want to reinvent Stalwart then only included core Eddard out of every Stalwart character in the entire game was kinda laughable .

All that said, and I'm aware I probably sound like I'm dumping hard here, I just want to re-emphasise that I've really enjoyed the episode up to where I am. That first paragraph where I said you'd chose well counts for a lot! But I just wanted to get that frustration off my chest. Apologies, back to regularly scheduled programming .

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the episode.  The Stark deck is exactly the kind of deck I think would be great for introducing new players to the game.  My biggest concern is the inclusion of Arya Stark (Cos).  I like the card and it works well with the winter theme, but I hate that I have to teach the entire shadow mechanic for just one card (I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the Greyjoy deck won’t include any shadows cards).  I would prefer for the deck to include a couple more shadow cards or none at all.

On the reprint issue I would rather see the Refugees die as they are both boring and omnipresent.  I also wouldn’t reprint Frozen Solid, Old Nan, or Damon.  I’m kind of with JCWamma I don’t really understand why you would want to keep the last couple of cycles if you rebooted.  Doing so dramatically limits your options to make significant changes to the overall power level, templating issues, and to core mechanics like morbid.

@JCWamma, Just wanted to take a moment to touch on a couple things.One being that if we're reducing the cardpool in some way, we have the ability to keep pieces of a bunch of those themes that we do like, and negate the parts that aren't good or good for the game by creative choices. Take Wildlings/Nightswatch for instance. They're an important piece of the world that I think deserve to be represented in the game. And yes, NW have historically been much worse than Wildlings, but that doesn't mean that a reduced cardpool would keep all of the cards that let Wildlings be so much better than NW. Say you choose to reprint only the NW that already have icons and then add in their agendas. Say you choose to reprint only the unique Wildlings and the Free Folk. What about every iconless NW and their agendas but the Wildlings get the nonuniques and The Last of the Giants? There are several possibilities to pick and choose in order to force a reevaluation of their power levels relative to each other. And don't forget that the overall power level of the environment would go down. Both factors that would make NW "better."

Why would Baratheon, Martell, and Greyjoy be forced to use their new agendas? I mean, I'm sure some folks would like to use them, but honestly, I'd like for all of the house specific agendas to stick around in a refreshed cardpool. Again, with a big limitation on the pool, their relative power levels are likely to shift dramatically.

As for Valar, I probably should have spoken more about it during the show. I'll try to rectify that for next week. Yes, I did indeed play through the CGG prior to Valar Morghulis being released as well as during the Winter Edition years when they decided to try not having it for awhile. Was the game unplayable? No. Was it much better when Valar was available? Yes. I wrote some about that here. Many of the same points are valid, though some are ones that could be addressed with shifts in design philosophy behind the scenes if you wanted to eliminate Valar. I'm not a fan of what some of those implications like increased claim values would mean for the game, however.

Thanks for taking the time to bother to formulate a response, appreciated as ever!

Apologies in advance for the counter-counter-point style of this:

- I disagree with the theory of this refresh resulting in overall power level of the environment going down and making the Night's Watch better. More importantly, I'm not just talking about power level. In fact I'm not even really considering power level. I'm talking about design, and frankly I hate the Night's Watch theme in the game. I won't pretend the Watch are my favourite part of the books (despite really liking both Jon Snow and Stan-the-Man), but they're an important part and they deserved better than a completely vanilla theme of tricons that has no broader synergy and no thematic resonance to the Wall itself, and a group of characters that are completely hampered by the agendas meaning that the vast majority have no icons.

- On this note, you suggest the possibility of bringing forward only the NW characters with icons. In the entire cycle devoted to them there are 14 NW characters, and only 5 of them have icons. Of those 5, 2 of them have better versions already available in the cardpool (Jon Snow and Janos Slynt), one potentially has a better version depending on whether you carry him forward or not (Benjen Stark), and the other two are power icon monocons. One of them is the fairly boring but ultimately inoffensive Builder of the Watch, and the other is a 5 cost character based around killing himself (Old Bear). What cards can be brought forward to salvage this theme, exactly? Far better to raze the theme to the ground and start afresh, the exact sort of philosophy that is one of the reasons many including myself favour a reboot. Instead space is already being saved for them in these refresher chapter packs?

- Bara Martell and GJ wouldn't be forced to use their agendas - I merely meant that by preserving them it limits the probability of those houses getting new agendas in the future, and speaking personally I dislike all three agendas. The closest to being a fun agenda in my opinion is The Old Way, and that got Warship'd into the dirt by those filthy min-maxers!

- Valar points are nice, and I remember reading and liking the article at the time. I look forward to hearing a discussion of it in the future (even if it doesn't happen next week or next month, just at some point ).

- I still feel broadly like the last two cycles aren't good cycles to build the game around. One is about trying to reinforce the status quos set by every cycle that came before it, and the other is about introducing cards of crazy power levels. Neither of those seem like great concepts to set in stone early into the refreshed game's existence.

Again, thanks for the response. And apologies because generally I feel like I've only been negative in my feedback for a good while - take my continued listening and commenting as a sign that you must be getting something right at least .