All Things Shagga - Neutrality

Once again All Things Shagga treats my loyal readers to your very own bi-weekly dose of combo-tastic deckbuilding. Well, we’re back to deckbuilding these days after the series of Top 5 articles. But you know what? Those top 5 articles were all just a clever façade! (Cue mispronunciation as fa-kad. Bonus points if you know the reference.) Not so secretly, that series was my attempt to dig into the card pool and rummage around for interesting ideas. Thankfully, it worked! This week we’re going to combine a couple of the cards that hit on my Top 5 list from The Brotherhood Without Banners cycle- The Neutral Faction and Hollow Hill!

Key Cards:
The Neutral Faction- Part one of our required cards for this week, the neutral faction is a card that I just don’t feel has been explored as well as it should have been. Anyone that plays with me regularly knows my love of splashing cards out of house for surprise and effect, and the Neutral Faction is the king of splashing. Just a couple rules notes though: 1.Basically everything is out of house to you. Even neutral cards. So if you wanted to do something like House of Dreams with the Neutral faction- you can’t. 2. It only reduces the cost of characters that you splash. 3. You can’t play anything at all that says “House Only” unless they’re Shadows cards and you’re using the agenda.

Hollow Hill- This location is a phenomenal draw engine that lets your splashed characters keep replacing themselves as you play them. It’s even a pretty great cost reducer if you’re using the Brotherhood Without Banners or a heavy Infamy deck, but at the moment, I just wanted to try out a rainbow build. Even just using it for the draw is very strong. Useful rules note- While it only looks to trigger off of characters you play, it compares house affiliations to everything you have in play. So you know all those cool Kingdom locations that encourage splashing? They don’t work here, as they effectively turn Hollow Hill off completely.

Refugees- You’ll notice that I’m playing a couple of every house except Targaryen. This is for a couple reasons. First, they’re still cheap characters who have higher strength than their gold cost even with the one gold penalty with the Neutral Faction. Secondarily, they discard themselves if you lose Dominance. Now some would view this as a negative, but in a deck like this, we’re actually glad that they’re expendable. It’s actually not a bad thing for this deck to lose Dominance so that we can ditch characters from a particular house in order to play new ones from our hand and keep the draw going with Hollow Hill. I settled on two of each of these to save room for the higher impact uniques in the deck and to lower the odds slightly on a lategame draw into a Refugee where the utility is slightly less since we have a unique in play.

Disgruntle Mercenary- See the above argument about Refugees and then look at how the Mercenaries set you up to play and replay them with even less work. Our Targaryen characters are kept to a minimum, so chances are good that you’ll be able to bounce and draw off these guys many times.

Orphan of the Greenblood, Doubting Septa, Cersei’s Attendant- I’m lumping these characters together because they serve a very similar purpose. Much like the refugees, these help give a spread of houses on bodies that aren’t going to stick around. The Orphans and Attendants help give us some control to force through challenges and the Doubting Septa is always a great choice for military claim in order to keep propelling our draw.

The Unique Characters- It’s too long a list to mention individually here and in the decklist, but basically this is a big who’s who list of solid, splashable characters who bring a great deal of impact to the board while they’re in play. Conveniently many of them turned out to be Nobles, so we’re able to use some solid support in Eddard Stark, The Power of Blood and Distinct Mastery.

Thoughts on Play:
As insinuated above, the general idea is to prioritize the play of characters from your hand so that each one you play hopefully does not match the house of the others so that you can maximize draw from the Hollow Hill. This should propel you through the deck pretty quickly in order to get the beefier noble characters on the table to really have some impact. Conveniently, the low cost of many of the small characters combined with the zero cost non limited locations mean that we’ll generally have a decent setup to help see more cards as well.

In order to keep the character flow moving, don’t be afraid of incoming military claim or losing dominance and thus your refugees. Be sure to frequently double check the other characters in your hand. If you have another Martell character in your hand, don’t be afraid to go ahead and use that Orphan of the Greenblood this turn. If you’ve got a Doubting Septa in your hand, don’t be afraid to go ahead and kill that Cersei’s Attendant ASAP.

The plot deck gives us some other interesting options to keep the flow moving. First Snow of Winter is seeing a great deal of play now to slow down weenie decks or to allow KotHH decks to catch back up after not having had a setup. Thankfully, this is a weenie deck that loves it! Your nobles stay on the table and all of your low cost refugees and the like return to hand, ready to play and trigger draw all over again. Played optimally, it both hampers your opponent’s ability to develop as well as fueling your own. Marched to the Wall does similar work. You don’t mind losing one of those smaller characters in order to free up a house affiliation in order to keep drawing from Hollow Hill. Making your opponent lose a character as well is almost just gravy. Search and Detain as the Restricted card gives you another solid control plot option, but just like the others can be used in a pinch on your own characters to get a house affiliation out of play.

In general, this is going to play out as a tempo deck. We’re not quite all there to rush with the nobles and the many instances of renown, but we’re not all there to straight up control the board either. What we do have going for us is a very strong draw engine to keep our hand and our options full. While you shouldn’t hesitate to use and lose those characters, make sure that you’re gaining a challenge advantage out of them. Parting Blow is one of the ultimate tempo cards by using any of our characters leaving play for any reason (death, discard or bounce) to afford us a strategic kneel and replace itself. Distinct Mastery lets some of our higher impact challenge based nobles like Arianne Martell and Khal Drogo double up on challenges in order to keep pressure on.

The Deck:

Neutral

House (1)
Neutral Faction (IG) x1


Plot (7)
Alliance (PotS) x1
Marched to the Wall (LoW) x1
Search and Detain (HtS) x1
The First Snow of Winter (ODG) x1
The Power of Blood (Core) x2
Wildfire Assault (Core) x1

Character (43)
Bolton Refugee (RoW) x2
Disgruntled Mercenary (BoRF) x3
Highgarden Refugee (RoW) x2
Island Refugee (RoW) x2
Orphan of the Greenblood (PotS) x3
Refugee of the Citadel (RoW) x2
Cersei's Attendant (Core) x3
Doubting Septa (LotR) x3
Jeyne Westerling (ASoS) x1
Lost Spearman (MotM) x3
Tommen Baratheon (SA) x1
Arianne Martell (PotS) x1
Asha Greyjoy (WLL) x1
Baelor Blacktyde (TIoR) x1
Catelyn Stark (Core) x1
Cersei Lannister (LotR) x1
Eddard Stark (TTotH) x1
Euron Crow's Eye (TGM) x1
Khal Drogo (WotN) x1
Robb Stark (LoW) x1
Robert Baratheon (TTotH) x1
Stannis Baratheon (VM) x1
The Red Viper (PotS) x1
Ser Arys Oakheart (PotS) x1
Ser Jorah Mormont (WLL) x1
Daario Naharis (WLL) x1
Newly Made Lord (TftH) x3

Location (11)
Hollow Hill (ASoSilence) x3
Street of Sisters (Core) x1
Street of Steel (Core) x1
Shadowblack Lane (Core) x1
Flea Bottom (TGM) x1
Ocean Road (WLL) x1
River Row (QoD) x1
The Searoad (KotStorm) x2

Event (6)
Distinct Mastery (Core) x3
Parting Blow (PotS) x3

Attachment (0)