All Things Shagga - The Top Shagga: Beyond the Narrow Sea

Hi, folks, welcome back to All Things Shagga and thanks for sticking with me as I’ve worked my way through my choices on the top five Shagga cards from each and every chapter pack cycle since the LCG was released. This week, we finally catch up to the present day by taking a look at the Beyond the Narrow Sea cycle. So, without further ado, let’s take a look!

House of Dreams (ARotD) - Certainly one of the most controversial cards in a set full of controversial cards, House of Dreams is an agenda that will power a lot of imaginations. As I’ve said before, this is the sort of thing that is currently helping the creative juices flow for quite a few players. For instance, I recently built a Targaryen deck using this with Vaes Dothrak with a Dothraki theme for fun effect. Aside from that, however, there are quite a few locations of a more Shagga than Jaime bent that people will surely be testing with this. For instance Riverrun, The Iron Throne (Baratheon), The Wall (Baratheon), Blackwater Bay, Cersei’s Wheelhouse, Corpse Lake, Gates of Winterfell, and many others will all be experimented with by some enterprising player. In fact, there are so many wacky possibilities with this agenda that I think we’ll likely have to use the comments section to discuss some of the more interesting options. Of course, all that said, I think it is just a matter of time before the top choices become solidified and this moves more firmly into the Jaime camp.


The Kindly Man (VM) - Wow is this ever an awesome engine card! The Kindly Man is surely one of the most impressive of the character-agendas, with a recursion ability that just keeps coming. Frequently, it’s not that hard to win one of those two challenges (on attack or defense! With no strength requirement!), especially with the kill that Stark has available to get pesky defenders out of the way. Once you have the Kindly Man running, you can just keep cycling the beefiest character in any discard pile into play every turn. For most people that I’ve seen, this turns out to be The Viper’s Bannermen. If you can find a way to get the beastly out of house army into your discard pile, bringing back a 7 strength, deadly, stealth army that “draws” two cards each turn really helps turn a game in your direction. Is there anything better to recur? House Umber Berserkers perhaps?


Braavos (VD), Myr (AHM), Norvos (VD), Pentos (CD), Tyrosh (AHM), Volantis (VM) - Ok, so I’m really cheating here and including 6 cards all together for this particular entry. If House of Dreams hadn’t been in this set, then this cycle of unique kingdom locations would have hands down won for most Shagga friendly cards in the set. Those who play often against me know that I have a pretty intense love of dual and out of house cards, and the addition of these locations lets me indulge in this guilty pleasure to a pretty obscene degree. Whether it’s splashing Newly Made Lord for location control, Brienne of Tarth to shut down control effects, or slipping in a few copies of The Viper’s Bannermen as a draw engine, you can do darn near anything you’d like. Conveniently, they can often be chained together to combine houses and traits in order to add multiple discounts and they work extremely well with any of the Treaty agendas by double discounting your out of house stuff. The fact that they provide influence is nothing to sneeze at either. I recently took a deck that used several of these to great effect down to Tulsa, so I’ll almost certainly be writing about that soon when I get back to looking at decklists.

Dragon Egg (AHM) - Sure, it’s fragile. I think we can all agree on that, but can’t we also all agree on the potential here? Being able to give all of your cards that wouldn’t normally have ambush that keyword can be pretty huge, really. Sure, putting it on an opponent’s character does leave you open to an opponent removing the attachment even more easily by killing the character, but it does suddenly give you the ability to trigger Illyrio with 0 cost characters like Refugee of the Plains and Disgrunteld Mercenary. Conveniently, Targaryen also has very efficient recursion in Lady Daenery’s Chambers and Street Waif to keep bringing that Dragon Egg back. Of course, there are also locations with some sweet abilities that could be backbreaking to jump into play like the Dragon Pit.

Much and More (AHM) - For all that I said it wasn’t a top 5 card in the 2 Champs and a Chump review of the A Harsh Mistress chapter pack, I readily acknowledged then and now that it is a superb card to help put together combos. It’s not a great engine or extremely impressive effect by itself, but it really is one of the best ways to keep digging down into your deck in order to assemble the specific pieces of a combo that you’re trying to put together. Bonus points if, like Mr. John Bruno, you can consistently find means to negate the card that you’re putting into your opponent’s hand each time you play it.

So there you have it folks, we’re caught back up on chapter packs. I’ll probably tackle the deluxe expansion boxes at some point, but for now I’m going to let that rest and get back into deck building mode. I’m sure you loyal readers will be glad for the change of pace. Before we move on though, which are your most Shagga location choices to go with House of Dreams? Do you have some crazy thoughts for what you can jump into play with Dragon Egg? Be sure to let me know. Also, if you have thoughts on what nuggets of a deck I should focus on in two weeks, be sure to let me know here in the comments or by private message!