First Tilt - Growing Your Collection Without Breaking the Bank

Welcome back to First Tilt, a column dedicated to helping new players learn the strategies that will help them win the Game of Thrones. If this is your first time reading this column, we recommend you start with the New Player’s FAQ which addresses many common questions and provides links to a wide variety of great articles and resources. You should also refer to the great thread dedicated to new players here on the forums.

One of the persistent problems new players face when they first begin to play living card games is that of having a limited card pool. With an LCG like AGoT, that has been around for many years and is on its tenth expansion cycle (with each cycle having six chapter packs of twenty distinct cards), the sheer size of the card pool can be quite intimidating for a new player. First, because a large card pool means a lot of cards to learn, a lot of mechanics to understand, and a lot of deck builds/combos/staple cards to discern. Second, it can be intimidating since most new players don’t jump in by buying an entire collection, but rather by slowly dipping their feet in to chapter packs as they gain increasing knowledge of the game even as they are determining their potential level of interest and commitment.

Previous First Tilt articles have addressed this problem by discussing competitive deck builds that can be made with a small number of chapter pack purchases. Our previous series on this topic focused on building the most effective decks possible with two core sets, a house expansion, and the equivalent of a chapter pack cycle (six packs). While this series is still recommended reading for new players, such ambitions can still pose problems. The meta is continually changing, as new chapter packs are released and old cards receive errata or become restricted. This can make such deck builds stale and possibly unplayable. Also, for some players two cores+house expansion+six packs can be too big of a purchase, but they still want some advice on how to build decks and how to determine what one or two packs to buy.

With all that in mind, let’s talk about card purchasing strategies when you don’t want to spend too much or want to slowly increase your card pool.

BUYING CARDS FOR YOUR HOUSE
If you have a favorite house, and want to focus your card collection on that house, then this presents a clear and easy path for purchases. First stop: house expansion. Second stop: okay, I guess it’s not so easy a path. Buying for one house beyond the house expansion presents a problem, because you have to buy chapter packs that are filled with cards for houses you may not be interested in. Still, there are a couple of options:

1) Find a place that sells house-specific cards from a given cycle. Team Covenant is one such place; often you’ll also see people selling their collections and splitting them up by house (or selling only cards from a single house since they built up their collection this way).

2) Find a partner or two to go in on buying packs with you. This only works if you are interested in different houses, but if you are you can split costs and expand your collection jointly. The main difficulty will arise when you come across neutral cards that you both want, so you’ll have to come up with some system for determining who gets what when it is out of house..

3) Pick other houses to also play with that work with your collection. Buy the packs that have the best cards for your primary house, then see what kinds of decks you can build for other houses with the leftovers. You may be surprised by the decks you can build without even having intended to!

BUYING CARDS FOR YOUR PLAYGROUP
If you are the person providing cards for everyone in your playgroup, there is good news and bad news. The bad news is this could get expensive if you want to build top decks for every house. The good news is, it’s usually going to be expensive building top decks for more than one house anyways, so if you had any inkling of branching out beyond one house you will get the double benefit of both providing good decks for your friends while also building your card pool so you yourself can build some fantastic decks.

Of course, you can keep it cheap with just two core sets and have a great experience with your playgroup. Beyond that, the obvious choice is a house expansion for each of the houses people in your playgroup go with. After that, the best option is to buy entire cycles, so that each player/house gets a full set of playable cards with a shared design focus. I would lean towards cycles with more generic themes (i.e. Tale of Champions, Beyond the Narrow Sea) where cards can fit into a variety of decks, rather than cycles with specific themes (i.e. Brotherhood or Secrets of Oldtown/Maesters). This way players acquire broadly applicable cards that they can fiddle with within their houses, rather than theme-specific cards that often require the same neutral staples to work (when you only have three copies of each neutral Maester, it can be difficult for players in your group to each build a Maester deck).

BUYING CARDS FOR YOUR DECK
If you are buying just for yourself, and interested in playing more than one house, the best option is probably to buy packs on an “as needed” basis. What I mean by this is to wait until you have specific deck ideas that you want to create, then go out and buy the packs to support that. For example, if you want to build a Greyjoy choke deck or a Targaryen burn deck, you could then go out and buy the specific chapter packs to build such decks. Likewise, if you want to create a Maesters deck or a Naval deck, you would know that you should then go and buy those cycles. The strength of this approach is that you slowly build your collection without any large upfront expenditure, and your collection grows organically according to your play interests, rather than in a fixed path where you might end up with cards you are not interested in playing with.

When the deck idea comes first, and is then followed by the purchases, you will find less frustration at being unable to build the decks you want with a limited card pool. Use the deck builder here on CardGameDB to fiddle with your deck ideas, go through the card browser to identify the packs you want, test out your decks online on OCTGN, and once you find decks you like go out and buy the packs to physically build them. Much more fun will ensue than randomly buying packs and finding you don't like any of the cards!

BUYING IN BULK
While it is always a good idea to support your local gaming stores, if you are making a large purchase of AGoT packs you should consider purchasing from an online retailer. With packs retailing for $15 in stores costs can quickly add up. Online however you can often find chapter packs for $10, with house expansions going for $20 online instead of the usual $30. Now the kicker is that to make the reduced price worth it, you will have to place a big order, as most online game retailers require orders of $75 or $100+ to throw in free shipping. This is important because without the free shipping those $10 packs will suddenly come closer in actual cost to the price you would pay buying from a retail store. So if you are planning on buying a large amount of cards, going through an online retailer is the way to go.

Consider this: for $90 you can purchase an entire cycle of chapter packs through a local retailer, six in total. For an extra $10, with free shipping at $100, you can purchase an entire cycle and most of a second cycle (ten packs) or an entire cycle plus two house expansions. This difference in purchasing potential can have a big impact on your collection, your potential deck builds, and your enjoyment of the game!*

*But please, please do support your local game stores with purchases as well. After all, tournaments have to be held in a physical space, and purchasing packs is the best way to show local stores that there is support and interest for the game. So unless you are making a big purchase, do aim to support your FLGS!