Much and More - Brotherhood

Welcome to the inaugural edition of the new weekly article Much and More with your host ShadowcatX2000. This series is going to be significantly different from the majority of the articles put out by the Small Council in that I plan to cover all 6 houses, both melee and joust formats, both top tier and lower tier agendas, and pretty much other random things as they come to me. Likewise some articles may feature deck lists and some may not. Basically it'll cover a large variety of topics. But at least they'll all be on Game of Thrones.

So I suppose I should introduce myself. I'm ShadowcatX2000, also known as Joshua Slane over at Team Covenant and ShadowcatX at tradecardsonline. I'm fairly new to the only game that matters, I played my first game on just July 7th of this year, so a little less than 4 months at the time of this writing. However, in my time playing I've read all 5 books, I've done an extensive amount of research into the game, and played in a large number of tournaments in the Tulsa meta, which to my understanding is one of the stronger metas in the U.S. Of the tournaments I've played in I've won a couple and placed in a couple more. I've also written a large number of tournament reports that are available in my blog.

I'm definitely a Jaime player, however I don't feel that I have to play only "the very best deck" but instead strive to make whatever deck I do choose to play the very best it can be. I started with house Stark. My favored house is Martell, though I've taken to using Greyjoy for my melee deck, currently running it allied with Baratheon. I also really like House Targaryen. House Lannister kinda makes me feel dirty though.

So what can you expect to get out of this series of articles? Well, hopefully you can get some really good advice about things that other articles may not be covering, such as how different houses stack up against each other on the same agenda. Also, you'll be getting the view of a fresh set of eyes, because sometimes that is just helpful. So let’s get into it shall we? To begin with we’re going to do a series of articles examining the Brotherhood.

To start, let's us look at the Brotherhood Agenda. "If you would claim or move power to your House, you must place it on a Brotherhood character you control instead. Opponents may choose and take power from your Brotherhood characters to fulfill the claim of Power challenges initiated against you."

The first thing you should notice is that with this agenda there is no up side, everything about this agenda is bad. Power on characters is less safe than power on a house card and this makes it even less safe by letting your opponents take power from your characters during their power challenges. Finally, it requires you to have a brotherhood character in play to collect power "for your house" at all. It is important to note that renown is exempt from that.

So let's think about that for a minute, you must have a brotherhood character in play to collect power at all. This is going to tempt you to load your deck up on brotherhood characters, after all, if you must have one in play you might as well have tons in play, right? Well no, more is not always better.

To begin with, having one or a thousand in play allows you to collect power, it makes no difference. What does make a difference, however, is how stable that "one" that's going to collect the power for you is. And of course, everyone immediately thinks of Beric Dondarrion (IG). And that's not a bad thing at all. However, the methods of getting rid of Beric are legion, Ghaston Grey (FtC), A Game of Cyvasse (ACoS), A House Divided (WLL), blanking & kill, etc. all of which means that dupes are your friend. And not just for Beric, if you run Brotherhood, no matter how much you work at protecting him, you will encounter situations where the Lightning Lord is in the dead pile. That means you're going to have to have backup Brotherhood characters. And that at least some of them should have dupes for all the same reasons as Beric as well as the obvious "protect from death" reasons.

So what other Brotherhood characters should you run? Well to begin with The Mad Huntsman (ASoSilence). If you're playing Brotherhood, he's probably one of the best characters in the game. Lady Stoneheart (MotM) shows that it is hard to keep a good woman down. Tom Sevenstrings (RoR) is one of the best cancels in the game. And Thoros of Myr (RoR), in both his forms makes an impressive figure.

If you run all of the above in triplicate that's 15 Brotherhood characters, or 1/4th of your deck. That means by the first turn marshalling phase, even without any search effects, you will generally have come across 3 brotherhood characters, which is more than enough to start collecting power. You may even decide you don't want all of the above in triplicate. Or perhaps you'll want a one of of this or that brotherhood (Ghost of High Heart for example) and that's perfectly acceptable, just realize that one of's are a horrible place to hold your power.

Now you're probably wondering why I didn't mention some of the other brotherhood characters above, Lem Lemoncloak for example, and the reason for that is simple, characters that are not good by themselves rarely, if ever, belong in a deck. With the availability of a reset as a plot choice overwhelming the opposition with numbers and synergy is not a particularly strong strategy, even for the brotherhood.

And that's it for this time. In the next Much and More we'll take a look at the different houses and what cards each house brings to the table for your Brotherhood decks. Thanks for reading and let us know in the comments what you think of the Brotherhood.