The Hand's Judgement - The Wrong Voyage?

The Long Voyage, awesome new agenda that opens up new possibilities or scourge of the current meta choking out other deck types. In this article Libert1ne and Istaril take a look at the Agenda and debate its effects on the meta. Let us know in the comments which side you fall on.

First up is Libert1ne taking the con position:

 
Libert1ne

Ever feel in control of a game and lose because your opponent draws more cards than you?
Have you been playing your best decks and been getting smoked by The Long Voyage (TPoL)?
Need a hug?

You are not alone.

Welcome citizens of cardgamedb. My name is Bert (Libert1ne) and today I'll take a break from my usual fare (tournament reports) to present to you a factual and philosophical position on the new shiny Agenda that just won't leave you alone.

I'll begin with a quick preface. My general position on the Agenda is that it is too powerful, and should be removed from the environment. Additionally, it serves to stagnate and homogenize the meta-game, and kills an entire deck archetype: control.

What's the big deal? It's just another card advantage agenda/card, right?
There are many cards in the Game of Thrones LCG that supply card advantage (Through draw, or adding to hand, or saves, etc), so why is this any different? At face value, The Long Voyage (TPoL) may appear to be akin to Knights of the Realm (KotStorm) (KotR) or the Kings of Summer (ASoS) (KoS) Agenda. This is not the case.

Let's do a brief side-by-side comparison of the benefits of each agenda:

They each provide one additional card draw during the draw phase.
KoS requires it to be summer, and cannot fire until turn two
KotR requires you have more knights than each opponent
Long Voyage has no requirement
Ok, so the Long Voyage has a much better benefit than the other card advantage Agendas, surely the downside will even them out, right? Wrong:
KoS has a vulnerable condition (it is summer), and a game-destroying draw-back (If it is winter, you only draw one card per framework draw), and is restricted.
KotR has a vulnerable condition (More knights than each opponent) and a crippling draw-back (If you have less, you only draw one card per framework draw)
Long Voyage has a deckbuilding drawback of an 85 card minimum.
At a glance, it seems a reasonable balance. At the nitty-gritty, it is not.
The Long Voyage has a deckbuilding restriction, but so does KotR and KoS, in addition to their other downsides. KotR requires you play lots of Knights (you inherently sacrifice card quality by choosing knights over better characters), and is more or less restricted to house Baratheon and house Stark. KoS requires you play attachments to make it summer, and a plot that, in the current meta-game, has weak stats and a weak effect.

So how big of a downside is an 85 card minimum decksize? Well, the short answer is not very. Istaril's excellent article on the agenda (found here) illustrates that the chance to draw a particular card in a TLV deck is ~25% worse in setup and by plot 7 is only 5% worse off. So top-decking that No Quarter (TBC) is not such a long shot in your TLV deck. It gets even more interesting when we consider the redundancy that the immense cardpool affords us. Consider a 60 card deck with 3x No Quarter, and an 85 card deck with 3x No Quarter and 3x Die By the Sword. The 85 card deck has a better chance of picking up a "murder" event than the 60 card version does, each turn. If you can accept that the difference in card quality between the best 60 you can play, and the best 85 you can play isn't very large, then the 85 card minimum pales in comparison to the downsides the other card advantage agendas offer.

Wait, so you're telling me the advantage is better, and with clever deckbuilding the downside is negligible?

Yes. In fact, The Long Voyage is the only card in the history of the LCG of its kind. It is the only card advantage card that has no conditions, has no cost (you don't have to draw it and pay for it), and isn't vulnerable to attachment/location/character removal. It Stands alone, scary, huh?

Okay, you've convinced me. The Long Voyage is a very powerful agenda, with an unprecendented design, but what is it really doing to the game? There have been other powerful Agendas in previous meta-games.

Let me start by saying that TLV is one of the winningest Agendas so far this regional season (I just came from a 20 player regional where the top 4 had 3 TLV decks), and is gradually eclipsing other agendas in popularity as the playerbase catches on to its power level.

This is where the article will take on a more contentious and less factual tone. It is my firm opinion that The Long Voyage is dissimilar from other powerful agendas in its impact on the meta-game, impact on viable deck archetypes and impact on general flow of the game.

First of all, I'd just like to address something that many people have overlooked. TLV has effectively robbed Black Sails (RotK) and the entire naval theme of being "the new shiny" and potentially dominant. In the recent French nationals (113 players), Pirates of Lys was not legal and the top 32 was flooded with Black Sails decks. In regional tournaments where Pirates of Lys is allowed, Black Sails has been doing poorly and been underrepresented. The types of TLV decks that have been winning are only using the exceptionally powerful cards (on their own) from the latest cycle, and largely are reusing old archetypes (such as Choke, Dragons, Kneel, etc). In fact, TLV has been killing a lot of agendas and deck archetypes (significantly more than it's been empowering), which leads me to my next point.

The Long Voyage elevates aggro to such a high level of ascandency that the list of viable control and rush archetypes is becoming very short. Isn't that a good thing? Aggro has been suffering in the past right? Yes, generally speaking aggro hasn't been positioned very well. I am all in favour of making aggro strong again. The dilemma arises when you examine the magnitude of the effect. In conjunction with Negotiations at the Great Sept (TPoL) (this is a whole other beast that would require another article), aggro decks garner the ability to overplay their hand, without worry about a reset; a control deck's biggest weapon. Pouring card advantage into aggro (traditionally an archetype with limited card advantage) has really made control almost impossible to play. These merging effects serve to homogenize the meta-game. The Thrones community is a slow-learning, slow-moving entity, but expect to see more and more of Long Voyage and aggro at fourthcoming events.

The Long Voyage moves the game away from player orientated control and interaction over the board state, and injects a larger element of luck into the game. This is fantastic for the casual gamer! How many times have you seen your new friend playing his first game cop a The First Snow of Winter (ODG) into Rule by Decree (Core) and cringe? Well the Long Voyage can make up a lot of ground (as can Negotiations) in these situations. It serves as an equalizer, which is a good thing for new or casual players, but alienates top level players or players who value skill greater than luck in competitive games.

Thanks for the rant Libert1ne. I think you're overblowing the potency of the card though. I'm going to take my control/rush deck to a regional and prove you wrong!

Please do. I'd love to be proven wrong!

 
Istaril

Remember when HoD came out? Everyone said it was overpowered, had no drawback. The 2champs1chump podcast ridiculed the design for 20 solid minutes. The post-worlds meta was dominated by the deck. The sky was falling... and look how that turned out.

Now it seems we have another fellow holding up a “The End Is Nigh!” sign...

Claim 1: It has homogenized the meta.
TLV has no more homogenized the meta than any other popular agenda. In fact, it's comparable to the most popular agenda in regionals now: HoD – it is playable out of any house, and each can play a very different build. In Bert's very words; TLV decks run the gamut from “Choke, Dragons, Kneel” (I'd add Clannsmen, Burn, Stark toolbox, and even Martell challenge control); a huge variety of styles, and not all aggro.

Claim 2: It has killed control
Here I think Bert is confounding two issues; Negotiations at the Great Sept and TLV. While the two play well together, saying that TLV kills control is like saying that no one without a counter to the season can beat a seasons deck. Furthermore, the downsides of TLV mean it's less likely to have the specific answer to any given control on the board. While TLV has certainly empowered aggro, which is the natural opponent to control, it's far from a death sentence. Negotiations, on the other hand... I also find that high prevalence of aggro has opened the way for combo decks to step in from obscurity and potentially rise up for the first time.

Claim 3: It is the “winningest” of agendas
This is currently true, although by no landslide margin. I had a look through 2c1c's tourney data, and TMP and TLV are roughly equivalent, with an over-repesentation in the top cut of 1.7 fold. This is nowhere near the values we were seeing for TMP in its heyday.

Claim 4: It has very little downside.
Here is a matter of opinion. Having an 85 card deck *is* a drawback, although how much is clearly debatable. In my experience, a vast majority of the TLV decks include at least 15 sup-optimal cards that would not make the cut of a 60 card deck, including (but not limited to) dupes and second-rate locations in an effort to smoothen the resource curve and decrease variance of the deck. Now a 20% “sup-par” card rate, probably double that of a KotR Bara deck, is a small drawback.

The most important drawback lies elsewhere; variance. TLV decks are inherently more variable than non TLV decks; Historically, top-level players abhorr variance. They maximize the copies of their best cards, they run agendas that allow them to thin the deck.

Finally, there' s the inefficiency. People like to cite my previous article's value of a 5% inefficiency (5% less likely to have drawn any given 3 copy card by turn 7), but they forget that this inefficiency starts off at 25%, and that your chance of top-decking into a needed card once you add more draw to your deck greatly favour the smaller deck.

Claim 5. In a direct comparison, it's better than the other Draw agendas

I agree. KoS and KoW can compete (KoS is extremely efficient compared to TLV), but they're restricted, and KotR is quite constraining; by contrast TLV is liberating and “safe”. However, I believe that its current major contenders are the other card advantage agendas; Black Sails, TMP. You pay a bigger cost, but the payoff is greatly reduced variance, more valuable draw (BS) or toolboxing and a thinner deck.


The future of TLV:

I'm of the opinion that KoS/KoW weren't restricted because they were too powerful, but because it was time to see some changes in the environment. I think TLV is a likely candidate for restriction to shift the meta in the same way if it shows signs of stagnation. TLV is resilient, easy to use, new, shiny, and empowers new decks. As a result, it's getting overplayed by new players seeking an easier deck and old players looking for something new. I don't think that makes it bad for the game.
Negotiations, on the other hand, needs a spot on the restricted list, an errata, or both.

 
Libert1ne

Remember when HoD came out? Everyone said it was overpowered, had no drawback. The 2champs1chump podcast ridiculed the design for 20 solid minutes. The post-worlds meta was dominated by the deck. The sky was falling... and look how that turned out.

Now it seems we have another fellow holding up a “The End Is Nigh!” sign...

While the tone of my article is somewhat aggressive, I think the comparison to the alarmist reaction to HoD here is unwarranted, and that last statement is borderline ad hominem. A majority of the arguments that arose from the introduction of HoD focussed on the design choice, and eliminating "no agenda" as a viable archetype. HoD didn't become the winningest agenda upon release, unlike TLV, and sets itself apart from a design perspective.

House of Dreams has immediate answers, that were already played in tier one builds prior to release; A City Besieged, Search an Detain, Seasick etc. Since that time the list of answers has only grown (Battle for the Shield Islands). TLV is an agenda with no legitimate answer (KoW has potential, but is restricted and winter decks are just better off running TLV), and more importantly is winning. It is winning a lot.

Also for the record, I did not react this way when House of Dreams was released.

Claim 1: It has homogenized the meta.

House of dreams created entirely new, and more importantly, mechanically interesting deck archetypes. Building decks around interesting or powerful locations (with the availability of appropriate answers by opponents) was/is excellent. Decks like HoD Tunnels, Aegon's Hill, or The Iron Throne became incredibly specialised, new, and interesting decks in their own right, all from the one agenda.

The Long Voyage, in stark contrast, introduces a blanket benefit without adding any new archetypes or mechanically interesting decks. The winning builds we're seeing aren't new or exciting, and are essentially the same as their 60 card counterparts, but with additional card draw. I was not only referring to the dominating percentage of players playing a particular agenda, but what that agenda does for the game in terms of creating deck diversity. Surely one can make the distinction between Tunnels/Aegon's Hill/The Iron Throne and Targ TLV/Greyjoy TLV/Lanni TLV (These builds are essentially no-agenda decks with extra draw).

Claim 2: It has killed control

Comparing the current balance of that control has with TLV to the balance that control had with the seasons agendas last year is a false analogy. When seasons were unrestricted, so too were Orphan of the Greenblood, Pentoshi Manor, The Scourge, A Game of Cyvasse, Aegon's Hill, The Hatchling's Feast, (the list goes on). Control had its canines' pulled with the FAQ. KoS wasn't played because of the balance with winter, and most, if not all top tier decks had answers to seasons (Tin/Copper link, carrion bird). On top of this, TLV is *strictly* better than KoW or KoS, a point you concede later.

If you play control at a regional you will experience auto-loss games to TLV decks running additional draw spewing out more characters than you can deal with.

Claim 3: It is the “winningest” of agendas

It's early days yet. The Maesters Path won a world championship before it even had its heyday. TLV has been out for a couple months and is leading regional wins by over double the next successful agenda. I agree that data is sparse, and sample sizes small.

Claim 4: It has very little downside.

The discussion about including sub-par cards is an interesting one; particular qualities that make a card subpar is a subjective matter in its own right. The difference between the GJ maester deck that wins tournament X and the GJ maester deck that wins tournament Y, each with 50 players might be 15 different cards. Having an 85 card deck-size allows for the inclusion of more silver-bullet type cards (Bastard, Milk of the Poppy, Ill-Tidings, Cannot be Bribed, Cannot be Bought, etc), and allows for the inclusion of powerful cards that do not make the cut in 60 card variant, due to setup concerns, etc. I would wager that the real difference in quality between the first 60 cards one would choose and the last 25 one would choose is very little, and when conditionally very powerful cards are introduced, an 85 card deck size doesn't seem so bad.

While variance is increased by the 85 card deck minimum, the agenda also decreases variance. Card draw, by its nature, decreases the variance one will experience while piloting a deck by increasing the sample size of cards available for playing. The worst part of the game for the TLV player is setup, and by including many low cost cards this can be mitigated.Throw in search effects and clever deckbuilding and plot choices and the impact is diminished further.

As for the 25% disadvantage at the beginning of the game (which shrinks to 5% by plot 7) to draw a particular card, redundancy in the cardpool makes this point essentially a non-issue. "Adding more draw" to the smaller deck is easier said than done. Every other option is vulnerable, costs gold and requires you to draw it, unlike TLV.

Claim 5. In a direct comparison, it's better than the other Draw agendas

It seems we agree here on the first point. As for Black Sails or TMP being comparable 'card advantage' agendas I wholeheartedly disagree. Black Sails is incredibly unreliable (an ounce of challenge control ruins you, and you must overcommit on challenges most of the time to trigger the agenda), and does not fire pre-marshalling phase. TMP has so many answers that are so easily runnable (any attachment control, bastard, murder/burn) to counteract its advantages, again, unlike TLV.

I doubt FFG will restrict TLV. I suspect Negotiations will get restricted, and perhaps summer/winter will come off the list. TLV is easy to use, I agree, but it is too easy to use and too powerful.

After all that I'd just like to add another statement to hit my point home.

I'm not solely arguing that TLV is too powerful, which it is proving to be, but that it is bland, unsatisfying, and mechanically uninteresting and dull. Why should something cool like "The Power Behind the Throne" be unplayable, but bland "draw one card" agendas dominate? We, as players, have the right to protest the introduction of powerful but dull cards. Do we really want a meta that is dominated by "draw one card" agendas? At least maesters was mechanically interesting (even when they were overpowered [note: I am not suggesting they are still not too powerful])

Mechanically interesting agendas with REAL drawbacks (like PBTT or Heir to the iron Throne) will not be playable so long as the alternative is free card advantage.

 
Istaril

Rather than re-address any of the points re-stated in your rebuttal (I feel my arguments still stand and you do a good job of showing where we disagree), I'll limit myself to opposing the new claims;

Claim 1. House of Dreams has Immediate Answers, TLV does not.

House of Dreams, at the time, had 3 answers; a city besieged, search and detain (restricted), and Victarion's Reavers (Horrendous). Even answering it, you're left with a deck that gained little from it's agenda, but inherently lost nothing but some portion of its setup. TLV has at least two "hard" counters; KoW (restricted), Stannis (KotS): using these completely negates the advantage of the agenda *and* leaves them with 100% of the drawback.In addition we have a whole arsenal of softer counters; For R'hllor, Threat from the East (Restricted), Counting Favors. All of these serve to level the playing field. Other options include running choke (even a FoW or Blockade) to limit how they can press the card advantage they gain, and running more draw (They outdraw you 4 to 3 is not as bad as 3 to 2). Finally, running combo will be inherently less susceptible to disruption by TLV decks.

And in the future, I think some of those nice new "Cards at your Command" effects we're going to see in Kingsroad, if the spoiled "Rally Cry" is any indication, will serve to punish decks like TLV and reward more efficient decks.

Claim 2: TLV is Bland

TLV caused the playerbase to re-examine a stongly held preconception. When it came out, the vast majority were saying it was bad, and likely to see play only by beginners. I think at the very least, by challenging that preconception, it's been a design success. I also see that it has enabled new archetypes to rise to T1 that would otherwise never have made it. While the card text itself is bland, I think it's effects on the game have not been.

It has certainly provided for lively debate!