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kpmccoy22

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Posts posted by kpmccoy22

  1. Posted

    I realize Rings doesn't like to acknowledge Melee, but the Heir agenda is Ridiculous on Bara in Melee. After playin quite a few melee games both with and against Baratheon/Heir, I fully expect half of GenCon Melee participants to be running this deck.

  2. Posted

    Twn2dn said:

    Dobbler said:

    My favorite use of Narrow Escape right now is using an Orphan of the Greenblood, Dornish Paramour and House Dayne Skirmisher by discarding/killing them, then playing NE to bring them back to play and doing it all over again, if not this turn, then next.  Where Open Market factors is the ability to get NE from the discard pile and do it all over again next turn.  Pyre of the False God's does the same thing.  Heck, I probably need a rules clarification to see how it interacts with Loyal Guards and Bara Bannerman that were not in play as characters, but were in play in other ways as attachments and duplicates. 

     

    Yeah, this is how my deck plays too. I throw in some Parting Blows as well, since they're so easy to pull off with those three characters and smooth out the draw. One advantage of playing Skirmishers with NE is that they can pull the last couple cards out of somebody's hand, so that it's much harder for the opponent to cancel NE.

    Thanks for the insight into Martell. It seems to me that Martell shouldn't have access to Recursion, seeing as they have plenty of in-house draw and reveal effects for card advantage. The idea of recurring Burning on the Sand, Red Vengeance, The Viper's Rage, etc seem really over the top. Recursion made some sense before the Box Set, but I think the time for them needing recursion has passed. If other Martell players see it differently, please explain the need to me.

     

    Without Recursion, they can only pull off the above trick 3x, and rarely more than 2x. While a little sick, you are looking at 5 cards. Nonunique, but still 5 cards. I'll take my chances.
     

  4. Posted

    The Martell/Summer build that really breaks NE hasn't made it to our meta yet. What about that build makes NE broken and in need of banning? Is it the Open Market? Is it something else?

    I understand the using of Narrow Escape as Hand Advantage, but that still doesn't break the card to me. What other ways besides returning standing characters for challenges/dominance do you and Greg see that requires NE to be banned or errataed?

    As to Auto-includes and House specific themes. Would I like to see House specific themes developed? ABSOLUTELY! Do I want every power neutral banned til it happens? NO! IF it combos bad with Open Market, ban the market. How many decks were running Open Market consistently in the last 3 years since it has been released? ~Will and Greg's Recurring Army deck hasn't dominated the environment enough to ban NE.

    Where is your line on power cards? Venomous blade, Val, and Narrow Escape are bad- PotS Red Viper, Shadows Varys, Arys Oakheart aren't. Varys and Arys consistently discard 3 gold characters making it 3 gold for a 3 strength bicon with a keyword and character removal. Thatt's a 6 gold swing for 3 gold! Seems undercosted to me. The Viper is unique in his Immunity and Power grab combination. Imagine Beric conditionally not kneeling for 1 gold more. Bad for the game? What about Blackfish? 2 really good abilities(power grab and hand advantage) for the same price as Core Set Stannis. Really? Or are overpowered cards ok as long as they have a House affiliation? It all seems rather arbitrary where you draw your lines.

    I appreciate your desire for house identity and house diversity, but that is a personal vision, not necessarily an AGOT CCG or LCG vision. As long as the game has been around, there have been strong neutral cards(often events)  that defined the environment. Looks like NE is seeing it's time in the sun.

     

  5. Posted

    Good episode:

    Thoughts back to my experience with Ice and Fire Block I started playing between Crown of Suns and Valyrian

    Stark: Dead on about 2nd best save house. Between Nymeria, the attachment on stronghold locations, and Karhold most local Stark decks saved from Valar almost as good as Greyjoy.

    Targ: Burn was much nastier because it was mostly Marshalling phase. Nothing is more discouraging than watching 7-8 gold worth of characters getting "burned to death before you ever get to challenges. Every turn!enfadado.gif Thank God burn has evolved in the later CCG, LCG era.

    Greyjoy: I like where their cancel evolved in Valyrian and later. Don't remember much of their Ice and Fire cancel. Agree that they REALLY miss access to mass removal, both character and location.( ~They need Storm Raiders back!) A little bit more renown to help their Unopposed theme would be nice as well.

    It would be interesting to get a peak into the mind of the game designers....but I'm not sure I would want to write that article right now if I was in their shoes. Seems to me that there are a vocal minority who are certain that they know what's good for the game and whatever Nate is designing isn't it....Maybe the article would give them some perspective. Who knows. Interesting thoughts.

  6. Posted

    As far as the playtesters go, maybe they have a different definition of what's good and bad for the game than the vocal opponents of Narrow Escape. It may not be that they didn't see the "problems", Maybe they didn't see them as problems. Many on the boards don't feel that "any strong neutral is bad for the game because it might become an auto include." Maybe playtesters fell into that category.

    As far as Blood-crazed Screamers and Knights of the Hollow Hill, I personally always read the card as errataed, so I never understood the need for the errataes. Maybe I've played the game too long and my mind autofills the meaning based on past rulings and errataes, but I found both of those rulings superfluous.

  7. Posted

    So,  what should a "balanced" anti-reset look like? If Narrow Escape is too powerful for LCG, what is balanced for LCG? If I just had my board wiped by Stark Siege, Targ burn or Valar, do I just grab my ankles and hope for lube?

    It seems to me that the environment is evolving away from resets and heavy control and making rush decks more viable, and control players don't like it.

    ~Good thing MtG doesn't have a history of bannings and cards that weren't playtested properly. We should definitely model after them.

  9. Posted

    Recently on the boards, there has been alot of threads discussing the need for Bannings of certain cards in the game. I think it began with the Wildling "problem" and has continued on to The Laughing Storm, Narrow Escape, other "broken" Martell events. The last time I saw this much clamor for the banning of cards was Fear of Winter and Siege of Winterfall late spring/early summer last year.

    Back in the CCG days there was a flurry of banning in Westeros Block, but after that they were few and far between. That was one thing I liked about AGOT. Rather than ban every power card that unduly influenced the metagame, the community either came up with ways to deal with the problem, or FFG created cards to shift the environment or made erratas to the power cards. While I didn't agree with all the erratas(tourney grounds), I appreciated the fact that there was a miniscule pool of cards that were outright banned.

    Why the shift in attitude?

    Does it take too long for cards to get printed to shift the environment?

    Do we dislike an unbalanced environment for any period of time so cannot wait for the coming solutions?

    Are we too lazy to change our decks and playstyle to adapt to the current environment?

    Are we too used to playing other CCG's to appreciate the difference in power and balance of AGOT?

    What makes me think I have enough insight to determine what's good for the entire metagame?

    Just some random thoughts that have popped in my head after reading the boards the last couple of months....

     

  10. Posted

    I remember reading threads that hated auto-include cards, because it shrunk the overall variety of the metagame. Venomous Blade, To Be a... Plots, Wildlings before the banning, Val(not sure on this one, but I think she's been included). No one's throwing that around about the Heir to the Iron Throne agenda, but I can think of 6 or more deck archetypes where the adding the agenda has virtually no drawback and it makes the deck more efficient immediately(Bara Rush, Bara Asshai/Hand Destruction, any Stark build not running an agenda currently, any Greyjoy deck not currently running an agenda, Targ Dothraki) without having to modify the build dramatically.

    I'm really surprised the "auto-include police"  haven't jumped on this card. Am I missing something?

  17. Posted

    Joust play is all about control elements, either the ones you are using against your opponent and countering your opponent's attempts to control you. That is very different than Melee where the emphasis seems to be taking advantages of oppurtunities as they arise and claiming power. You really need to remember that when transitioning from melee to joust and joust to melee.

  18. Posted

    I enjoyed listening to the episode.

    1. Finally a quote by someone without the surname Lannister. All the opening quotes to date have been memorable, but other Houses/characters had great lines too.

    2. The Renn music between segments was a nice touch.

    3. Top 6 Houses in Joust

    Spot on. Lannister is still top house, without getting any strong house-specific cards in the last 2 chapter pack cycles/box sets. The Last strong card they got that I can remember is Arys Oakheart in the Martell Box and alot of goodies in the Shadow cycle. If top players decided they wanted to run Lannister at major events, the kneel build is still strong enough to dominate the overall meta. The gap has closed, but Lanni still leads. "Gold plus draw is good? Who knew"

    Will had good points about Martell. 2nd best Control, 2nd best draw,  2nd best rush in the game. 2nd at GenCon. "Always the bridesmaid...." 

    Bara is slightly higher in my mind than Stark, because of the variety in-House. Especially with the box set and latest cycle expanding on the builds they have available to them. Until Stark gets more reliable search for their toolboxing, I'll give Bara the slight edge.

    On the TLS, without turning this thread into the other thread, I see TLS as negative hand advantage. He draws me no cards, but protects the cards I have. I think King Stannis in the box set was likewise negative hand advantage. He draws me no cards, but prevents my opponent from outdrawing me each round. In that sense, TLS is inline with Bara hand advantage. Not draw or recursion, but more hand manipulation like Winter/Greyjoy builds.

    On the Blackfish, this may be coincidental, but his appearance on the scene marked the rise of draw in Stark. His arrival with the guard at Riverrun gave Stark reliable draw which brought them out of 6th place in the Joust rankings. Until the Stark Box set, Stark had absolutely no reliable draw in house. Now with the Drawfort back. Stark draw is very reliable. So Blackfish either opened the door for Stark draw, or was the first to walk through that door. Not sure which.

  19. Posted

    I've listened to all 6 episodes now. I like the fact that each episode has it's own unique structure. I like the bantering back and forth. i even like the chapter pack card-by-card "analysis". I'm not really looking for a professionally produced podcast, I listen to alot of them already. I like the fact that it feels like I'm hanging at the local game shop with a bunch of guys who play thrones, some who I know more than others.

     

     

  21. Posted

    With Stark, Baratheon, and Greyjoy getting more in-house/thematic draw effects, is there a need for strong neutral draw in the environment? I keep seeing that Val+TLS=broken, but what if Val were removed from the equation instead of TLS? Which houses would suffer the most from Val being removed from the metagame?(No, I'm not calling for the banning of Val, I'm just trying to see the other side.)

  22. Posted

    rings said:

     ~Again, I think the same people would be annoyed if no characters could be killed while he was standing, so maybe it is icon-racism...  demonio.gif

    ~Nah, that's why Westeros Bleeds was reprinted so we could have a Baratheon character that negated military challenges also. It's all a grand conspiracy to make Baratheon top house by GenCon 2011

  23. Posted

    ~This is the most broken card ever! We should ban it now before Baratheon takes over the meta game and no other houses are viable!....oh, he does take milk of the poppy...and he has no immunities....but I like proclaiming how cards will break the environment before they are released, only to never see them get played regularly. 

    While I see your point about Greyjoy/Winter, I think that deck has other holes besides the Laughing Storm.

     

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