Despite All Your Rage I Am Taking Your Icons With Cage 1.0

• Versiones
• 1.0

I took this to top 16 at the last Worlds this past weekend and it was a ton of fun to play. A brief bit about the rationale behind the deck:

I hate sea of blood. It's the bane of my existence and the game itself. It is the worst thing to happen to AGOT since David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. I wanted to take a deck that would beat it handily virtually every time. To that end I began testing Martell Kingdom of Shadows with icon removal. This did the job rather well, but it kept losing badly to BaraQ and other decks with heavy shadows hate. It also lost to other shadows decks.

As I was dejectedly browsing new cards looking for inspiration, I came across Cage of Ravens, which had been generally dismissed as not very good upon release. My mind flashed back to my Martell Trading with Qohor deck from the halcyon days of Greyjoy dominance and I had an idea to smash that together with NW, wipe away the blood and see how it went.

The Martell Qohor deck always did well with things that wanted to commit to the board, so Bara Qohor would not be an issue. The draw issues from that deck are solved by the embarrassment of riches that NW has in the form of Hobb, Seasoned Woodsman, and Messenger Raven. Add in Bowen for good measure, since we have stewards to tend to our cages anyway.

The decks that jump things in were always an issue since I could neither marshal attachments on them nor Qohor them in. Cage of Ravens solves that issue fairly well in combination with 2x Barring the Gates, in addition to some other interesting applications, which I'll list below:

• Use Messenger Raven in Dominance to draw, then cage them back in immediately and draw another. Ack! But now you're right at reserve and can't draw for Hobb. Well, just cage the Messenger Raven back in during Standing phase and you still get your Hobb draw.

• You unfortunately drew your one Gates of the Moon. What bad luck. Just go 2nd with cage in play and trigger during your opponent's marshaling so you get the 2 gold as if you had fetched it with ATG, and your opponent gets nothing that turn.

• Cage in a cage of ravens and then ditch the knelt cage for qohor

Those are generally the most fun applications, but the standard usage of tossing an attachment on someone when you've gone first or they've jumped them in is strongest. Using it as an econ of +1 doesn't hurt either.

But that's only 2 cards in the deck. The rest of it plays fairly straightforward: lock your opponent out of challenges, get unopposed and maybe a wall trigger, and win by not letting them play. Steal the little guys with recruiter, take the icons from the bigs, keep the board small with your resets, and call it a day.

I'm not great at tournament reports because my memory is terrible, but I had a good time playing and hats off to all my opponents. My 3 losses on the weekend were all to Lanni Kingdom of Shadows, so I would probably change VD to ED if I were to run this back again.

Enjoy!