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Friendly Open Beginners deck: Night's Watch Kings of Summer (Builders).

Difficulty: Easy

Defending the Wall is the theme of this deck, designed to leverage the outstanding defensive abilities Night's Watch Builders can provide. This deck will swarm the board quite easily and will only initiate a few challenges throughout a game.

Plots: The opening plot for this deck will generally be Time of Plenty, mainly for the 1 initiative. However, when facing aggressive decks like The Lord of the Crossing or The Free Folk, starting with Late Summer Feast to maximize your marshaling capability can be the right call.

Close Call will generally be used to take back Halder or Othell Yarwyck.

For the Watch! Is a great defensive plot with which even experienced players struggle sometimes. You won’t need to defend the first challenge against you at all!

Grand Melee is another stalling plot that will match very well with your Cravens. Remember that it will also affect you, so be careful when initiating challenges!

At the Palace of Sorrows will be particularly great against Targaryen Burn (to understand what Burn is, check this list). decks, especially if you nail their Blood of the Dragon with it. Apart from that, Craster will be immune to it, so you can pump him nonetheless.

Valar Dohaeris because we all need a reset in our deck. Craster will also be immune to this one, so you will probably be able to keep 2-3 extra characters easily after its effect.

Key cards: The following cards are specially precious and, if protected accordingly, will lead you to a victory, or will at least give you high chances of success.

The Wall (Core): It is your main winning condition. Try to defend it as much as possible to outrun your opponent in the power race. When you have Isle of Ravens in play, always prioritize to reshuffle your The Wall (Core)s in the discard pile. When playing against Greyjoy or Winter decks, never place it in setup as the only non-limited location! Their Nothing Burns Like The Cold could be very effective in that case.

Lord Commander: This card is your secondary winning condition. However, it can only be attached to Othell Yarwyck or Craster, so make sure they’re protected when you play it.

Castle Black Mason and Three-Finger Hobb: They will provide consistent draw and tutor effects for your disrupting attachments. Sometimes it will be worth kneeling 2 builders in the marshaling phase to search for a game-changing Milk of the Poppy or Craven.

Lay Waste: This card will have 2 potential uses: first, and most importantly, it will get rid of annoying attachments on The Wall (Core). Second, it can allow you to tutor for Milk of the Poppys or Cravens or X if you discard a location of attachment of your own.

Piloting the deck: Here are some tools to explore while playing this deck. Don’t use all your bullets at first chance. Use Milk of the Poppys and Cravens only in key characters, preferentially duplicated ones, since remember that when you play Valar Dohaeris your opponent will probably put heavily disrupted characters at the bottom of their deck. Similarly, try not to overswarm your board before a reset has been played from either player. Keeping cards in hand can allow you to recover from those. This is especially important when playing against heavy removal decks like Martell 321 or Shadow decks.

When playing against Burn, being first player can be key to make your characters survive, since you’ll be able to pump their STR before your opponent has a chance to play events. This is especially true when Halder is in play, since he’ll be able to pump a character’s STR right after the challenge phase begins if you’re first, therefore protecting it from A Dragon Is No Slave.

Othell Yarwyck is a great card that will allow to defend most of the challenges. When combined with Owen the Oaf, it will be particularly hard for your opponents to win them. However, it is important to keep in mind that Owen the Oaf’s effect will also apply to your characters.

Playing purely defensive decks can be exhausting and can lead to long games with multiple rounds. Try not to overthink too much about secondary decisions (marshaling small cost characters), or mistakes you may have made and focus on the main goal, defend!

Keep your disruptive tools for the key counter cards in matchups like Greyjoy (Milk of the Poppys for Maester Murenmure) and Lannister (Seized by the Guard or Lay Waste for The Red Keep). Getting the defensive perspective with this deck can not only be fun, but is also useful to learn another ways of playing the game. Be ready to minimize damage caused by your opponents’ resets and Political Disaster, which can hurt the deck greatly.

Enjoy!

This deck is made by Marcel Arias, who is a real beast with orange cards (Martell), and a good deck builder with several factions. Marcel (JP Profile), is a real stand-up guy who helps new players, and is one of the reason Friendly Open became a thing (he helped Zinnie - host of FO, build his first deck ever). Friendly Open can be found at Friendly Open's Discord where you can find more decks, discuss with those who made them, and join our weekly tournaments. Hope this decklist will help you, leave a comment if it has, and join us for some thrones at the discord channel :)