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Friendly Open Beginners deck: House Martell The Wars To Come (R)

Martell Wars: The whole idea of the deck is to maximize the benefits Martells get from used plots by ramping up fast while disrupting the opponent’s hand and board with the plots. If a game goes to round 4-5, your chances of victory will increase significantly.

Plots: The standard opening for all matches will be At Prince Doran's Behest into City of Secrets. If you didn't setup Gulltown, discard House Dayne Escort so they can be marshalled from your discard pile later on.

City Festival can be played when we want to swarm the board after a reset has been played.

Duel is particularly useful against Aloof and Apart decks. One good thing about running the The Wars To Come (R) agenda is that opponents may refrain from marshalling 2 or more high cost characters in fear of a possible Duel.

Heads on Spikes can be played against an opponent with few cards in hand. It can also be useful when no other plots seem fitting.

King's Landing Riot will be played when we need to clean the board. Be sure to have at least 2 city plots+Gulltown or 3 city plots in your used pile when you reveal it!

Manning the City Walls is very useful for Martell decks to put into play your high cost Army characters, Starfall Cavalry and Host of the Boneway, with an acceptable alternative in Knights of the Sun.

Political Disaster is a very good card in competitive play against very powerful decks like Greyjoy and their warships, Night's Watch and their builder locations, or even other Martell control decks.

The Pointy End is a very useful stalling plot to fight back Renown or “Voltron” (a character filled up with attachments to make it very powerful) decks.

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.

Ser Cletus Yronwood: He’s probably the MVP character in the deck. You will be able to decide who goes first in most rounds if he’s in play. You or your opponent have intimidate? Go first! You have some tricks in hand or dead Desert Raider (R)? Go 2nd!

Ricasso: For obvious reasons, he will ramp up your used plots real fast, enabling powerful Doran's Game (R), Areo ambushes or pumping Host of the Boneway STR, among others, early in the game.

Doran's Game (R): This is the deck’s main winning condition. Protect it as much as you can by defending intrigue challenges or by keeping The Hand's Judgment in hand to counter your opponent’s counters.

The Scorpion's Sting: This 1x card can be brutal if used properly. Also, Stark matchups can be difficult to win by intrigue challenges if Catelyn Stark (Core) or Winterfell are in play, so this card gives you room for manouvering around those.

Piloting the deck: Here are some tools to explore while playing this deck.

A Mission in Essos (R) is a powerful card that can allow you to bring your Starfall Cavalry back to hand, thereby recycling your draw, while putting good characters on the board.

A juicy interaction is to use it on 4-cost Areo Hotah (SoD) to search for 3-cost Areo Hotah (Core) and remove a character from a challenge.

The Fowler Twins are good to dodge annoying characters during the challenge phase. They’re also very good combined with The Scorpion's Sting to cause your opponents to win challenges unwillingly. Experienced players will allow you to win irrelevant challenges once the game is advanced!

The Prince's Plan is a very good card that can make you win the most relevant challenges in a round. Sometimes it’s better to refrain from spending too much gold during marshaling and keeping it to play multiple instances of this card, especially if you’re looking to pull some Doran's Game (R).

Another good use for this card is to give Host of the Boneway an unexpected power icon.

Venomous Blade will be extremely helpful to remove low cost characters from your opponent’s board. It becomes especially important against Stark because it can get rid of Bran Stark (Core), who could ruin your Doran's Game (R)s.

Becoming familiar with every card in the deck can take time, but once it gets rolling it’s a really fun and resourceful deck that will face any matchups pretty decently. Its worst enemies will be all-in decks full of renown characters like Stark The Lord of the Crossing, so be sure to build up your defensive skills for those!

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 :)