Team World Cup | HUN | House Tyrell with the Kingsguard 1.0

• Versiones
• 1.0

I had the honor to be the Hungarian Tyrell representative with this White Book deck during the 2023 Team World Cup series. The list is a pretty bread&butter one, sharing lots of similarities with Magnus' Tyrell for intermediate player decklist (plot deck is absolutely the same, because it is the best setup for this deck in my view), but this one is a tad bit more greedy / aggressive by running both the Queen and the King, with the heavyweight punchers (Barristan / Knight of Flowers / Jaime / Robert Strong). Its strength is also its weakness: it either wins quickly (during testing most of my wins were at round 3) or fails quickly.

Matches played:

Round 1 - Loss vs Lannister The Many Faced God (Team USA) It was the most one-sided game of the World Cup for me - opponent played the Clansmen really well and efficiently, and my subpar draw could not do much against the Harrenhall and Lionstar combo and the endless attack from the mountains.

Round 2 - Loss vs Greyjoy Conclave (Team Poland) It was a sad game where I had the lead which was nullified by a small mistake (no doubt I have skill issues due to inexperience). I got selected as first player with my Valar against the opponent's Here to Serve, where I chose to resolve Here to Serve first (cause it is always good to put another maester in the dead pile, isn't it?). Totally forgot about Maester Kerwin not seeing play by that point of the game, only focused on depleting all the other saves the opponent's deck had. Euron (with a few power on him) was saved, and even though I had Barristan left on the board with Margaery, the opponent got the means to kill them easily.

Round 3 - Loss vs Martell Hollow Hill (Team Germany) Knowing that the opponent was Lennart with a signature Martell control deck, I was expecting this match to be heavily one-sided. In fact, it was not - the end result in terms of power was 11-15, which I would call close. Not so many means for handhate in this deck apart from the normal Intrigue challenge, thus the opponent constantly drawing cards is a huge threat, which eventually offset my rush start and turned the power split. But it was a close one, and a very enjoyable game overall - far from what I imagined originally.

Round 4 - Win vs Night's Watch Aloof (Team Chile) This was the match where the deck functioned as it was envisaged. Early Renly and duped Loras sealed the deal, getting a healthy lead in power tokens in the first three rounds was a good setup for the final blow with Tourney for the King.

Lessons learnt, a.k.a. how this concept would have worked better:

• Increasing character count - in some matches I struggled with finding the right characters, which I attribute to the fact that character count is on the lower end. 35 is healthier - the difference is only 10%, but still.
• I also reconsidered my key pieces, after many of my big buffoons died early. Margaery, Renly, Jaime and the Knight of Flowers shall definitely need to be at 3 copies, plus the small bodies. Barristan is a nice addition, but should not be higher than 2 copies, everyone else shall be at one copy. There is no sadder game state when in your hand you see copies of long-dead unique characters, so if I were to rebuild the deck, I would keep the non-key piece uniques at one copy for sure.
• Jousting Pavilion would be a great addition to this deck, and I would probably ditch some of the subpar gold-producing locations (Gates of the Moon, Gates of the Gods) and Honeywine) in favor of Jousting Pavilion. Also, running JP would make it ideal to use my lord Randyll Tarly's loyal companion women (Highgarden Courtier), so they can play their magic on Knight of Flowers, Jaime or Margaery. I used to think about them as the sidekicks in the "Randyll always stands" style of Tyrell deck, and not too useful in other ones, but playing during the World Cup made me reconsider this statement. Many times it would have been a gamechanger if I could attack twice and also defend once with one or two big renown knights.
• I almost never used Milk of the Poppy, or when I used it, it became immediately nullified because of Sweetsleep, so yeah, not that threatening card anymore, thus it shall not be part of the decklist. Smart usage of Nightmares is expected instead.

Thanks for the organizers for making the World Cup happen - being a fairly new player (playing my first Thrones LCG game in late December 2022), it was a great experience to have the first bite of competitive GOT during this event. See everyone next year!