The other kind of kingsguard - Stahleck 2023 top 32 1.0

• Versiones
• 1.0

Before Stahleck, I played Lanni crossing to the point of exhaustion, where I didn't want to pick the deck up anymore. After that I tried building my own Lanni knights, which did surprisingly well in my very limited testing. However, in eight rounds of joust I wanted to be able to do tricky and janky plays, and sometimes to surprise my opponents, so I defaulted to my last year's love, the white book. IMO Tyrell white book looks like it should perform better than Lanni one, but my house loyalty did not allow that as an option.

In 2022 I had more "fun stuff" in the deck, like tunnels and trial by combat. This year all those were trimmed out for nightmares and the nopethrone. Addam Marbrand and Amory Lorch should probably have been some other cards, such as 3rd Jaime or ghost of high heart. Cercei being the only loyal character. I also thought about the hollow hill for much needed extra draw. Also the mother -plot should have been a more conventional knight plot. However, after melee, dinner and some beers, I did not feel like thinking about all these changes. Marbrand gave me 3-4 draws in the one game I played him, Lorch was valuable from lionstar and, most surprisingly, the mother was excellent in five out of my nine games. I usually played it after the first snow, so opponents either played one big character or the ones returned to hand last turn. Either way I gained board control or cards.

My deck building philosophy is very straight forward: start with 3x gold mine and then put in cards I like. Lionstar (with 3x hound) is usually 3x too, but I cut one out because of the lack of targets. In my games, lionstar worked perfectly: claim soak, surprise strength and icons and, my favourite, a surprise queen or king to stand my kingsguards in attack. Iron bank for tricks is awesome, although at times the different permutations for money use took me a lot of time to figure out. The surprise element of a robert strong or knight of flowers with iron bank money helped turn games more than once. The deck has some better and some worse match-ups, but to me it was always fun to play.

Thanks for everyone organising Stahleck and everyone else for making it more than just a game event! I never really remember how much fun the tournament is until the first beer is opened the night before melee as a reward for not dying in the stairs. Hope to see everyone next year again!