So far the Lnnister's are undefeated.  Me and 2 friends have played about ten 1v1 games and it seems Lannisters beat all comers.  I do not have a record, just memory.  It seems the Lannisters are able to bury the opponent in Gold and Marshaling more Characters.  Then they attack the hand and remove options and then it's doen!

Help?

 This is using the Core Set only, sorry.  No EDIT function here?

Core Set only is a little odd for joust (though it works it was designed with multiplayer in mind).

Here is some advice.

Stark: Start slow with characters, try to get resoures form you locations and drop valar turn 2. use your kill effects wisely.

Bara: use your knights and their plot based immunity. Also Renly's and Axel Florent's self standing ability is good.

Targ: hardest to come up with a distinct strategy as they are pretty versitile. Targ as a lot of good characters and actually uses both streams of income (gold and influence). However, you probably need to be more comfortable with the game to use them well. Burn (killing a character with 0 str) is your firend.

Lars said:

No, no, NEVER drop Valar turn 2, especially against a house that has access to gold and card draw. They should be able to beat you every time. Save Valar for turn 3, or 4 if you can manage. Then you can really hit your opponent where it hurts. Playing Valar too early can be a mistake you canot recover from. (No offense, Lars. It just has never worked in my favor that early)

Lars said:

Targ is considered the best house by many in the core set, and their burn strategy is awesome (a kill when STR=0 is nearly unsaveable, and STR reduction to begin with makes a difference). If playing 1v1 make sure to switch out the Kill a Character chosen by an opponent plot; that will ruin you everytime.

Ia gree with JJ.

An early Valar against Lannister will lead to a loss more times than not. One of the reasons i despise the Plot is because it is and always has been one of the Lannister players greatest weapons (surpassed only by one other Plot, one I fervently hope we never see again).

JerusalemJones said:

none taken. different strokes.

I find valar bites me in the butt more later then it does early. My suggestion was to play slow on characters and build up the locations to be able to get the gold after the vala. PLus lanni's gold in LCG is mostly character based (they don't have any extra godl propduicing locations then the other CS houses). My goal/though process was to have 2 turns worth of the lanni players characters to nuke with little effort on your part.

I wouldn't go past turn 3 becuase the lanni players ability to spring back up is still just as viable and you've gone thoruigh some more of your charcaters and might not be able to recover as much. Last time i played lanni i was amrtell and had the char advan. early so tried to push valor back to turn 6 or 7...then got screwed by it as it juts focused the lanni kneel to the 1-2 chars I played after the valar.

Heck I'd drop it turn one if i had all locations and they had 2 gold producing characters on the setup...

 Cool, thanks for the words.  I was Bara most recently, and Robert kept getting knelt by the whores!  Great for laughs, bad for winning.  He kept beating my hand down, swamped me with characters, and I couldn't get enough Knights on the board.  Soon I had 2 cards/round, and not enough characters to survive a Challenge phase.  I think I'll try the Targs next, they look like fun.

With Valar back in the mix, I've taken to heeding the advice Melnick gave a few years back -- all your characters are expendable. If I am building a deck around a particular character, in the current envirnoment that is not going to work. Unless you are Targ, and playing To Be A Dragon (I am starting to hate that card; thank god the league is over this week, so I will only have to face it one more time).

Waiting too long with Valar can hurt as well, and the hope is really to get your opponent to overextend their characters before you play it, so you get an advantage. Sadly, more often than not when I play it I am forced to play it earlier than I would like -- being Martell in LCG means you don't have as much easy access to gold, and I refuse to run a +1 gold location for 3 gold. Just the crossroads and our Summer Sea, thank you very much.

Tian of House Zi said:

I find this always happens to me against the Lannisters. Best thing to do in response is to have a Distinct Mastery to stand him back up, or even better, a Vigilant Stag from Change of Seasons.

Stag Lord said:

Lol, but could we maybe have Anarchy in the Streets back, pretty pretty please?

Also, as far as Valar goes, I've got to agree with JJ. All characters need to be treated as expendable. That said, I think Baratheon really has a good shot at keeping characters on the board at the moment. One of the worst matchups I've played so far was against a Baratheon deck built around uber Renly. Dupes, Lightbringer and Bodyguard make him darn near impossible to kill. His immunity knocks out half of my kneel. His standing ability helps him recover from the other half, and Hunting Spear makes it very easy for him to win challenges.

Also, I find that running both Valar and Wildfire is a habit that I just can't seem to shake. Running both resets just really throws some people off. And what do I care? Everything I have is expendable.

 As far as that goes, to be honest, Stark kinda has 2 valar's.  Stark can kneel 2 and kill all attacking characters, and then come at you with a higher claim challenge with winter is coming.  I think the core set with Lannisters is just that they do have the gold advantage, and even in the LCG format, definite draw advantage.  Card draw to me, is the hardest thing to come by in the other houses.  But I think timing your valar/lethal counterattack/winter is coming, to where you do it at just the right time to where you can take a good chunk off of them, works very well.  And lethal is a great just blow to the face when they think they just kicked your butt in a challenge (IMO)

Much of the Start strategy & tactics discussion involves Valar.  Is it possible for Stark to be competitive in LCG without Valar?

I have resisted including Valar in the decks used by my newbie playgroup because it often leads to negative play experiences for novices.

Dr.Cornelius said:

I'm a novice myself, and I've been trying to teach a couple of other novices.  I find Valar oddly liberating.  I make a point of explaining how it works ahead of time, and I make sure my opponent knows if it's in his plot deck (or mine), and I explain that it's important to keep some characters in your hand so you can rebuild after Valar hits the table.

The benefit, for both of us, is that we keep fewer characters on the table, which simplifies the challenges phase.  And sometimes, if the challenges phase is clearly giving my novice opponent a headache (after we each have five or six characters in play), I'll play Valar just to clear the table and simplify things again.

Dr.Cornelius said:

Valar is a good plot but with the stats 2/0/0 it is balanced very well. If you need to slow down your opponent you can use it but in that round you will not do any harm since you have no claim and you will not propably marshall as much characters as your opponent just with 2 gold.

It is used primarly for Stark and Greyjoy in non-LCG games since the have a bunch of saves that can give them advantage. In LCG play all the Houses have some saves that they can use to help them keep something on the table. So Valar is not a must, but I would recommend a reset in every deck. Maybe Wildfire Assault will be better choise in some decks.

Rozy said:

There is no question that each house should include at least one "comeback' plot like Wildfire.  But the question remains - is Stark competitive without Valar, or does it require an offensive Valar to compete with the top tier LCG decks?

Before the coreset was released I played a Standard Stark deck that didnt have Valar (just Wildfire) and I think I played good with it.