A Lannister Always Pays His Debts

A man in dark armor and a pale pink cloak spotted with blood stepped up to Robb. “Jaime Lannister sends his regards.” He thrust his longsword through her son's heart, and twisted.
   –George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

Throughout A Song of Ice and Fire, the ambitions of House Lannister play a pivotal role, working behind the scenes to manipulate courtiers and warriors alike. In A Game of Thrones: The Card Game, the Lannisters are little different—drawing upon their vast economy and terrifying characters to defeat their foes.

Today, guest writer Kenno Nishioka takes the side of House Lannister, exploring their inherent advantages and just a few of the many ways that you might choose to build a Lannister deck.

Kenno Nishioka on House Lannister

From a certain perspective, challenges are at the forefront of A Game of Thrones: The Card Game. Matches can be won or lost by a single Put to the Sword (Core Set, 41), a claim raise from Winter Is Coming (Core Set, 159), or a lethal trigger from Mirri Maz Duur (Calm Over Westeros, 93). Challenges carry heavy weight in the direction of every game.

But from another perspective, the battle doesn't begin when you marshal your first character or reveal your first plot—it begins with your faction choice and the wealth of options that that choice brings. Sun Tzu asserts that “Every battle is won or lost before it's ever fought,” and I must agree, to a certain extent. If you’re looking for a faction that will give you a fighting chance in any game, there are plenty of reasons to turn to House Lannister.

Quality Characters

The Lannisters possess some of the best characters in the game. Their onslaught of new threats just never ends. From the efficient Tyrion Lannister (Core Set, 89), who can help pay for events or ambush characters, to Ser Gregor Clegane (The King’s Peace, 49), who can win challenges on his own, your opponent needs a fast answer for every character or they will start to run the game.

Unpredictability

When your opponent sits down against your Lannister deck, the faction card and agenda aren't enough to gauge what kind of deck you’re playing. And in a game of lies, deceit, treachery, and hidden information, this plays to the advantage of the Lannisters. There are some universally good cards, which will be played in almost every Lannister deck, such as Ser Jaime Lannister (Core Set, 87), or Burned Men (Core Set, 91), but there are also cards that completely change the focus of your deck, such as Harrenhal (For Family Honor, 50) and Tower of the Hand (Wolves of the North, 30), that your opponent can’t expect to see in every Lannister deck. 

This unpredictability also extends to gameplay. You can initiate a challenge with Cersei Lannister (Core Set, 84), while sitting on a pile of four gold. Your opponent has no idea if that gold is for Tears of Lys (Core Set, 44), Trial by Combat (Calm Over Westeros, 90), The Hound (Taking the Black, 9), The Queen's Assassin (Core Set, 95), Red Keep Spy (Lions of Casterly Rock, 12), or any number of other cards. The depth of the Lannister card pool is a powerful thing to leverage, keeping your opponent from mentally preparing for what you can bring to the table.

Economy

If there's one distinguishing feature that sets the Lannisters apart from any other faction, however, it has to be economy. The early days of the game were dominated by “big guy” decks, fueled by our keystone Tywin Lannister (Core Set, 90). With Tyrion by his side, you have at least six copies of characters that can win challenges on their own, while giving you the gold to populate your board with even more threats. 

Hear Me Roar!

Now that we’ve outlined a few of the things that make House Lannister a formidable faction, I want to shift our attention to some of the deck choices available for this faction using the economy as our framework.

All the Gold in Casterly Rock – High Curve

In A Game of Thrones: The Card Game, when players want to develop their board, they usually pay a certain amount of gold for a character, whether that’s a small character who can be killed for military claim to preserve their better characters, or a more expensive, quality character who can push challenges through.

House Lannister, crucially, excels in having characters that help you play out more and more threats, filling the board with more and more questions that your opponent needs to answer. If your opponent can't reliably defend Ser Gregor Clegane’s military challenge with more than five STR, for instance, he will fall behind, sooner or later.

Aaron Glazer’s Lannister Banner of the Rose (2015 Red Saturday winner), and Chris Schoenthal’s Lannister Banner of the Dragon (2016 Gen Con winner) decks used high-gold plots, such as A Noble Cause (Core Set, 4) and Trading with the Pentoshi (The Road to Winterfell, 39), to drop threat after threat, turn after turn. Strong, impactful characters such as Tywin Lannister and Tyrion Lannister were essential to the deck's success, as fielding either one early helped accelerate into other high-impact characters.

These decks often use plots like The First Snow of Winter (No Middle Ground, 79) to pare down the board, then follow up with a huge military challenge to pick off what's left. From that situation, ambushing Burned Men into play, followed by Marched to the Wall (Core Set, 15) as your next plot, could be back-breaking for many decks.

I Never Bet Against My Family – Tempo

As the card pool expanded, House Lannister has gotten more and more tools and toys. The release of The King's Peace spawned the infamous Lannister decks which used The Lord of the Crossing (The King’s Peace, 60) to tear up the tournament circuit for over a month. Pioneered by Lucas Sydlaske, these decks harnessed the initially-panned “jumper events” like I Never Bet Against My Family (The King’s Peace, 50), and Hear Me Roar! (Core Set, 100) to “cheat in” high-cost characters for nearly free.

While other decks would commonly spend all their resources to marshal characters, equip attachments, or invest in locations, the Lannister player would typically enter a challenges phase spending one or two gold to bring in big, heavy-hitting characters, while still having enough gold for Put to the Sword or Tears of Lys to take out a key character from the opponent's side. Through a single explosive challenges phase, the board is forced into the Lannister player's favor, and makes it exceptionally difficult for the opponent to even fight back effectively, because the Lannister player’s characters get discarded at the end of the phase no matter what.

Because of the much lower gold cost of the jumper events, these decks could run two copies of Counting Coppers (Core Set, 10), a plot which is supposedly a huge tempo loss. But consider an example where you and your opponent both reveal Counting Coppers simultaneously. Your opponent might draw into more characters and more power for her deck, but she probably won't have the resources to play them immediately. That's a huge tempo loss—there’s no pressing need for you to answer anything immediately. But when you draw any combination of jumper events, you can immediately play more big characters and continue to lock your opponent out of the game. Once your opponent’s board has been wiped, there’s an upper limit to how many new characters can come out each turn.

A Lannister Takes What Is Offered – Choke

Varbeg Morghulis 2016 offered two breakout decks which have since revolutionized the way we approach the game: Tamas Albeck's pet deck, Night's Watch Fealty (Core Set, 27), and Jakob Hultman's Lannister Kings of Winter (Called to Arms, 38). They were both decks that could function on as little economy as possible.

Specifically, Jakob's deck used the jumpers module, but went even more extreme, with plots like Famine (Calm Over Westeros, 100) and Wraiths in Their Midst (No Middle Ground, 80), which deprived his opponents of both cards and gold. This comes at a steep price, though, because the Kings of Winter agenda lowers the reserve of both players, and the Winter plots in the deck have inherently low reserve and gold values as well.

This means that the deck must be built to survive the harsh winds of winter by using its resources as efficiently as possible. Your opponent may play out most of his hand to avoid discarding cards to meet his reserve, but your Lannister deck can aggressively burn through jumper events to wrestle for early board control, continuing to reduce your opponent’s cards and choking his resources.

It Feels Good to Be a Lannister

In A Game of Thrones: The Card Game, knowing what your deck can or can't do goes a long way towards each victory. And by choosing a faction which can reliably dictate the economy—or the lack of it—in a game, you take an active role in determining the outcome of a game before you ever shuffle up and draw.

I personally view each deck as a blank canvas—sixty card slots to fill, and economy is the easel that supports your blank sheet from the very first stroke of paint. Finding that right support can be difficult, but when you find the right balance, you might just strike gold.

Kenno Nishioka discovered A Game of Thrones: The Card Game in 2014 and has been in love with House Lannister ever since. He is one of the organizers for The Liberation of Yunkai, the Philippine leg of the player-organized tournament circuit for East Asia and Oceania. Best described as a compulsive deckbuilder, he is always deep in thought about revisions and refinements over several decklists. He contributes articles to various A Game of Thrones: The Card Game websites, and uploads videos of his local meta on their Youtube Channel. You can find him online under his handle, kennish.