Hello there, and welcome to a new mini-series, Austere Assembly. In this series, I’ll be looking at each faction in turn, and trying to look at what cards that faction has that I believe should go in near-enough every deck of that faction.

As the game goes on, new cards are released, and some cards of a high enough power level are denoted as “auto-includes” – that is to say, cards that you automatically include in any deck that they can go in. The problem is that, as the game goes on, different cards reach the level of auto-include, and some of them may push others out. If you went through month-by-month and treated every supposed auto-include as gospel, soon you wouldn’t have any choices left in your incredibly unbalanced deck. To that end, this series looks to create an up-to-date core for each faction – which cards should you default to, and which shouldn’t you, and, most importantly, why?

Now, for a topic as broad as this, it is worth establishing a few caveats:

This series doesn’t assume what type of deck you’re playing, but it does assume what type of deck you’re not playing – namely, weird, out-there decks that don’t conform to standard deck-building rules. If you’re not sure whether your deck counts as this, it probably doesn’t. I will also be assuming that the decks are, broadly, mono-faction – or at least that if they banner in another faction, the faction in question doesn’t change the core makeup of the deck. This is both because it makes the articles easier for me (as obviously a banner could alter a deck in any number of ways), and because most of the best decks are mono-faction. This obviously isn’t true of all decks (at the time of writing the winners of the most recent Stahleck and Worlds were both banner decks, for instance), but it remains the case that for the most part banner decks are weaker than mono-faction ones, so those are the decks I’d prefer to focus on. The cards presented in these articles are not going to literally go in your deck 100% of the time. There will always be the occasional exception, and I’ll try to note these as I go. But as with any good deckbuilding rule, what I’m going to present isn’t absolute – it’s just that, also as with any good deckbuilding rule, if you’re going to break it, you need to know why you’re doing so.

With that out of the way, here’s how this series is going to be structured – this article is going to be a ‘hub’ article, from which I will link each of the faction-specific articles. And on that note, here are the links.

(Note: links will be added as the articles are written. I’ve started with Baratheon and will go through the rest one-by-one.)

House Baratheon

House Greyjoy

House Lannister

House Martell

The Night’s Watch

House Stark

House Targaryen

House Tyrell