I was excited to cast my vote for the Green Fork at the Battle of the Trident event in 2016, but it took me a little while to warm up to the agenda that resulted from that occasion.

Five months after its release in the House of Thorns box, The Conclave has yet to capture the imagination of the broader playerbase, with only 47 recorded instances of it being played in tournaments on the Annals of Castle Black. That’s backed up by only eight of those making cuts, implying an agenda that neither feels good to build nor matches expectations when built.

It’s easy to see the downsides when giving the card a cursory read. Yes, seeing seven cards which could be moved to the top of your deck when you want them is nice, but you have to win challenges with Maester characters to do that – and Maester characters aren’t really in the habit of guaranteeing you challenge victories. You don’t even draw the card immediately, so you run the risk of your choice being disrupted (Greensight comes to mind). Plus, you have to run 12 of these maesters in your deck, and are there really 12 maesters worth having?

What I’ve found from playing quite extensively with the Conclave over the last couple of months is that not only are there ways to make 12 maesters worth having, but that the Conclave already allows for a diverse range of builds and strategies. It’s also a complete blast to play.

In this article, I’m going to tell you about five different Conclave decks from five different factions, as well as suggest ideas for the other three. Each of them plays differently, and each is great fun.

The common theme that binds them all, however, is my favourite thing about the Conclave: they are packed full of decision points. Working out what you need to get on top of your deck, when, and how you need to juggle the order of operations on your challenges makes for an exciting and challenging piloting experience that’s rewarding as hell to pull off.

Greyjoy: The Seastone Chain

[The deck on ThronesDB]

Let’s start with what I think is probably the best of the decks that I’ll feature here. This was an idea of mine that I then passed to charity deck slave James Waumsley for a bit of revision, and he took it to 7th of 22 players in a good field at the FanBoy3 Store Championship in Manchester this year.

The premise is simple: Maester Wendamyr and Maester Pylos at 3x each, plus 3x Syrio Forel and 3x The Seastone Chair. Wendamyr and Pylos make unopposed challenges a promising theme for the Conclave, and Syrio adds to that while making up for the dearth of military icons that the beardy folks bring to the table. Greyjoy is a natural home for all this, because not only does the Seastone Chair provide a vicious outlet for this stealth, but Great Kraken offers both a way to profit in power and to draw cards from the top of your deck after winning a challenge; its synergy with the agenda is superb.

Syrio and the Chair mean that the deck doesn’t have to run a high curve to get big effects, so the plotline can be aggressive. If you set up Balon, you can quite plausibly flip Coppers, Oxcross and Rise of the Kraken in your first three rounds and have no trouble playing what you need to close the game quickly.

Also enabling a low curve is the Conclave’s synergy with Called into Service. Euron, for example, isn’t key to this deck as he doesn’t help you to win unopposed challenges, but he’s also a renown tricon who can spot-win entire matchups, so we can take advantage of our agenda to toolbox him into play when we need to.

The Conclave also enables us to draw into reactions to challenge wins that we didn’t have when we initiated the challenge; it’s pretty easy to control frustrating locations when you can juggle Raiding the Bay of Ice and We Do Not Sow as you please.

If you’re not sold about the potential of the Conclave, I think that this is the deck to start playing to see if it changes your mind.

Stark: All I Lu is Win Win Win

[The deck on ThronesDB]

When the Conclave was first revealed, Stark was the first faction that stuck out to me, because the drawback of having to put 12 maesters in your deck is less of a drawback when you already wanted to play maesters – and Stark already had a notable, successful build that played multiple maesters.

Maester Luwin, appearing at 3x in this French deck that impressed at both the Tournoi de la Main and Dockside Brothel Days in the spring of last year, also supports the natural strength of the agenda by providing insight to Robb Stark, thereby allowing challenge-phase draw after you’ve already decided what your next card is.

Since then, Stark has received a second in-faction maester – and one that survives the First Snow of Winter, too. This means that you don’t have to excessively compromise your existing character base to build a Stark deck that takes advantage of the options provided by the Conclave.

This deck is a flexible one that uses Wardens of the North and Ward to make up for the mild deficiency in military icons that comes as a consequence of the agenda. It can go on the offensive, with Ward, Winter is Coming and the Dreadfort Maester potentially offering serious board pressure, or just play sensibly, draw with Luwin/Robb, Summer/Bran, Gates of Winterfell and Maege, and keep careful control of its own board.

Lannister: The Infinity Link

[The deck on ThronesDB]

I’ve always loved the ‘infinite challenges’ archetype out of Lanni/Rose that uses the non-kneeling Jaime and Cersei plus Relentless Assault, A Lannister Always Pays His Debts, Olenna’s Informants and so on to blitz a whole bunch of power in one round through making too many challenges for an opponent to effectively counter.

This deck has the same idea, sacrificing the Informants for better control of when it sees its necessary pieces. It uses the insight from Grand Maester Pycelle and repeated draw from Casterly Rock -> Lannisport to profit from the agenda.

There’s not too much to say here; it’s just a relatively straightforward Lannister good-stuff deck until it’s ready to go very quickly. Don’t play out all of your big guys too early; wait for one or two of them to scare your opponent enough to reset you, and then smack down all of the beef that you need before closing on A Storm of Swords.

A note here on a subtle power of the agenda: much like Rains, opponents can grow more wary of a potential trigger than they should be, especially if you’ve visibly profited from it before. A low-STR challenge with, say, just Wendamyr can look more dangerous than it is, and prompt a defence that allows you the Pays His Debts trigger that you’re looking for to go mad with the twins.

Baratheon: Superior Conclaim

[The deck on ThronesDB]

This is another deck that uses Wendamyr and Pylos as the bulk of its agenda-mandated maester population, allied to 3x Maester Cressen because this is Baratheon/Conclave and there couldn’t be a better time to play 3x Cressen. So far, so power-monocon… so let’s play Sailing the Summer Sea and build a deck that plays into Bara’s predilection for focusing on the power challenge.

Again, we can use Syrio Forel here to generate greater icon diversity and also further our stealth presence. This naturally leads us to play 3x Marya Seaworth, who can kneel stealthed characters, and 3x of the six-cost Ser Davos, who provides more stealth as well as a way to draw cards that we’ve lined up for him.

Mid-challenge draw is harder in Bara than it is in Greyjoy – we’re looking at the Red Keep and Tobho Mott’s Armory as ways to pick up what we’ve put down – so I’ve included 3x Motley plus Patchface and Moon Boy to create more insight, as well as Davos’s stealth ability. Running more attachments also makes good use of the Citadel Novice, who rounds out our maester count and can combo well with Even-Handed Justice to draw Maester characters or attachments that we’ve left on top of the deck.

Between the Keep, the icon spread, a Robert who can complement Marya in kneeling out opponents’ boards and the extra challenge offered by Sailing the Summer Sea, it’s very hard to stop this deck from triggering Superior Claim at its leisure. The result is another Conclave deck that can jump ahead quickly in power even when it’s not looking all that threatening.

Targaryen: Making Chains, Breaking Chains

[The deck on ThronesDB]

This is the most eccentric of the decks that I’ll show you here, and it’s the one that I’m still tweaking the most, but at its best it’s the most janky and hilarious: get Daenerys, protect her with Healing Expertise, put all of the attachments on her, win.

Dany is her own draw engine for this monstrosity but the Citadel Novice has 22 viable targets as well. Green Dreams not only acts as a simple boost for the multiple Tokars that you’ll be putting on the Mother of Dragons but can also help you to stash cards away under your agenda that you won’t need until later. Perhaps more than the others in this article, this deck really does see a startling amount of its cards over the course of a game. Once the Voltron is assembled… good luck knocking it over.

Other ideas

I haven’t even mentioned Tyrell, who are in many ways the most obvious candidate for a Conclave deck, what with Oldtown, the Hightower Spy and more offering creative and powerful ways to profit from knowledge of the top card of your deck. Ally the maesters to the stupidity of Mace Tyrell and, baby, you’ve got a stew going.

The Night’s Watch are an interesting case as not many of their cards are especially suitable to having nine non-Aemon maesters lying around, but my initial experiments with NW/Conclave have involved playing Sworn to the Watch and handing out the Steward trait to my bannered maesters, then using the agenda as a toolbox for things like “The Rat Cook”. I don’t think that it’s all there yet, but I nevertheless suspect that there’s room for creativity that I just haven’t attempted.

Martell were the most difficult faction for me to work with on this agenda and I’ve yet to hit on an approach with which I’m satisfied in actively pursuing. They don’t lack for interesting maesters, however – Caleotte suggests an interest in an icon-stripping theme, while the Maester of Starfall is an underrated way to slow down problem characters. I’d be very interested to see what enterprising deckbuilders do with Martell/Conclave.

It feels like we might be on the verge of a breakthrough in terms of engagement with the agenda; I saw ThronesDB user ChrisChris posting a bunch of different Conclave decks recently using some entirely different ideas to the ones presented in this article. The Facebook group has been rumbling with some praise for Targ/Conclave here and there, as well. I’d love to see that explode into some more experimentation with what is rapidly becoming one of my most favourite cards in the game.

Oh, and one more thing: if you think it’s fun in joust, try Conclave in melee! It gets better.

P.S. If you attend the Brighton Charity Joust in April (which you should) and you bring a Conclave deck, you’ll be in the running for a special* prize that I donated.

*Lower your expectations.