Every Thrones player has their pet cards. The ones that you keep coming back to, time and again, either because they’ve always come through for you in a pinch or because you’re sure that they could, in the right circumstances.

As you might expect from someone who writes about jank, I have quite a lot of pet cards; so many that I have to subcategorise them. One such category is the overcosted card.

It’s usually pretty easy to spot when something costs too much to be worth it, so if an expensive card doesn’t obviously pull its weight when released, it can quickly become a byword for crappiness. Its badness then becomes memetic, and from there most people will never think of it again besides as a joke. I’ll laugh along too, but I’m always on the lookout for something that could one day give me a reason to put it in a deck.

And that’s where the Water Gardens come in.

Many Martell players quickly identified this card, released in the first pack of cycle four, as an extremely potent option that allows them to threaten all manner of horrible tricks (particularly Vengeance for Elia and Venomous Blade) without even having to save gold for a bluff. Indeed, it seems to have single-handedly dragged Vengeance back into the meta.

But there’s nothing about it that stipulates that the card you’re reducing has to be Martell card, and it doesn’t take all that long for the potential reduction to go well above just two. Suddenly almost any event becomes affordable… even Ours is the Old Way.

Yes, Ours is the Old Way, the Greyjoy event handing out stealth to all of your Greyjoy characters or removing it from every non-Greyjoy character, at the near-inexplicable price of four gold. It’s one of my pet cards. Now you can play it for free.

Naturally I had to build this deck as soon as the thought occurred to me.

So this will have to be a Martell/Kraken deck containing very few Martell cards, as we want most of our characters to be Greyjoys who can take advantage of the event (this means that by and large they also won’t have stealth to begin with).

Since Ours is the Old Way, in its best case scenario, offers up the possibility of multiple unopposed challenges, we should include cards that reward us for winning big somewhere around rounds five and six, when our mega-costed event becomes the most affordable. Hmm, do you know any Martell events that get really good at that point in time?

(ThronesDB link)

Unfortunately, the problem with Banner Kraken is that you don’t get many intrigue icons, so I can only justify including the one copy of Doran’s Game here. But we can certainly cram in three copies of Superior Claim and one Street of Sisters, plus a Clash of Kings in the plot deck, to hammer home the advantage in a late-game power challenge. That’s seven events before we even address stuff that prevents us from losing before our big turns, so we might as well also include the Annals of Castle Black and six general-use events (Burning on the Sand, Hand’s Judgment and Words are Wind) that we’ll never be too sad to see.

In the location base, we can take advantage of being in main-faction Martell to add three Dornish Fiefdoms, arguably the best of cycle three’s two-cost limiteds, and use Ocean Roads as well as Sea Towers to reduce all of our Greyjoy stuff without buffing any Underground Vaults. Add the obligatory Iron Mines and two Iron Fleet Scouts to help protect against Targ burn and facilitate win-by-five triggers, and we’re done.

The character set is pretty obligatory given that we’re restricted to non-loyal Greyjoys for the bulk of it, but I’ve made an exception for the exceptional Greenblood Traders and two Begging Brothers, one of the flat-out best cards in the game.

Big Aeron and the rarely spotted Alannys Greyjoy both make appearances, due to having intrigue icons for Doran’s Game. Victarion Greyjoy is the lynchpin when it comes to maintaining board presence in the early game as well as forcing through the win at the end, while Core Theon makes one of his increasingly rare cameos as another power-gain trigger for those massive Old Way challenges.

The plot deck is pretty standard, with zero attachments making Nothing Burns’s high initiative even more appealing (discarding a Water Gardens to just marshal another one is the way to take the edge off on locations).

It’s honestly much better than a deck running 3x Ours is the Old Way has any right to be.

Now, of course, I could stop there, but seeing as we’re on the subject… what’s the next best thing to Water Gardening a four-cost event? Water Gardening a three-cost event, of course. Here’s a Frey Crossing list as well.

(ThronesDB link)

Don’t say I never get you anything nice, eh?