Welcome back for another instalment of In Search of Jank! This column has taken a slight break in recent months due to a combination of factors, some of them Thrones-related (the super-serious testing processes for UK Nationals and Stahleck requiring a certain shelving of jank) and some of them not (new job and a move!), but it’s a pleasure to be back for this MONSTER recap of the UK Team Championships held in Milton Keynes in October 2017. Expect something of a return to normal service come December/January.

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Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Blundering Butterbumps!

UK (and Dutch) Nationals in September had been a major milestone for my testing group, having spent several weeks testing intensively with little time to get distracted by jank – a tough pill to swallow for players like myself but ‘take one for the team’ and all that. When the dust settled on the event (my report from Arnhem is here) and the prospect of kicking it into gear once again for Stahleck in November was lurking over the horizon, it was clear that we needed to blow off some steam in the meantime.

So fellow nonsense-devotee Gabbi Trimmings and I f orced convinced Joe Zimmer to join us on an all-out jank team for the event that sat between the two big ‘uns – the UK Team Championships. Three players, three decks, no usual suspects and one singular commitment to not embarrassing ourselves in a field that ended up even bigger than Nationals themselves.

Gabbi ran a Lannister/Stag deck centred around everyone’s new favourite tricon, Patchface.

Joe ran a Stark/Rains deck aiming to abuse two of the least appreciated cards in the Brotherhood Without Banners pack.

And I ran a Greyjoy/Watch which I’m confident is, at least until the start of Cycle 4, the most consistent mill deck on the market.

In this bumper article, I’ve recruited both of my team-mates to help me break down all three of our decks, what we loved about them and how – or if – they worked out…

— FOOL YOU TWICE: GABBI’S LANNI/STAG —

GABBI: Seeing as we had named our team for a fool, there was no way that we could have none of us running a Patchface deck. Indeed, if he’d been spoiled earlier, there’s every chance that the Blundering Butterbumps would have been reborn as the Pondering Patchfaces!

Unfortunately, a deck apparently needs substance beyond just 3x Patchface and 3x Motley, so it was time to work out a list that would complement such a solid base. Perhaps a character who enjoys it when your opponents have to discard to Motley? With a grand lack of imagination, I built a Lanni/Stag that utilised Motley for both keyword gain and power gain.

Gabbi’s deck on ThronesDB

This is actually a deck that I’ve built before – Queen Cersei is a huge fan of Seen in Flames and Motley, after all. Two Heads on Spikes with a pinch of Tyrion’s Chain added to the party, plus a Golden Tooth because why the hell not? It did not make an appearance once all day, but it was nice to know that it was in there somewhere.

As for the day itself, well, I can run through my games very quickly.

Round 1 vs Bara/Fealty: Cersei arrived, Patchface did not. My opponent didn’t see a single intrigue icon, so this was an easy win.

Round 2 vs BYE: We faced a two-man team, so technically another round without drawing Patchface.

Round 3 vs BYE: I recorded the rare achievement of getting two byes in one event – this time along with the whole team. We played a three-player melee together instead… still no Patchface.

Round 4 vs Greyjoy/Dragon: FINALLY PATCHFACE. No Motley, though. A fantastic game that went 15-14 in my favour in three plots.

Round 5 vs Greyjoy/Wolf: No Patchface, no Motley, no victory.

Well, there’s a lesson to be learned here: if your deck revolves around an attachment, run Building Orders. All was not lost, however, for after the event I played a four-player melee with the deck. Duped Patchface and Jaime were about all I saw all game, yet somehow I won through sheer sitting there and pushing small power challenges. The highlight was very much drawing a Motley and having to choose between Asha, Victarion and Euron, then having to decide which of my two Greyjoy opponents to pick seeing as both had all three said characters out.

Patchface might not have been the hero I wanted, but there’s nothing quite like the joy when an opponent stealths past what they think are your only military icons for an unopposed victory, only for one brave fool to stand in their way.

— THE MAIDPOCALYPSE: JOE’S STARK/RAINS —

JOE: Going into UKTC, I had absolutely no idea what to play. Coming out of a long regionals & nationals season, shifting my mindset to something more fun was tough. The first thing that I built was a Targaryen/Crossing deck, using Bloodriders and the newly released Warrior’s Braid. Aggo being able to gradually get stronger and gain renown through multiple challenges was fun, but I wasn’t set on it.

During my testing, I ran into a Stark/Fealty player who was just playing the usual Stark cards that I was expecting; Core Catelyn, Robb, Sansa, nothing out of the ordinary. Then they flipped Favours from the Crown and played a Sansa’s Maid. Suddenly what was originally a mild annoyance became an unbreakable wall of strength. I had no idea how to deal with it. I got crushed from that point onwards but I knew that I wanted to try out the idea myself. But given how strong he could make his Sansa & Catelyn, I thought I’d add a twist. And so was born “The Maids of Castamere”.

Joe’s deck on ThronesDB

The first, obvious thing that I knew I wanted was as many ladies as I could get my hands on. So 3x Catelyn, 3x Sansa, 3x Arya, 3x Dacey and 1x Donella. Add in the 3x Sansa’s Maid and the bestow plot, and we had the core of the deck. I wanted to try make it so that every attempt that an opponent made to try to break my wall was a tough decision point, so I added in Winterfell for further strength boosts and control. Then from there I filled out with other useful Stark cards. Lady and Nymeria were some of the more unusual choices, there to provide more adaptable ways of controlling challenges.

Originally the choice of Rains was a gimmick, but it actually did a lot of work. I opted for most of the typical schemes: Riddle, Power, Wildfire, Filthy. Game of Thrones was my last plot choice, and arguably ended up being my favourite one. As people often would try to kneel you out in the intrigue challenges to push through their bigger military/power for renown, they’d forget the risk. I imagine that sometimes it was due to forgetting I was playing Rains, and sometimes forgetting about the specific plot. It won me one of my games at UKTC, so it did its work.

During testing, Summer also proved himself to be a crucial card to the deck. He was able to target three of the key characters, giving me a lot of redundancy around resets. If I had more time, I’d have likely moved more towards a sacrifice deck to make more use of him and Flea Bottom, but I stuck with my original plan.

A last-minute plot change that I made was to add Duel, which if I recall was in place of Building Orders. I was trying to avoid running a reset but some matchups were proving to be hell if they got out too big of a board. Given that Eddard wasn’t a key part of my deck, and I felt that I could hold off playing him, Duel seemed like a decent punt. It allowed me to deal with two big characters, without hurting my own board and buying me a round’s breathing room.

As the event grew closer, I had some very mixed experiences with the deck. I went from one week of winning pretty much all my games, to another of predominantly losing. The only thing that was proving to be consistent was that, if I could get out a Maid on the Favours turn, I would usually win. It just became a case of setting it up. On the day, this rang true – I went 3-2, with one of the wins being a bye and the other two being the games in which I drew the Maid.

The deck requires a few turns to get its foothold, so rush decks are a very bad matchup. However, if you’re playing against something a bit slower, it can lock down the game. Rains and strength manipulation allow you to punish errant challenges heavily, thus putting a lot of pressure to make the right choice onto your opponent.

If I were to try to improve it, I would switch Eddard to Robb and lean more heavily into the sacrifice theme. More ways to recur Summer and stand characters would help maintain the lock on the board, while it could probably also use a copy of Summons to help find those Maids.

— BUILDING A MILL: GEORGE’S GREYJOY/WATCH —

The quest for a viable mill deck has been ongoing since the release of the 2.0 core set and it should surprise nobody to learn that I am one of the many who have been fascinated by the prospect of completing that quest.

For UKTC, I pretty quickly settled on playing Greyjoy/Banner of the Watch as a mill deck – although I nearly chose an entirely different kind of Greyjoy/Watch which may well be the subject of its own article in the near future. But it wasn’t too difficult of a choice for the right faction/agenda combo here.

George’s deck on ThronesDB

In my mind, there were only three choices for factions who could contribute meaningfully to the win condition of reducing your opponent’s deck to zero: Greyjoy, Lannister and Night’s Watch.

Greyjoy is an obvious choice, boasting the joint-most characters with the pillage keyword (four) and additional discard abilities through the Reader, Loot and King of Salt and Rock plus various ways to capitalise on cards being in an opponent’s discard pile.

Lannister has natural attractions as well. I know from watching meta-mate Joel Pearson’s performance at the Brighton Charity Joust that Lanni/Kings of Summer has the tools to get mill wins – chiefly through repetition of Without His Beard but also its own set of four characters with pillage.

What the Night’s Watch brings to the mill table is really down to one card: Queenscrown. I have been sceptical of using that card as the basis of a mill deck until now because, while the Watch has plenty of in-faction ways to steal cards that have been discarded, Queenscrown is its only way of discarding those cards from the deck rather than the hand – and the deck, of course, is what a mill deck must be hitting. Can the Watch (or Banner of the Watch) give us enough cards to justify using them instead of Greyjoy or Lannister?

Thanks to the emergence of the Flea Bottom + Veteran Builder combo, I think it finally can. This deck was born out of the realisation that I could trigger Queenscrown, marshal a Veteran Builder, sac it to stand Queenscrown, then Flea Bottom the Builder back into play to sac it once more and get a third Queenscrown trigger. This means that the deck can usually trigger Queenscrown twice every round, which makes it a veritable engine rather than just a bonus.

Armed with this trick, I opted for Greyjoy over Lannister as the main faction in order to access the Reader, who offers the greatest potential of bursts for milling (three cards at a time) over Without His Beard. It also lets me use the Iron Islands Markets in their natural habitat, often switching them on for two gold per round by the end of the first taxation phase and never looking back.

The rest of the deck can be categorised by the cards’ various purposes:

Filling out the banner package: Sadly, I can’t stop at just 3x Queenscrown and 3x Builder. I would if I could, but the deck is still better with those six cards and six other generically okay Watch cards (3x Steward, 1x Edd, 1x Benjen, 1x Aemon) than it is without them – the combo is just that potent.

Pillage keywords: 3x Black Wind’s Crew and 3x Silence’s Crew for cheap, efficient non-unique triggers. 3x Euron Crow’s Eye for a pillage keyword who also has the beef to help to oppose whatever it is that the opponent’s characters are up to while I keep trying to grind them down. Only 1x Nute the Barber because there’s already plenty of draw in the plot deck and a dupe wouldn’t do enough to displace another card. Finally, only 1x Wildling Horde because I can’t reduce its cost – but I wish I could cut some Watch cards for more of it.

Support for the Reader: While the Reader can trigger off himself, he needs other unique Greyjoys – preferably those who can help make challenges unopposed. In this way, Esgred forced her way up to a second copy while Maester Wendamyr and Sexy Wex Pyke offer backup.

Bursts of milling: 3x Dragon’s Tail is, of course, a mandatory part of any mill deck, and I’ve backed that up with Annals in my plot deck to maximise my chances of triggering it as many times as possible per game. Late Summer Feast goes in the plot deck as the opener in all situations except a completely dire mulligan, with a good shot of getting three (or more!) cards drawn before your opponent realises that they shouldn’t. Finally, 2x Time of Plenty to force the draw.

Not losing: Building Orders (to set up the key locations for the Builder) and Confiscation (for Frozen Solid) are the mandatory cards to fill out the plot deck, along with Valar Morghulis. I originally played Wheels Within Wheels instead of Valar, but a mill deck needs to be able to stall for time sometimes, and few plots do that as well as Valar. In addition, 2x Varys, 2x Nightmares and 3x Milk of the Poppy help to prevent renown characters from closing before you can deck them. There’s also an Isle of Ravens, usually deployed to reshuffle Milks or key locations in the case of repeated location hate. Finally, 3x Lordsport Shipwright is increasingly necessary these days.

What all of this amounts to is what I’m pretty confident is the most consistent mill deck currently available. That isn’t to say that this is a truly competitive deck capable of outright winning a non-trivial tournament, but it wins more often than I initially expected it to. It milled opponents 17 times in testing for UKTC and once more on the day, and in its losses very frequently ended the game with the opponent’s deck in single figures (I would anecdotally place the average at around eight). And there’s at least a couple of games that I lost only because I deliberately avoided securing a conventional power victory in an attempt to complete the mill.

On the day, I played four non-bye games and won one, successfully milling out my meta-mate James Parsons’ Tyrell/Rains deck after carefully controlling some scary renown buildup. A very bad plot choice at the end of my second-round match against Mike Smith’s Bara/Lion likely cost me a second mill victory, too. The deck didn’t really have the tools to keep up with Alex O’Fee-Worth’s rushy Stark/Fealty or Matt Slade’s Targ/Wolf, however.

Ultimately, the deck’s biggest weaknesses are probably not surprising – rush and the Wall. Milling is a race to get them to zero before they can reach 15 power, and opponents who can quickly and reliably jump towards their target are hard to stop. The Wall is hard for you to knock down without some exceptional luck and an un-Cravened Esgred, which makes it comparably bad to the less passive decks who get more than two a turn but are more vulnerable to losing challenges and Milk. Tyrell are often the worst of the rush offenders, but if Lanni or Greyjoy get their big characters out quickly then you’re going to need to see all of your control pieces ASAP. Khal Drogo also represents a serious challenge.

Despite losses on the day, the best matchups are usually Baratheon and Stark. Both are factions whose most commonly encountered builds take most of their strength through characters who are vulnerable to being bogged down by this deck’s control options. In addition, though I haven’t tested nearly as much in the post-House of Thorns environment, the slew of decks abusing Mace and the Hightower are very tempting targets as they already make a habit of drawing through their deck in great quantity.

So while mill isn’t yet a threat to win a serious competitive tournament, it is absolutely possible to win more than you lose with a little bit of fortune in pairings – and it is an absolute blast to play. When you find yourself making sure to place a character above a location on the bottom of your opponent’s deck during a Queenscrown trigger because you’re very likely to get all the way back down to it on a later trigger, you know that you’re onto something promising.

And if you’re one of the many people whom I milled on The Iron Throne during testing for this deck, I’m sorry and you’re welcome.

Thanks to Gabbi and Joe for playing alongside me and for contributing to this article! Joe can be heard regularly on the Southron Bannermen podcast. Ask Richard Walker to tell you a story about Gabbi.