Hey guys!
I haven't been very active in GEMP lately, mostly due to work and life, but I'm planning on getting back into casual (rather than just leagues).
I really like Expanded format, and am musing about new deck ideas.
Once of the biggest topics that you see people complaining about in Expanded is Site Manipulation decks. It can be very NPE sometimes, and, yeah, it just sucks when you lose a game to the sites!
Well...you are
still losing to the player who knows how to build a deck that
uses the sites to punish you, but it just feels crappy sometimes, am I right? haha
This is just an idea, and I don't know how effective it would be, but it MAY be possible to keep your opponent from punishing you so much by making a straight site control deck.
The challenge here would be timing it so that you could control one of their key sites, which is either used to punish you, or help their fellowship. This can be tough, since you can't take control of a site that they occupy, and quite often a site-manipulating shadow makes use of site manipulating FP cards as well
HOWEVER, this isn't to say that it would make some kind of difference against them. They won't always be able to pull off the change that they want at every site, but if your shadow ISN'T running site control, they can just yank the card on the following turn.
Led Astray is a region-free way to do this very easily. I've seen this used quite often to yank
Stewards Tomb from site 3 and then dump it back onto you at site 6 with Nelya.
So...since I've never seriously played a site control deck (maybe Dunland once or twice), I'm curious as to your thoughts about the best kind of rapid and consistent site control. I've actually never even touched the new Uruk culture (other than Ugluk of course), and am unsure as to how well they do with controlling sites. There's like a high strength one that takes control for each win I think.
Factors that I suppose we would be looking for would be:
A shadow that isn't condition-reliant for controlling sites.
Could possibly include a combination of shadow cultures, benefiting from the quickest site-controlling cards.
Others?? (any ideas you might have)
The deck wouldn't HAVE to be huge as you wouldn't really stock up heavily on cards to subsequently punish your opponent for each site you control, as your intention is just to get sites so that your opponent can't crush your fellowship. You're basically setting yourself to be free to move faster than your opponent to site 9 (since you are most likely going first if you just bid zero...they will want you going first).
SO...do you guys have any proven strategies....or maybe just some ideas?
I'll do some browsing and post something soon as well