http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=3905

Like the way this agenda work, too bad it will need few more CP's to flesh itself to work with enough naval characters. Anyone else waiting to make a naval epic battle deck since this thing is once per phase? ;)

Oh, the trickery that we'll see since you get to search the Hold for whatever you want! 

Oh, and mill got hosed.

Not really. Assuming 13/30 cards on setup and draw, my opponent has 17 cards left in his draw deck. Milling that away to strip him of 2cards/turn draw is very easy. Sure, the payoff isn't as great - he still has a way of accessing 1 card/turn (but after the marshalling phase and it's challenge dependent), and I'm less likely to trigger specific mill based effects

Overall, I'd say Mill vs Black Sails is a good match up for mill!

Black Sails decks can be easily milled.  If you are the opponent, choose the biggest stack to become The Hold.  Then you are going to be milling away at a deck that should have less than 30 cards in it and that shouldn't take very long at all.  A Raiding Fleet will remove almost 1/3 of the deck by itself if you happen to play one.

Current Naval character count:

Neutral: 1 (+1 forthcoming)

Bara: 1 (+2)

Lanni: 2 (+1)

Targ: 2 (+0)

Stark: 2 (+0)

GJ: 3 (+0)

Martell: None

Supporting Plot: 1 (+1)

They've had worse roll-outs for new agendas (cough chargendas cough). There's probably tonnes more to come.

I'm also not bothered by its potential weakness to mill. If only certain other agendas had some inherent liabilities.

I think the agenda allows you to build larger decks(depending on the numbero f naval characters there are).  The whole "search and grab" from the hold is a huge advantage that can sort of overcome the larger deck stuff.  The thing that scares me about building a larger deck is if I am adding additional locations and events, if I get stuck with the majority of those in my "deck" instead of my "hold", I may be choked out of not drawing many characters.

Bomb said:

You could build a large deck with nearly all characters, and then use the agenda's effect to search for events and locations. 

I was hoping while reading that Agenda it would have a last sentence of "While The Black Sails is your Agenda, your Draw Deck cannot have cards discarded from it in any way from other character, location, attachment, and agenda effects." Just to protect it some. I still think Mill is going to hurt the Hell out of this thing… You're gonna have to play with a 200 card deck.

A smaller deck does make it easier to mill, but in some ways it seems like a boon to me to have a smaller deck against mill; as we all know, milling someone out doesnt win this game, mill in part relies on triggering their own effects thru milling, so if they can't draw with Euron and FMS or claim power with Corpse Lake then the mill deck may just grind to a halt while you continue to trigger effects that get cards from the Hold…?  I guess it will depend on how many other effects let you access the Hold.

Mill them to nothing, Valar, no more Naval icons. Shouldn't be hard to win unopposed challenges against an opponent with zero card draw.

An eighty card deck split in half is an interesting idea. I wonder if it will pan out.

Rehlow said:

Yeah, in this mill-heavy environment this agenda has no shot.

We were discussing this at my local store tonight before their weelky AGOT tourney. Considering this happens as soon as you reveal houses and agendas, this particular agenda is hard to swallow, as you could easily end up with no setup and/or no characters in your draw deck ( all in your hold). Mill isn't the only caveat for this one.

stormwolf27 said:

I don't get it. Given a random distribution, how is drawing 7 cards from the top of a half of your deck any different than drawing 7 cards from the top of your deck. If my shuffle is that unlucky that all my characters are clumped together in one half of the deck, then I'm screwed with or without the agenda. Admittedly, in the case of a terrible setup hand an unlucky distribution of cards between your Hold and your draw deck, a mulligan will do less to alleviate the situation. But really, that's a deckbuilding issue. If you have bad setups with this agenda, you'll have them without the agenda as well.

Saturnine said:

I understand this, and I don't typically have bad setups (there's that one game in about 40 where my characters retreat to the middle of the deck, but it happens). My point is there's too much risk of not drawing anything that can allow you to get something out of the hold at the moment. There will be, I'm sure, more options later, but for this first CP, I think this agenda will sit by the wayside for a bit. I'm just underwhelmed at its current playability. Perhaps FFG should have waited a couple packs to fill a CP slot with this one.

That argument I can understand. Given the reliance on the naval enhancement, this will probably need a few chapter packs to get going. Maester's Path wasn't too hot with just the first pack either (though perhaps still more functional than Black Sails).