It's good support for combo decks. Either search the card you need out the Hold or get it quickly from your reduced draw deck. I don't see why people would use more than 60 cards though, it trades better hold choice for crappier draw deck efficiency. Unless Mill gets crazy popular.

Saturnine said:

Without this agenda, all the setup efficient cards being at the bottom of your deck does not hurt you upon your first 7 card draw because you can mulligan and reshuffle the entire deck to get another chance at redistributing those setup friendly cards.  With this agenda, what your Hold contains is permanent as soon as the deck is split.  If your first shuffle puts most setup friendly cards in one half of the deck, and that half is chosen for your Hold, you cannot mulligan back into those cards period.  So, to me, that is completely different than using your normal deck because there is the added chance that a mulligan will only allow you to redraw a very similar hand to the one you just mulligan'd away.  If your deck before the agenda is minimum deck size of 60 and you split the decks evenly, you are now drawing 7 out of 30 cards. With a mulligan you have a significantly better chance to draw some, if not most, of the same cards you tossed away. 

To me, this agenda completely changes the value of a mulligan.  I just can't decide if it is more or if it is less.

For example, let's say I draw four cards that I can place during setup.  My chance to redraw one of those cards from that setup hand is double compared to a regular 60 card deck.  So, is it better to mulligan decent setup friendly hands knowing that my chances to redraw the cards I want to keep are doubled? 

Just some food for thought.

Bomb said:

A fact that I did acknowledge in my post, though only briefly. I do believe the value of mulligan goes down a little bit, but if your setup hand is crap there's still a good chance your setup will improve even with a mulligan out of 30 cards, assuming your deck is built properly and the bad setup hand is really a fluke.

So what's the drawback of this agenda? Other that it can potentially never trigger.

Question is how often would it hurt mulligans. Because it's not like you mulligan because you draw bad cards (since assumption is that all cards in deck do something good for you), but because you draw bad combination of cards. And if it's combination that you care about then probability of you redrawing 4 events and 3 4-cost characters is probably about twice out of 30 card deck compared to 60, but it's just very small anyway (let's say on the order of percent and doubles to being on the order of percent with 30 card deck).

It might increase the value of mulligans simply based on the info you get about whats in your deck.  A mulligan when you only have a 30 card deck means that anything that you drew into the first time and didnt get the second time is less than 20 cards away and will probably be drawn within the first few Rounds, and you can adjust your strategy based on the knowledge that those cards are coming soon. 

Also, is it a boon that you don't add cards from the Hold to your hand until the end of Phase, meaning they cannot be lost to I challenge, Ghost of HH, etc, or is it a weakness b/c you want to play the cards that come from the Hold that same phase?  Will Black Sails players overextend at the beginning in the hopes of getting board control to push through the challenges to maximize the number of cards they get from the Hold, or is overextending even more dangerous since a reset could leave you with a precarious position of maybe not drawing enough characters to get back in the game b/c they are all stuck in the Hold?  Or will everyone just reveal Naval Reinforcements as their first Plot every time so as to look through the Hold so they know exactly what is available in their deck? 

Will icon-stripping be the best counter to this Agenda since a player can't touch the Hold if he/she has no N characters to win challenges?  Many questions…

Now that I go back and think about it, you could strategize based on what is in your hold before you decide whether to mulligan or not. The reason I say this is, if you look at the wording of the agenda and plot card spoiled for this, there is no indication you don't know exactly what is in your hold.

The Black Sails says "When you win a challenge with…choose a card in the hold…" not "search for"

Naval Reinforcements says "reveal a character from your hold…" not "search for and reveal a character…"

This makes me think that, as soon as your deck has been divided into draw and hold, you, as the owner of that hold, have full right to look at/through your hold at any time, including before setup to decide whether or not to mulligan… or to simply know what's missing from your draw deck to plan accordingly.

stormwolf27 said:

That being said, without more "get X out of The Hold" stuff, which I'm sure is coming in the future packs, this one will still sit in my agenda box for a bit.

I just logged in to nitpick on a card title I saw in a preview.

"Fleet from Lysene". Hopefully they write it correctly. Either "Fleet from Lys" since the name of the city is Lys, or "Lysene Fleet" as you would call someone/something from Lys.

1000thCommander said:

The card is called "Fleet from Lys" on the printed cards.

stormwolf27 said:

If you want to get a naval icon, you will. It just depends on how much you want it. If you have 9 characters with a naval icon in your deck, you have a 90% chance of drawing one on the first turn (with a 4 card set-up). If you have 6 (which every deck can currently do) you have a 78.6% chance. This can be extrapolated out to say that you have a 95.4% chance of having a naval icon in the top 13 cards or bottom 13 cards. This means that if you are running Naval Reinforcements, it is extremely unlikely (<5% chance) to not have a naval icon in hand during the Marshalling phase of the first turn to take advantage of the agenda's ability.