Ok, I’ve played a few games with this deck, and have some feedback. First I will give a quick play by play of the games, then my thoughts on the deck.
Game one, built up to five influence on one site, using a low cost site. Opponent countered lanz, another low cost agent, and avaricious banker, before I managed to get the Spaniard on the table. I dropped the Spaniard in a new region, and a papal influence in each region I was scoring in (opponent down to one card, so hopefully it’s not a counter), got the win.
Game two: Gamemaestro’s discard/counter deck. Write that one off.
Game 3: I have 2x Basilica di santé maria, two bitter repentance a papal bull, no decent income boost cards, and a Pompous preacher. He is playing an order fast control (not quite pure rush, but fast), I get brutalized.
Game 4: Managed to change of plans his grimaldi, and papal bull another. But he killed my gimaldi, and pumped out agents, while all I drew was basilica di santa maria, mob justice and another papal bull (all of which helped nothing). Lost.
Game 5:
Paulo, di san pietro for some income. Sudden exhaustion his arquebusier after he pumps it with militia training (see common mistakes thread). He plays let he who is without sin, I lose avaricious banker and pompous preacher (this deck is going to get especially brutalized by discard, cause of low income generation/high cost card combo). I got out brother ristoro and 2 assassin guerriero, but then had to sit and watch as he got more and more cards with his draw power while I was sitting with no cards in my hand. Then he played just cause with a full deck of agents, and under arrest on one of my assassins, and he used papal influence. I stalled and blocked for as long as I could (managed to change of plan his Spaniard), but he was always winning with more agents /draw power than me, and his second papal influence sealed it for him.
Ok, now in the next part I’m going to get a bit critical (in the sense of constructive criticism, not personal criticism). Please don’t take it the wrong way and get offended, it’s the only way I know to comment on improving your deck (the positive ideas have already been covered by Jeff).There are a couple of issues you need to address, some of them have been mentioned already. Note, quite a few of those ideas are in the intermediate/advanced thread, so don’t feel bad, it took me a while to get to grips with them to.
Firstly, it might help to change the way you list (and assess your deck). You’ve broken your deck down by colour, which is helpful to figure out what cards you are listing, but not that helpful in figuring out the flow/strength/synergy of your deck. Look at how the others list their decks, I know just thinking in these terms immediately improved my deck build (there is often overlap, as for e.g. a lot of draw cards also give income).
Income
Plentiful Crop (1)
Merchant Ship (2)
Footpad (1)
Basilica Di San Pietro (3)
Draw
Nothing!!! Big issue!!!
Control
Sudden Exhaustion (2)
Mob justice (5)
Paula (1)
Villa Auditore (1)
Change of plans (1)
Papal Bull (2)
Bitter repentance (5)
Frari (2)
Capella Sistina (1)
Finisher
Lanz (3)
Ercole Massimo (2)
Merchants Guild (1)
The Spaniard (1)
Lia De Russo
Avaricious Banker
Brother Ristoro (2)
Seeking Sanctuary (3)
Basilica di San Marco (1)
Basilica di Santa Maria Novella (2)
Papal Influence (2)
Pompous Preacher (2)
Ok, specific issues:
Income curve: You don’t have a lot of income generation, but you have expensive agents. That’s always going to cause problems. You either need to get some cheaper hitters, or push up your income curve. I was sitting far too often waiting for money to push out a 7-10 cost agent, and when I do get it out, waiting for income to play the next card I draw. Be careful though not to take this advice and just drop a load of cards that do nothing but boost income, because then you will be sitting with even less action/agent/site cards. You have to consider this issue along with:
Draw power: With this deck you are more often than not going to end up with one or no cards, sitting watching your opponent. The reason this is related to income is because you can solve both with low cost draw cards like By order of the King, or discreet calling, which cost one, give one income, and let you draw the specific agent you want. Another really good card is forced charity, costs 2, +2 income, draw a card. If you don’t have enough of those cards, consider switching one of your colours to green, and putting in knowledge is power and in-depth analysis.
Specialised cards: You have a LOT of specialised cards in your hand. A LOT! These cards are great against very specific decks, but 80-90% of the time, when I see them coming into my hand, I’m going “Oh cr*p”.
I’ll list the cards I have in mind:
Villa Auditore: Order agents cannot campaign in this region, 3 cost, 1 influence. For 3 cost I want at least 2 influence, or 1 influence plus 1 gold. It’s expensive and situational specific. Having said that, one is not the end of the world in certain decks, because the Meta includes so much order.
Frari (2) : All media agents have -2, -0. Costs 3, only one influence, situation specific.
Capella Sistina (1): If you control opponent cannot score. Not a terrible card in certain decks, but a specialized card that needs specific strategies to make the most of its high cost.
Basilica di San Marco (1) & Basilica di Santa Maria Novella (2) – I’ll discuss these under synergy, but again, very specialised cards that need specific strategy/synergy to make the most of their cost.
So over 10% of your deck is specialized cards that need specific synergy/strategy, and that don’t complement each other. These cards all have their place in specific decks (e.g. you have a deck you like, but it keeps losing to media rush, put one or two frari in). But not all in the same deck.
Synergy (In my mind your biggest issue): Tuism has some good posts on synergy, so check those out. Basically, you want the cards in your deck to complement each other. Easiest example is probably Lanz and other thieves. When Lanz scores, he and all other thieves get +1/+1. That’s synergy.
Best recent example of synergy I have seen is Mana’s strange feeling deck. It works like this: Everyone knows cheap (or zero cost) agents work great with Borgia tower, cause Borgia tower boosts them. Heathen followers are a 1 cost, 0/1, +1 gold agent. But they have the ability (for zero cost), to pull more heathen followers into your hand. So mana can get as many heathen followers into his hand as he wants, at no cost to get them there (obviously he still has to spend one gold to get them into play), and drop them in his borgia towers. In the meantime he can use his 5 order of the king to get his Carlo grimaldi into play. And grimaldi and Borgia tower have great synergy. Voila, the beginning of a great deck (obviously that’s not all that makes it great. I tried to copy it and my version failed because I was missing too many other key cards
Ok, let’s look at your synergy:
• Few income boosts and high cost agents, not working
• There is some synergy between merchant ship (not my favourite card) and seeking sanctuary for a site deck, but the rest of the deck is not really complimenting it.
• Lanz is there, but you don’t have other cheap agents for him to boost, so he loses his potential synergy.
• Merchant’s guild can very quickly win you a region, but you need income boosters to play after it is on the table like political patronage or forced inheritance, and this deck doesn’t have any. Also if you want to use that as your strategy, you will need more merchant’s guilds.
• Basilica di San Marco: This site has synergy with rush decks/low cost agent decks, where you are going to be pumping out a lot of agents the opponent could potentially neutralize. Not really this deck.
• Basilica di Santa Maria Novella: This site works in conjunction with a lot of other churches. You have a few others, but not enough for a consistent strategy. I know you have basilica di san pietro, but if you want to run those as income boost/ di santa maria novella pumpers (a legitimate strategy), you need more low cost sites to cycle them, and at least one or two more santa maria novella for when they get countered.
So what you really need to do is follow Jeff’s advice, pick a strategy, and run with it. Another thing that helped me was to go look at some good decks in the deck discussion thread, and make a cheap version based on similar affect cards you own e.g. swopping in a court order for a pre-emptive strike, or a lower income boost for a stronger one. The key is to keep the overall ratio of kinds of cards with similar affects the same, to see how they work. Your decks won’t be as strong as the original, but it will help you understand deck building better. Maybe try a Borgia tower / art gallery combo, an officials deck, something like that.
Hope these thoughts help