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Keyforge: The Age of Ascension is upon us!
Bedlam
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
In the beginning, there was no KeyForge. There were other card games, and they had Netdecking and Predictable Metas. They had countless options, but the "collective wisdom" of online whisperers saw those options reduced by to one-dozen or fewer. Players knew 90% of an opponent's card from the first card reveal.
And then there was KeyForge!
From the offical website: https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/products/keyforge/
Enter a world where anything is possible in KeyForge! In the center of the universe hangs the Crucible, an artificial world built from the pieces of countless planets. Here, in the world’s first Unique Deck Game, created by legendary designer Richard Garfield, two players step into the roles of mighty Archons, racing to forge keys that unlock the Crucible’s hidden Vaults.
Leading their diverse teams, filled with followers from three of the Crucible’s great Houses, the Archons must gather Æmber, stave off their opponent’s progress, and ultimately be the first to open a Vault and gain its incredible knowledge. With a vast array of creatures, artifacts, and abilities and over 104 quadrillion possible decks, every deck is completely one-of-a-kind, and no two battles will ever be the same!
Keyforge is a Unique card game, meaning every deck is generated from an existing pool of cards with a unique card back which means no deck building. Each deck runs about 10 dollars american and contains 36 cards - with 12 cards from 3 out of the seven houses available. On your turn you can activate a house and play all the cards of that house from your hand, no mana curve to worry about. The winner is the first player to gather enough Amber and forge 3 keys.
The seven houses available are:
Check your local game store for prerelease events going on now, the official release date is November 15th. With a companion app/website planned to launch at the same time to help track your decks and find events near you.
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Almost pulled out a win on the second one but the opponent was able to, via shenanigans, get enough aember to pull off a Key Charge to get their third key.
I really do like the name of the second deck I got there, "The Intensely Staunch Pirate of Bishopford."
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
The Brobnar in it can cheat out a lot of non Brobnar activity.
Only got one game in which I lost. I had an early lead and plenty of removal but my opponent had graveyard recursion and all 4 horsemen. Eventually he just snowballed and got the Amber he needed while I struggled to maintain a board presence.
Wanted to do another but it was an hour drive home and I needed dinner as well, but I had fun and I'll definitely get a Core Set as soon as I can. (they only had two cores available for sale).
My biggest gripe is that the box they come in kind of sucks for actually storing cards. I dont think Ive ever had to buy a box for magic but I'll have to pick up some deck boxes for keyforge
And heres a "How to play" video that was posted in the board game thread and I have not watched yet:
Its pretty unique and not at all a magic clone like other card games tend to be. It was designed with the intent that you never build a deck, and intended by the designer to be more like a procedurally generated video game where discovering what your deck can do is half the fun.
(I know, I know, you can just put them in a transparent deck box. I'm assuming that not every deck will be worthy of sleeve/box treatment? Maybe the power level is more even than I think it is.)
It's a Shadows/Mars/Brobnar deck that seems quite swingy. I have a ton of heavy hitters, but shadow does direct damage, stealing, and other nifty things while Mars just.. builds up if I can spare the turns. I would share the deck list, but I'm not sure if that is a good idea.. like if the QR code can be registered to your keyforge account or something.
My favorite card, hands down, is Yo Mama Mastery. It's just... everything about it is great.
I am kind of confused how to use one card, though. I got a rare card in shadow called "Selwyn the Fence." Its a 3 power, ~ shield elf thief. Its ability is "Fight/Reap: Move 1 Aember from one of your cards to your pool." Except, NONE of my cards have capture or anything that synergizes with that. I guess I do have one card that can use my opponent's artifact as if it were mine... But I dunno. Seems like a target more than anything.
Anyways. I posted this to our store's FB group after the pre-launch event:
Any time I learn a new game, I like to go back and see what rules I messed up, or told people about wrong. Here's the notable ones I've found so far for my games and teaching today:
1) You only shed chains when you draw to refill your hand. So if you have more cards than your draw limit, you don't shed chains.
2) You collect Æmber from a card FIRST, before any of its effects are triggered. (this mattered for a card that stole Æmber).
3) You retrieve your archive after you choose a house. Not a huge deal as you can look at your archive anytime, but still notable.
4) Your character needs to survive a fight in order to trigger its "Fight" ability.
5) The active player chooses if Assault or Before Fight traits trigger first.
6) Technically, the archives are a facedown area in front of your archon card, and the purge area is a facedown area under your archon card. I was telling people the archives were under the archon card.
Buying one deck for $10 or less sounds good. However, if it means then buying more and more decks then that doesn't sound good. Really warning up to the concept though.
my deck is Brobnar/Dis/Mars, the three factions I was least interested in, but it turns out that shit works together real well
I have 3 rares in here, one of which is the Banner of Battle, a Brobnar artifact that increases EVERY friendly creature's power by 1
and considering I had anywhere from 4-9 creatures on the field for the majority of the game...stuff got crazy
I love this game
Much as I know it’s fools errand to wishlist a blind random distribution system, Mars is the house I’m really hoping for! I love the look of those goofy cartoony guys.
I got the pin I was really after, Logos, and I can't decide what I should grab as my second one
I can't get Mars because I will just look like a conspiracy theorist if i walk around with a lil green guy on my stuff
I had to wrap my mind around the fact that you don't always need to be fighting. By the second game, I was only doing so in service of gaining more amber, or denying amber, or getting rid of specific enemies. Basically, fighting was a means to an end.
In our two games, I went through my entire deck both games, while my friend had a lot of cards that let him pull cards back into his hand from discard or archive cards. For a while, I thought he had multiple copies of a creature, but it turned out I had to kill the same one three times before it was finally gone.
I picked up a second deck, and got the exact same houses, but looking through the cards, it plays way different than my first one.
Anyway, as someone who wanted to like Magic and the various LCGs, but just couldn't quite click, I really enjoyed Keyforge and am planning on going to some of the tournaments at my FLGS.
"Wait, this is Bring Your Own Tokens?"
"Yes, it is."
"I will be riiiight back
*Runs to the car to get the Iron Clays*
Thanks for the excuse!
If the app ever lets us barcode our decks into online play, I would buy far more packs.
also I don't know how much I'm even going to be using the official stuff?
I'll use the amber and maybe the damage, but it feels like this game needs better and more kinds
the stun and power-up cards take up way too much space, those should just be lil tokens, and the armor system is too fiddly to NOT have tokens for it
Fortunately just grabbing some Destiny shield tokens works a-okay
That is a hill I will die on.
I'm gonna shout out Burger Tokens here. Although I wish he could do larger key tokens, having all the other things like health and amber as little pennies is great.
I really need to reach out to the guy and see if he's reached the point where my store can just carry them.
The core set comes with the tokens, the prerelease events just let people get a single deck and some stores were provided with a single core to pull some tokens from so people can play, but most people had to bring their own proxy tokens
The core set does have 4 decks for $40 so you are essentially getting the tokens for free. You get two non unique decks for teaching and two unique Archon decks. I imagine that teaching the game will be easier with the core decks.
The store I went to was like: "here grab a handful of dice" and we figured it out. Everything was pretty chill.
Oh, and six tokens to represent forged keys, I guess. I was just pulling random large die from my D&D dice bag and declaring them keys. :-P
but I'm guessing the way they release new stuff is by having new sets be called "Keyforge: blank blank blank made up lore?" I dunno, I'm very curious what the plan for additional content will be
The art and graphic design are some of the worst I've come across in any game. It must be deliberate but I can't figure out why
I played 3 games and won 2 of them! I never win card games!
Both times I've won with my Brobnar/Dis/Mars deck, I get an extremely come-from-behind victory, literally down 2 whole keys and I'm able to get huge amber gains and delay them long enough that I can catch up
The Martian spider card the one game I lost had thirty amber sitting on it
It's goofy bright Saturday morning cartoon fun. I love it. Fits with the whole ethos of the game which is more about experimental wacky enjoyment than super serious competition.
Shadows seems like entirely my shit, and while I think Sanctum is currently easily my least favorite house to play AGAINST (armor is a nightmare thing), boy do I want a Horsemen deck pretty bad
For those who don't know, Scorched Earth was a Netrunner card that would do 4 damage to a runner player if you had placed a tag on them, and since your maximum starting hand size is 5, it was very easy to win with if the runner had any less than 4 cards, so before the card was banned, runners going against decks that had it pretty much had to always keep at least 4 cards in hand and remove tags as soon as possible
so whenever people play against a Shadows deck that has Bait & Switch in it, it seems like you never want to go above 7 amber, and never take enough of theirs that Bait & Switch would be useful
I've seen a few decks with two of each horseman, and internet scuttlebutt says a triple horsemen deck exists.
Given the ability of Death that's... more than a little crazy! Get a Death loop going and you're going to steamroll in short order.
Scorch was never technically banned; it was just "rotated" when they replaced the core set.
And by that point they had created a card that dealt 7 damage so...
Also I have some steal Amber in my deck, but ended up discarding them because my opponent was slow to start and then snowballed later. I think knowing what to keep and what to pitch will be a big learning curve.
And there were at least two horseman decks at my event so they cant be that rare. Can confirm death is bullshit.