Cactus Game Design Message Boards

With two of basically the same deck in the top spots, a likely question is: which version is better? JD and I have both been working hard to develop this deck over the last month or two and greatly benefited from each other's discoveries and modifications. Almost all the differences between the two decks are slight variations of the same cards that accomplish the same thing, with the except to this being my inclusion of the Justin Martyr package. Here's a breakdown:

Mayhem/Falling Away (CoW) vs. Guardian/Falling Away (W):
When the tournament was announced, the plan was to have 7 rounds of swiss with a 4 player top cut who would then play bo3 to determine the winner. With this in mind, I included CoW Falling Away over the women's variant since while the latter enables you to boost your differential, the former is a more consistent block as it isn't rendered useless by the opponent having Guardian, thus leading to a slightly higher win % during testing. Since differential would not matter in a bo3 top cut, I opted to miss out on a few potential soul differential in favor of the marginally higher win consistency. However, at the last minute a vote was held to change the structure to 8 rounds of swiss with no top cut at all which was strongly voted in favor of. This of course makes differential much more valuable and under these circumstances JD's choice of W Falling Away and the Three Liner Lost Soul to squeeze out those last few differential is absolutely correct. I'm unsure about Guardian over Mayhem as I used Hypocrisy+Mayhem in 6 out of 8 games and successfully used Foreign Wives to block after a Mayhem in 6 out of 8 games.

Faith of Joseph and Lay Down Your Life vs. Gentleness and Faithfulness:
Gentleness and Faithfulness seem like obvious inclusions in the deck because they are placed enhancements that protect CoL which is the entire goal of the deck. I opted not to include them because once you have the entire stack of enhancements down, everything that Gentleness and Faithfulness do is covered by the protection abilities of other cards. The redundant protection is excellent if you do not get Children down with Ram's Horn since it forces the opponent to negate two things instead of one to make Children vulnerable. With the inclusion of Hypocrisy though, the stack is going to be CBI virtually every game. JD's earlier list did not run Hypocrisy and I believe did not run Ram's Horn either and in that version of the list Gentleness and Faithfulness are absolutely necessary. In the Hypocrisy/Ram's Horn list, I believe they are redundant and their slots in the deck are better used to shore up the few weaknesses the deck has. Lay Down Your Life is the only card in the game that can save CoL from being banded to by the opponent and Martyr'd (All the protection turns off when Children is stolen) since you only have healing initiative when a character you control is discarded Peter does not work in this scenario. LDYL is also nice to save Peter if the opponent tries to kill him in territory. Faith of Joseph is a personal inclusion and can easily be replaced with any other card that cycles itself (Another placed enhancement for example) but I like the ability to cycle it even if the opponent has Moses and the ability to get captured characters back (A common fate for Peter) comes in handy.

Well done my friend you can find an excel spreadsheet on covenant games.com with the results of each round which usually helps me jog through them

Your build is really superior to the others I believe with the exception of shrine. The Justin Martyr package is a great include as an alt win condition. We did have a great sealed game!! :-) Bravo