Cactus Game Design Message Boards

Well throw in holy grail, worlds of encouragement, he is risen, first fruits, passover hymn, Susanna, Lydia(maybe) it can start to become quite devastating

Plus the 4 girls become a CBN band of 4 rather large characters that do a bunch of ignores them selves.

Throw in John, Phil, Bart and a collection of other disciples with reach, pentecost, MLaMG, AoCP and things are starting to become pretty nasty.

You can add things like fishing boat, 4D and Peter and lots of other things to play as well.

Meta defense says hi. TGT roflstomps it all.

In the beginning of TGT, they were the fastest deck, using Purple/White to blitz through with Pentecost, First Fruits, Words, Reach, and then use AoCP, He is Risen!, Holy Grail, and other territory destruction cards to walk in. It was extremely difficult to keep characters down in the territory long enough to block.

Also, most defenses in those days only used ~4-6 evil characters (Uzzah, KoT, SSoS, Prince, and The Amalekite Slave, for example), and many of them were not of shared brigade. This made TGT be able to focus on speed instead of territory destruction for most games.  Balanced decks with protection fortresses made this more difficult, but it was pretty easily to capitalize on the power of He is Risen!

Gabe Isbell revolutionized TGT with his 2009 national winning deck, TealTomb. This was faster (due to searches) and more powerful.

TexP didn't change too much, except it added Susanna as a super powerful speed card. We saw more N.T. females to maximize Susanna and He is Risen!'s power. We also saw how OP a first turn Mayhem was.

In 2010-2011 we had Disciples, and it was finally fairly easy to make a mono-white deck, having 4 characters who could maximize it with a powerful CBN band that negated Uzzah and KoT. There was some debate as to what was more powerful, Gardenciples or Mono-white, and it was never really resolved.

Last season TGT was predominantly combined with Disciples to make Gardenciples, which used Purple's drawing to increase the speed, as well as the power of AoCP to decimate a territory if necessary. With the new rule change, it was much easier for them to manipulate Lost Souls, using Susanna and Hormah to put them on the bottom.

What searches did TealTomb have? Filling Z's Temple, Haggai, and Priests of Christ? I wouldn't say that made the deck exponentially faster than other decks (especially with two of those searches being situational)...it was Z's Temple/Joiada/Gifts and the infinite recursion of Feast of Trumpets/First Fruits/Pentecost that made the deck busted.

Ahh, I completely forgot about Joiada's recursion.

First Fruits and Pentecost were already in most TGT decks. Feast of Trumpets was an add, but Gabe didn't use Gifts, so it wasn't really worth mentioning.

And I didn't say exponentially. I said it was faster. It was also faster due to a larger matching brigade. There were generally only ~3 of each heroes in the White/Purple decks, with a smattering of other brigades. Having Teal gave them more characters to play the feasts on.