Cactus Game Design Message Boards

The Herod theme is just starting to pick up, and I love it. They probably won't have much trouble with lack of enhancements, but right now the characters are kind of all over the place. Here are a few of my ideas:

Herodias
6/6 Gold EC
"Search deck for Herod Antipas, Salome, or Rash Oath. You may and add one of these to battle. Herodias and Rash Oath cannot be interrupted."
Royal N.T. Female

Herod Philip II
7/5 Gold EC
"This character is protected from discard, shuffle, set-aside, and remove from the game abilities on human Heroes."
Royal N.T. Male Human

Herod the Great
8/9 Gold EC
"Look at opponent's hand. Unless The Magi are in play, set Son of God aside from that hand until this character leaves play. Cannot be Negated."
N.T. Male King, Fought earthly battle

Census
0/0 Gold TC EE
"If used by a King, reveal all players' hands and force all Heroes in hands, battle, and set-aside areas into owners' territories. Cannot be negated if used by Herod the Great.

Yeah, the focus in the new set was gold.  The reason, in fact, that Herod's Treachery is a multi-color Enhancement, is not only to make it portable to all the Herods scattered around, but because thematically, it was Herod the Great who is referenced in the card, and he is stuck over in black brigade.

The nice thing about evil gold is that it has several withdraw Enhancements, which is not really built up as a defensive strategy, but also does not have a lot of protection against it.  Gold also has a lot of capture and deck discard, but I preferred to see a new strategy for the Herods and not just a carbon copy of the Egyptians.  So after some negotiation, we got more withdraw in gold, with a little boost to give Herods capture and deck discard as well.

I like all of your card ideas here.  Each of them has at least a somewhat useful ability, and their theme is great.  Census in particular is a very clever application.  The only two things I would suggest are:
a). move everything into gold, because I'd like to see the Herods clustered into the gold brigade if possible, and yes, I know I'm the guy who posted a crimson/gold withdraw defense,
b). Reword Herod Phillip II as follows:
- If you want protection from removal: "Protect this character from removal abilities on opponent's good cards."
- If you want protection from anything that removes him from the Field of Play at all: "Protect this character from discard, removal, set-aside and shuffle abilities on opponent's good cards." (a bit wordy)
- An alternative to that, "If this character would be removed from the Field of Play, return him to owner's territory instead".

To go along with the minor theme of Herod's doing forced withdrawl, I would allow Census to move heroes into territory from battle as well.

Oooh even better!

Census is FTW.

QFT.

It doesn't seem like you'd even need Arrogance. Great Image and Census are both 0/0, so you wouldn't pass initiative anyway.