Cactus Game Design Message Boards

While I personally want more red cards, the current design space makes those cards difficult to build, as you end up either stuck with 'this is too weak' or 'this makes Throne too strong'. That said, if there's a good way to balance the two and make Red viable again, I'd love to see it. Maybe stuff more focused on warriors, or on searching for red cards? Maybe even Joshua cards to go with the Cloud Josh/Faith of Josh.

That said, a lot of the weaknesses of the O.T themes (judges, prophets, red warriors, etc.) is a lack of reserve access. Part of why Justin Martyr and the Martyr theme in general, so strong is that he gives a powerful reserve access hero that has multiple support heroes (Polycarp, Angel from the sun, etc.). I'd be willing to bet an alt border RoJ card that with more reserve access spread across the other themes, Martyrs will weaken significantly. So any set with a strong O.T focus (a Kings, Priests, etc.) would help with that.

Another thing that would be interesting to see would be a way around dominants. Three Woes comes to mind here as an annoyance, but the deck I end up playing against most of the time is a tabernacle deck, and let me tell you, Glory of the Lord makes that deck a pain and a half to play against. Bulletproofing Tabernacle and Aaron's Staff is painful. Teal's in a pretty decent place right now, with infinite Zeal for the Lord/Gifts and Offerings. Using those with Seventh Seal for reserve access to get Trumpet blast/Trumpet and Sword for more Tabernacle fodder helps.

And that's just because of one card. If red or prophets or judges got a tabernacle-like card, just imagine what could happen.

TL;DR: I want a red reserve access card, Throne hurts that design space, and Tabernacle is annoying

While I personally want more red cards, the current design space makes those cards difficult to build, as you end up either stuck with 'this is too weak' or 'this makes Throne too strong'.

Koney

Set rotation conveniently solves both of those problems.

Can someone explain what set rotation means?  Is it similar to retiring a set one season or what?

It doesn't have to be one set a season but yeah the general idea is that cards older than a certain point cannot be played in the main format of the game. With the rate that Redemption releases sets and the lack of problematic cards in recent sets (The current CoL deck will cease to exist if set rotation becomes a thing) we may only need to set a one time cutoff and not even more it forward a year when new cards come out like other games do.

So if limited/unlimited goes first... no more two and three liners? Yay!

Thanks for the explanation. Set rotation might have worked once upon a time here, if they had started it around say when Priests or Disciples was released. Now I believe it would be more trouble than it's worth.  Nearly every deck has the 2/3 liner lost souls card in it.

If set rotation won't work, then what? What other options are there?

Once upon a time when Tin 26 and I/J starters decks where coming out we had a chance to implement set rotation starting there. We could have practically eliminated CBN. Foreign Wives would've been the only CBN card in the game if we didn't print anymore CBN.

That passed and I'm not sure we could actually implement rotation until a new starter comes out again. Even then if would take a couple more sets intentionally aimed at a set rotation after a starter deck to make it happen.

To build on this, there were some players wondering if the new I/J starter deck/tin 26 cards, with their new format, would be an appropriate place to start set rotation.  They envisioned 2 Redemption categories:  A "Legacy" version of sorts, where all cards are legal, and a "Modern" format where it's just the newer cards.  The different look of the cards would serve as the obvious "cutoff" point between the two.

The problem with this is that the cards from I/J on are very unbalanced in terms of brigades.  Clay has gotten by far the most from those sets, and many good brigades couldn't field a competitive offense if their life depended on it.

Set rotation would probably have to be intentional; the playtesters would have to name a "Ground Zero" and aim to balance things from that point forward.  Not sure this could happen if there's only about 130 new cards every year, and 16 brigades to bring back to balance.

Well Koney is technically red...

Koney is a clay deck and you can't convince me otherwise.