Cactus Game Design Message Boards

You honestly didn't explain yourself very well here. For a fairly large post, the only points you made were A) The Early Church is now "forced" into a single brigade and B) One brigade takes up half an "entire" testament. The New Testament is about a fifth of the size of the Old Testament, so that's not a problem at all.

I still don't get people's absolute hatred of new brigades.  Power of cards is generally determined by theme, not what color they are in.  The Early Church cards could have all been Blue, but then almost all of them would have just ended up with "if used by an acts hero" or similar phrases in their ability specifically not to make them work with the other cards in their brigade.

My point is, brigade doesn't really matter much, because theme is what has determined how the majority of cards that have been printed will play for a while now.

The new set is a lot of fun and adds a lot of variety to the game.  More importantly, it's already out.  I'm not sure what the point is about complaining about it, it's already happened and we won't be going back now.  As pointed out, this was the most efficient way to handle adding all of these new themes, and the large themes being designed.  But even if there were an issue, complaining is not going to be helpful.  Instead, look at the cards that are posted and try to correct/help things there.

On to one of the major gripes you seem to have, if we printed in all the brigades, then how would there be synergy between the themes?  Would you want to print all of the enhancements they used as multi-brigade?  If you did not print the ENTIRE early church in a single brigade, you would have to print enough enhancements for each of them, and that just would not have been good.  For one, we would run out of things to print.  For another, we'd have an even larger print (a size we couldn't handle.).  Finally, you'd have to specify "if used by [insert church here] hero..." on a lot of those abilities to avoid unintentionally breaking the existing brigades.

By printing the early church in one brigade, enhancement support is easily handled.  Those things that NEED to be limited to themes can be with simple clauses, things that SHOULD be used by specific themes can have a clause boosting it for them, and for everything else you are now printing support for all the themes at once.

What you are suggesting with a spread early church only works with a lot of multi enhancements with limiters on them for use.  Which makes no sense.

Redemption's color wheel has been broken for years. Surely adding another color and diluting it even further seems legit.

It's a representation of how each color differentiates from each other in terms of philosophies/mechanics/ideologies/etc.  The original colors represented this system quite well. Angels, Demons, priests, and early church peoples are not philosophies and should in no way be brigades.

I'm confused how you can see the themes besides the 4 mentioned and see them as 'philosophies' instead of actual thematic combinations. 

What is Red? You're probably thinking warriors, and from a certain point of view that is true, but it's much more than just warriors. It's the spirit of war, combat and might. Which happens to go hand in hand with warriors, but also fills many spiritual roles.
Purple? Is it Royalty? Disciples? Yes to both, but it is about Authority and Power.
Green? It's not just prophets but spiritual life.
Blue? Heavenly Character
White? Glory and Majesty.
Gold? Well I'm going to be honest, I'm not really sure on this one, it is described as "The material of New Jerusalem" and I have no idea why that makes it end up with Judges and the convert heavy Luke stuff.

There is no 'color wheel' in the sense that you are suggesting is my point, nor like any other game that uses one.

You can also try to explain away brigades in that way, but it doesn't make it any more true.  For example, I can tell you a lot of things related to 'spiritual life' that just aren't printed in Green, because Green is the color Prophets and cards related to them are printed in, and that's just the way it has been.  Same with all of the others.  Blue is heavenly character?  Not sure how only Joseph and his extended family show heavenly character (or show it in the first place).  Glory and majesty for White?  Not sure how that applies to N.T. females, not to mention the exclusion of people like royalty.  And it goes on and on...

The point just is not valid.  It's not how Redemption works, and that was pretty clear before this set, too.

I wish that Redemption went more with the Philosophical, Ideological and Mechanical differences instead of the themes as far as picking which brigades they fall under and found more creative ways to link themes together outside of just putting them in the same brigade.

The point being made is just how diluted Redemption's color wheel looks with all of the unnecessary and uninspiring brigades...especially when looked at in retrospect of what philosophical differences each color was originally meant to represent.

It was even in the rulebook and is currently in the REG for crying out loud, how do you possibly argue against that?

When I first heard about Clay Brigade I was... how shall I put it... facepalming and thinking "what are they doing?" There were quite a few people who shared in my opinion, but I saw Rob and at least one playtester mention that we might change our minds once we saw the cards. This is my response.

I like almost everything from the Early Church set except Clay as a brigade. Well there's one other thing I don't like, that the entire Early Church is in one brigade. Of course I realize it's too late to change it, but I think it needs to be said.

When I think of what the Early Church should look like in Redemption I don't think "What brigade should it go into?" And I'm surprised anyone else thought that. I've heard many arguments for and against a new brigade, and I think most of them are silly. It won't have an impact on closed deck. Or that Genesis is big enough for Blue, which is looking at it completely wrong, in my opinion.

Let me explain why after seeing The Early Church set I am just as (or even more) against Clay:

Let's start by looking at a brigade everyone knows and loves, Silver. There was no time when I was playing Redemption that silver didn't exist, to me it was always there. But as time went on I became skeptical of it, not because it didn't do good things, not because it was or wasn't playable, but because it was defined as the Angel brigade. That meant that if you wanted to play angels you had to play silver, if you wanted to play silver you had to play angels. Is angels big enough to have its own brigade? Sure. Does that mean its good? Well that's a little more complicated. Lets explore the other brigades.

What is Red? You're probably thinking warriors, and from a certain point of view that is true, but it's much more than just warriors. It's the spirit of war, combat and might. Which happens to go hand in hand with warriors, but also fills many spiritual roles.
Purple? Is it Royalty? Disciples? Yes to both, but it is about Authority and Power.
Green? It's not just prophets but spiritual life.
Blue? Heavenly Character
White? Glory and Majesty.
Gold? Well I'm going to be honest, I'm not really sure on this one, it is described as "The material of New Jerusalem" and I have no idea why that makes it end up with Judges and the convert heavy Luke stuff.

Now look at silver: It is angels. Nothing more, nothing less, regardless of what the REG says about it being "The word of God".
Teal is priests.
And now Clay is the Early Church.
You've now forced the entire Early Church into one single brigade, all of its variety, all of its problems, its power, its struggle to remain united despite its differences. All of its aspects into one single Redemption Brigade. I think that does it a massive disservice from a thematic point of view.

What about a game play point of view? That's important too. What did it add? A single brigade with some cool strategies which basically counter many of the current defensive strategies. What did it take away? The chance to make a massive multi brigaded theme that struggles to work together, but when it does it is an unstoppable force.

Let's look at it from another point of view. We often split things between Old Testament and New Testament. The Early Church will include much of the Acts and on good cards, which means most of them will be Clay. That's about half the New Testament. So you've created a brigade that covers half of an entire Testament. The largest potential Old Testament theme is probably the Prophets, which cover maybe around a third of the Old Testament, but that still leaves more Old Testament than there is New Testament.

So if someone asked me what brigade I'd put the Early Church in, I'd say: Purple, Red, Blue, Green, White and Gold. Because I think its both important enough to go beyond a single brigade and that those brigades are all big enough to handle some of the Early Church in addition to whatever else they had.

Anyway, feel free to disagree with me. I'm the guy who things that the original 6 good brigades and 6 evil brigades were enough for the game and Silver, Teal and Orange were bad for the game in the long run.