All Redemption starter decks from A/B to G/H have had the same dominants in common. One deck gets Angel of the Lord, Son of God and Christian Martyr. The other deck gets Angel of the Lord, Son of God and Burial. That system has worked for several years so why the change with I/J?
Our desire for I/J was that the decks would be simple, but fun to play. We wanted to design the best teaching tool Redemption has seen. Not having a lost soul to rescue for several turns, also known as "soul drought", can take the fun away from a game. Burial encourages "soul drought", as do the single color sites that were found in E/F and G/H. From the start we decided to omit both. We decided the obvious thing to do was to replace Burial with Christian Martyr, keeping both decks at 3 dominants.
Fairly early in our testing for I/J, discussions about the dominant cap started. If implemented it would give us the freedom to print more dominants. We felt that we had room to add a 2nd evil dominant, bringing the total dominant count to 4 per deck. Mayhem had not yet received errata. We were looking for effective options to counter the dreaded "first turn Mayhem" (FTM) and came up with Vain Philosophy. It was never as effective as we'd hoped against FTM for reasons I won't get into here. This is the original version of Vain Philosophy that was added to both I and J.
Looking back I don't see that anyone was all that happy with this version. Some were concerned that we were creating a whole new problem in an attempt to combat FTM. Other's had not yet got the memo that these were simple starters and insisted that we needed to add sites and/or fortresses so we can make a dominant that targets those for removal.
One of the most common problems we faced in starter deck games was that Vain Philosophy could not be played on your turn, so it was being discarded during the discard phase to get a players hand down to 8 cards. We discussed a number of ways to change the card. One thought was to just go back to 3 dominants and make Vain Philosophy an evil enhancement. Another was to remove the turn restriction all together. With that change it could be used as an offensive battle winner against evil dominants though. That isn't something we wanted from an evil dominant.
There was a lot of discussion about the evil dominant spot in our second round of testing. Another idea that came up was to print two different versions of Vain Philosophy, an OT version and an NT version with different abilities. This is the first time a card that went by the name of Discord came up. It was added to our list of cards to test, however both decks still contained Vain Philosophy.
Testing results showed that the new version of Vain Philosophy was good. Discord was less impressive but served a good purpose in the starter decks. The Ruth band had been rather difficult to stop for the Philistine defense early in our testing. Discord helped with that. We also discussed the combo with Herod Agrippa II and potential T2 uses. We agreed that nothing was broken but more testing was warranted. Discard replaced Vain Philosophy in the J deck, but no other changes were made to either card during this round of testing.
During the following round of testing we noticed the Discord had some unnecessary verbiage in the special ability so we trimmed it down.
We were about half way through testing at this point. During the later half of our testing we didn't feel that any additional changes were needed for the special ability on either of these dominants.
Has anyone noticed up to this point that Vain Philosophy was in the I deck and Discord was in the J deck? If you've seen the final version of these cards you know that each was actually printed in the opposite deck. Part way through our testing we decided to swap that two decks around so that the "J" deck is Judges and the "I" deck is Disciples.
The last change came after testing was over, while Rob was putting the cards into the new layout and updating the scripture from the KJV to the NASB. While the KJV used the term "discord" the NASB did not. There were a hand full of cards that received name changes as a result. Discard was changed to Strife.
I hope you've enjoyed this insight into the development of the I/J decks and the thought process that went into the decisions we made. If there are other cards from the starters or tins you'd like to hear about give them a shout out and I'll consider writing about them if there's an interesting story to share.
