Cactus Game Design Message Boards

Can a Dominant be in a Reserve? For example, in a 56 card deck, 6 Dominants are in the deck, 1 Dominant is in the Reserve.

Thanks,

-LD

Can Sites start in Reserve?

Quote from: lduvall on January 31, 2019, 08:15:23 AM

Can a Dominant be in a Reserve? For example, in a 56 card deck, 6 Dominants are in the deck, 1 Dominant is in the Reserve.

Thanks,

-LD

Dominants and lost souls, except hopper, can not start in the reserve.  Dominants can be put there during game though

I like the idea that Hopper can go in reserve. I'm not sure why you'd put it there, but still.

Because it doesn't count as a LS for deck building rules, it made sense to allow it to be in the Reserve. At the time, Moses (CoW) was as very big part of the meta and we figured there could be some strategy with the Gain LS--if I suspected my opponent is running Moses, I wouldn't want to shuffle Hopper since it could easily be negated, but if I see that his deck isn't running Moses then it's another LS gen piece I can add in during the game.

While Moses isn’t seen as much today, Covet is as well as plenty of other cards that can pull out your Hopper for you.

Hopper is also double-edged if you are consistently using The Ends of the Earth.

Depending on the deck, I could still see Hopper being a good use of a slot in the Reserve if you have a way to shuffle it when desired.

I don't recall all of them, but there were several factors that led to that decision. For example, we wanted to keep deck checking as simple as possible for tournament hosts. Having dominants in both main deck and Reserve would add an extra step in the checking process.
In terms of gameplay, we weren't entirely sure how impactful the Reserve would be since it was a completely new thing for Redemption. We did not want to create a situation where dominants became more powerful by being allowed in Reserve at the start.

That's not to say we'll never decide to change the rule and allow them to start in Reserve but to this point, we have not seen a need for that.