Keyforge: The broken card that warped the meta, dominated the competitive scene and divided the community. [Hobby Drama Archive]

For several years, a KeyForge player soho_jin has documented KeyForge's more dramatic and interesting moments for the r/HobbyDrama subreddit. While the stories he tells involve low points for the game, he always uses them to point out the best of KeyForge and the community that keeps it going. KeyForge Public Radio is proud to archive these important pieces of KeyForge writing, with permission from the author. The original version of this post is here; the below post is unmodified from its original posting on February 10, 2021.

I love Keyforge.

In my first post on this subreddit, (which I would highly recommend reading before this one) I delved into the nightmare of the LANS combo and how it culminated in the most boring grand finals the game has ever seen. And while LANS and LART decks were most certainly crazy, the early days of Keyforge were dominated by a certain other card. One that drove players mad with rage. This post is a Tribute to that card.

Okay, so it isn’t Tribute.

But I still think Tribute is too good.

Fight me. 😉

The Rules of The Game

To recap from last time, the basic premise of Keyforge is as follows: In order to win, you must forge 3 keys. Each key costs 6 ӕmber (pronounced ‘amber’), which you can gain through certain card bonuses, or by using creatures to perform the ‘reap’ action. If you have enough ӕmber at the start of your turn, you forge a key. There are other intricacies and various aspects of play, but to put it simply: play cards, get ӕmber, forge keys, be the first to forge 3 of them. Decks are sold sealed and whole as opposed to being constructed through booster packs, and every single deck in the world is unique.

The Standards of Power

Before I go ahead and spill the beans over this infamous card, I should first disclose a comprehensible standard of cards within Keyforge. When directly compared with other card games, Keyforge is capable of having some pretty wild effects that would be utterly insane, number-one-on-the-ban-list type cards if seen elsewhere. This isn’t because Keyforge has no sense of balance or is ‘broken’ by design, but simply because the way Keyforge is played (plus the lack of deck construction) allows for certain cards to exist that you wouldn’t see in likes of Magic: The Gathering.

Keyforge has no mana system, meaning powerful effects aren’t locked behind resource expenditure. So long as you only play and use cards from one house (or ‘faction’) you can pretty much play any card you want, when you want. With that in mind, let’s have a little look at a small selection of cards from among the currently available sets so you can get a taste of what we’re dealing with.

- Stealth Mode: Gain an ӕmber and prevent your opponent from playing any action cards on their turn. Imagine if MTG had a zero-mana common that said, “Your opponent cannot play Sorceries or Instants on their next turn.” This is pretty much that.

- Arise!: For the cost of just 1 chain you can return every creature from your discard pile of the chosen house. Choose house Dis and you can immediately play them all, stacking the board against your opponent with a small army. Extremely effective when paired with a board wipe to kill all of your opponent’s creatures first.

- Key to Dis: An artifact that, once placed, on any future turn you wish, you can trigger to destroy all creatures. Yup. Destroy all creatures. At any time. On any turn. No restrictions. No setback. My pleasure.

- Mimic Gel: This guy enters play as a copy of any creature on the field, whether it be yours or your opponent’s. Pair him up with Reassembling Automaton and you have two creatures that cannot be destroyed!

Okay, those might sound pretty crazy, but why stop there? Let’s go completely bananas.

- Punctuated Equilibrium: This one forces your opponent to discard their entire hand before drawing up to standard hand size, completely ruining any chance they had of holding onto an important card. And if that wasn’t good enough, after playing all your other Untamed cards, this allows you to discard the others, draw 6 new cards, and carry on with your turn, playing more cards.

- Lateral Shift: Take a look at your opponent’s hand. You now know all of the cards in their hand. Hey, why not take one of those cards and play it as if it were your card? Creature, action, artifact, doesn’t matter. What if it’s not of the active house? Doesn’t matter either! Just pick and choose the best card from their hand and play it.

This should hopefully give you a good enough idea of what kinds of standards I’m talking about, and to put into perspective the fact that none of the above cards have been errata’d while a certain other card was so incredibly dominant and powerful that it needed to be nerfed.

But first, let’s go back to when Keyforge first released, to a time when the meta was in its infancy. A time when the game was just being figured out, and a certain quartet of cards loomed heavily over the competition.

All Great Things Come in Fours

Every card game has this story: The legendary rare card that everyone and their neighbor’s dog was clamoring for. For Pokemon, it was Charizard. For Magic, it was Black Lotus. For Cardfight Vanguard, it was [insert card that nobody has ever heard of]. And then there’s Keyforge…

Are you ready!?

(“yes” cried the redditors)

Then let’s introduce the fabulous, the mighty…

The Four Horsemen!

(*redditors gasp*)

These four cards always appear together in the deck. You will always get all four of them! And they are:

- Horseman of Famine: This bad boy can destroy the least powerful creature on the field every time he enters play, reaps, or fights. What a guy!

(“ooohhhh”)

- Horseman of Pestilence: How about dealing damage to every non-horseman creature every time he enters play, reaps, or indeed fights! Scary!

(“aaahhhhhh”)

- Horseman of War: Play this guy, and you can fight with all of your creatures, even if they don’t belong to the active house! How about that?

(“wow”)

- Horseman of Death: Saving the best for last, this wretched spirit can revive all of your other horseman cards in an instant, letting you bring them into play with a triple whammy of effects!

(“amazing”)

These four cards were the ones everyone was talking about. These four cards were the powerhouses that people were searching for. There were even double horsemen decks that had two copies of each! The bidding on eBay went wild! One sold for a whopping £1,652! Because you see, everyone knew these cards were special. Everyone could sense their incredible power. They were… My goodness, they were…

Average.

Maybe a little bit below average, honestly.

The Four Horseman seemed amazing at first glance. From the standpoint of a game like Magic, (which many Keyforge players had experience with) these guys looked to be the most fearsome creatures around, but they really weren’t. (F in the chat for the people who paid absurd amounts for these decks)

Quick question: What’s the most powerful deck archetype from retro Pokemon TCG?

If you answered Rain Dance, you’re wrong.

If you answered Haymaker, you’re also wrong.

Turns out it was a Jungle Lickitung deck. (Yes, really) Who knew?

The problem was that the meta hadn’t evolved enough back then, and most people were simply following the leaders, assuming that the best decks had already been figured out. Once Keyforge’s meta had progressed beyond the beginner level, people soon realized that the four horsemen really weren’t all that. While they have some impressive effects, the true path to victory quickly became apparent.

Make. The most. Ӕmber.

Or, better yet, steal it.

A Penny Stolen is Better Than A Penny Saved

There are many different aspects to any given deck that can provide a benefit. ‘Creature control’ is a deck’s ability to deal with enemy creatures, usually through damage, destruction, or inflicting them with stun. ‘Recursion’ is a deck’s ability to re-use cards that have already been played, usually by returning discarded cards to your hand or shuffling them back into the deck. And while these – along with various other aspects – are important when it comes to judging a deck’s capabilities, the two most important factors are ‘Expected Ӕmber’ and ‘Ӕmber Control.’

‘Expected Ӕmber’ is the amount of ӕmber you can feasibly expect to make from the deck. You need ӕmber to forge keys, so naturally, you want to be able to generate it.

‘Ӕmber Control’ relates to how much ӕmber you can expect to take away from your opponent, or your means of preventing them from generating ӕmber or forging keys.

In the first set – Call of The Archons (or CotA for short) – there’s no questioning that house Untamed is the king of generating ӕmber. Cards such as Dust Pixie, Full Moon, Hunting Witch, Nature’s Call and Fertility Chant allow players to generate swathes of ӕmber, with cards such as Regrowth and Nepenthe Seed to reclaim cards that can then generate even more ӕmber. Few people would doubt the power of CotA Untamed, but despite their abilities, they weren’t generally considered to be the strongest house.

That would be Shadows.

House Shadows is all about stealing ӕmber, which is a big deal as it acts as both ӕmber generation and ӕmber control. By stealing one ӕmber you are simultaneously generating one ӕmber and removing an ӕmber from your opponent’s pool. While there were certainly some great ӕmber control cards in other houses – Doorstep To Heaven, Burn The Stockpile and Effervescent Principle for example – Shadows were simply unmatched overall.

Cards like Urchin, Umbra, Noddy The Thief, Nerve Blast, Relentless Whispers, Ghostly Hand, Finishing Blow, Too Much To Protect, Magda The Rat, One Last Job, Routine Job and more provided plenty of opportunity to steal from your opponent, bringing you closer to victory while pulling your opponent back.

Shadows quickly solidified themselves as the most powerful house in CotA. Plentiful stealing was simply too good to pass up, but there was also another reason. Because you see, there was one particular card that was the best at stealing. One card that pretty much the game's entire meta revolved around. Nothing else came close. As Old Bruno would say…

Heckuva Deal

Bait and Switch is far and away the most dominant card in Keyforge history. Nothing has even come close to holding the game’s meta in such a stranglehold. But what made it so good? Let’s go over its effect:

If your opponent has more ӕmber than you, steal 1. Sounds fine so far. Now after stealing, if your opponent still has more ӕmber than you, repeat the effect. Not just by stealing 1 additional ӕmber and being done with it, but by repeating the entire effect. You don’t stop at 2 ӕmber. You keep stealing. You keep stealing until you either have the same amount of ӕmber as your opponent, or you have more.

Let’s say I have 0 ӕmber and my opponent has 7. I use Bait and Switch, which steals 1. This puts me at 1 and them at 6. Bait and Switch activates again, putting me at 2 and them at 5. It activates again, putting me at 3 and them at 4. They still have more ӕmber, so it activates again, putting me at 4 and them at 3. That means I’ve stolen a whopping 4 ӕmber by playing just one card.

Now, I know what many might be thinking. Surely Bait and Switch wasn’t that bad. Heck, it sounds like it’s just a means of preventing dominant players from running away with victory, letting the losing catch up. Plus, it was clearly situational, requiring you to have much less ӕmber than your opponent to have any great payoff. The thing is, Bait and Switch was a card that effectively punished players for generating ӕmber. That is, punishing them for doing the very thing that is required to win. Even worse, despite the card seemingly being designed to let losing players catch up, it was more often the case that the player who is already out in front would launch themselves even further out of reach of their opponent for the rest of the game. That 'situational' aspect? Players soon learned how to force the situation in their favor.

Assuming there are no key cost effects in play, forging a key requires paying 6 ӕmber at the start of your turn. Let’s say I finish my turn at 7 ӕmber. My opponent is unable to reduce my ӕmber count but is able to reach enough ӕmber to forge a key on their next turn. But there’s a catch. If they go all out and generate as much ӕmber as possible and I have Bait and Switch, they’d be giving me a huge advantage, essentially providing ӕmber for me to steal. But if they refrain from generating tons of ӕmber and I don’t have Bait and Switch, they’ve just missed out on a chance to get ahead. Perhaps go for the middle-ground? Settle at 6 ӕmber and hope for the best? Sure, but then Shadows has plenty of cards that can easily steal 1 ӕmber away and prevent them from forging a key, putting them in the exact same dilemma as before. Meanwhile, I’ve already forged my first key and can charge ahead, keeping the pressure on.

The outcome of many games would be entirely dependent on whether the players had Bait and Switch in hand at the right time. Take a risk? Generate tons of ӕmber? Or hold back and miss out when you could’ve gained the advantage? Bait and Switch didn’t even need to be played to have an ӕmber control effect. The sheer threat of the card would make people scared of generating ӕmber, and it wasn’t uncommon for people to straight up discard useful cards or refrain from reaping. To boil down its effect to just the amount stolen in any particular game would be doing it a disservice. Simply not knowing if your opponent had it in hand would change the flow of the game, and other than staring into their eyes in a tense standoff (As shown here in this frighteningly realistic depiction of the Bait and Switch facial twitch meta), there weren’t really any alternatives.

Things got even worse when it was paired with other cards:

Miasma prevents your opponent from forging a key at the start of their turn, which was not only useful for stalling or preventing an otherwise inevitable win, but also put them in a dangerous spot by keeping their ӕmber count high, thus making Bait and Switch an even bigger threat if they tried generating ӕmber.

Lash of Broken Dreams increases your opponent’s key cost for their next turn, meaning they are now required to gain additional ӕmber to progress, which in turn made Bait and Switch even deadlier.

Counterplay

That’s not to say Bait and Switch was completely unstoppable. There were cards that outright prevented stealing such as The Vaultkeeper and Discombobulator. Problem was, the vast majority of viable decks wouldn’t have them, and they could be immediately negated by various creature removal cards.

Control The Weak and Scrambler Storm were perhaps the most obvious methods, preventing the use of Bait and Switch in the first place – which definitely helped – but weren’t strictly full-proof given the use of cards from other houses, and creatures that could steal/capture, thus prolonging the game and keeping the threat of Bait and Switch as a possibility for a future turn.

However, by far the best way of dealing with Bait and Switch existed in our good old pals, house Untamed. Key Charge and Chota Hazri allowed players to forge keys in the middle of their turn. So long as you have at least 7 ӕmber to spend you can forge a key without giving your opponent any chance to respond. And since Untamed were already the kings of ӕmber generation, it wasn’t beyond the realms of reality to be able to manage a quick ӕmber burst, enough to reach the 7 ӕmber required to use one of the two key cheat cards. And while decks were limited to a maximum of only 1 copy of each, this was often enough to give players a leg up when it came to dealing with Bait and Switch.

If that was the case though, why did Bait and Switch still dominate the tournament scene? Sure, it existed at the common level (though limited to only one copy per deck, thank goodness) but so did Key Charge. Plenty of capable key cheat decks with good ӕmber generation existed, but Bait and Switch still ran rampant. Why?

Think of it this way: In what situation did Bait and Switch work best? Well, that would be when you have far less ӕmber than your opponent, allowing you to steal more from them. And what would be an excellent way of ensuring you have the least amount of ӕmber possible, while also getting ahead in the game? Yep, you’ve guessed. Key cheats. The very thing that countered Bait and Switch also had amazing synergy with it.

What was better than a key cheat deck? A key cheat deck with Bait and Switch. What was better than a LANS deck? A LANS deck with Bait and Switch. Its immense strength could not be denied.

Broken or Balanced?

The community was divided on the matter.

Some defended it, calling attention to other powerful cards like Nature’s Call, Library Access and Control The Weak, saying that there were plenty of other cards that were capable of winning games. Bait and Switch was situational and required thoughtful tactics to get the most out of it. It was still possible to play around it, and it didn’t straight up break the game like infamous examples from other card games. And since it was at the common level, it wasn’t as if you had to pay through the nose to find a deck with it.

Others felt that the card was far too frustrating to play against, that no other card forced such a difference in playstyle simply by virtue of existing. Close games could suddenly be turned into curb stomps, and the rush to first key became vital to success, increasing the luck factor. The fact that Bait and Switch decks were fairly common and easy to find wasn’t the issue; the problem was its overbearing effect on the game, regardless of whether you were playing with it or playing against it.

In the Eindhoven Vault Tour, every single top 8 deck had Bait and Switch, which was a common occurrence at tournaments. Many felt this demonstrated how centralized the meta had become, which hurt the game overall and pulled it further away from the unpredictable “jungle” that creator Richard Garfield had envisioned. For these reasons, many argued, something had to be done.

The phrase “just play around it” garnered a Poe’s Law-esque status, as it was used both as genuine advice to encourage players to improve their skills and alter their game plan instead of simply complaining, while also being used mockingly to deride the feeling that almost every action you took had to be made with only that card in mind, and the uphill struggle that came with having to deal with it.

While there was no objective right or wrong answer, there’s no denying Bait and Switch was a highly controversial card that was the cause for ire among many players. It’s no surprise, then, that Fantasy Flight introduced an errata in May 2019, stating that it would now steal a maximum of 2 ӕmber. (Which funnily enough was what many players’ interpretation of the card was to begin with) That’s still a powerful effect, of course. Stealing 2 ӕmber is nothing to be sniffed at, but it’s a far cry from what it was once capable of. While not everyone agreed with the rule change, for many (myself included) it was as if a weight had been lifted from our shoulders. And while Shadows remained the most played house for a while, the curbing of Bait and Switch allowed for a metagame that was far less centralized. As of this post being made, Library Access and Bait and Switch remain the only two cards to have been nerfed via errata.

Brighter Times Ahead

You know, it’s funny. Back in the day, I had a somewhat warped fascination with Bait and Switch. Simply glancing at the artwork gripped me with a bizarre sense of terror, a hypnotic daze that both drew me in and held me down. Now I look at the card and feel nothing, as if its mystical powers have vanished. The errata gave the game a new lease of life, and this was followed by the release of the game’s second set, Age of Ascension. It was a roaring success, and nothing bad happened ever again.

😊

“So we activate each creature’s destroyed effect…”

Nothing bad happened ever again.

“He’s attempting to leave the battleline and we recheck the board state…”

I said, nothing bad happened ever again.

“And we move the creatures into their new positions…”

No.

“And activate any effects that…”

Please stop.

“So if Brend has an upgrade…”

I tried so hard to forget.

“Couldn’t he steal 6 ӕmber?”

Don’t make me remember.

“And if Duma is next to Dust Imp…”

I almost quit the game for life.

“Gain 2 and then heal it…”

Please don’t make me face those dark days again.

“There’s nothing in the rules to say…”

It was that owl.

“With Soul Keeper, the effect could loop for all eternity.”

He started it all!

“Jargogle dies, then we sacrifice him again.”

That Goddamned…

“We recheck the board state, and…”

Owl.