kpr_ep15_starallianceplaybook

[00:00:00]

Cold Open

KeyForge. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the podcast. KPR It's five-year mission. To explore a strange new decks. To seek out new players and new metagames To boldly go where no podcast has gone before. [00:01:00] Let's get sweaty.

Introduction

Welcome dear listener. My name is Zach Armstrong. This is KeyForge Public Radio. And today we are talking all about the playbook for star Alliance in Winds of exchange. Can you make it so, if Picard asks? I'm so excited to talk about this house. They are a lot of fun. I have a whole lot going on here in winds of exchange. And we're talking about their playbook, what do they do well, what do they not do well, how you do you play with and against them in any kind of situation, based on the cards they have the strategies that emerge so that you can play with and against them effectively.

If they're across the table, what are their outs? What are their threats? Are you going to be the beat down or are you going to control when you're facing them? I'm so excited to dive into this with you. If you're not already subscribed to the [00:02:00] podcast, hit that button on whatever platform you're on. So you can hear every episode that comes out as it drops. We are talking next week about playing to your outs. You are not going to want to miss that one next Wednesday.

So why do we want to talk about Star Alliance? What are the three most important things about Star Alliance? Star Alliance is the consistency house in winds of exchange. They've got house cheating, draw archiving and board control. So consistency across a few different elements. Like we talked about last week and all of these elements are present in spades at common and uncommon. And so you are likely going to get these in some sort of consistent fashion, providing consistency for the rest of the deck, and then having some effects present consistently. In your decks. It's really great. I love this feature about them. They do have quite a few power cards and combos at common and uncommon that can drive a deck to a win. And they have powerful synergies with each other. There's a number of duds that might be, might be slowing your deck down if you get them, but they're not the end of the world. And there's some good stuff. This house this house has [00:03:00] going on and they really do have a couple power combos. Power cards that if you see them, if you see them together, you can really shoot for an out where they work together and become greater than the sum of the parts. Lastly, we're going to be talking about their token creatures. What's great. What's not so great. How did they interact with the game plan? And then of course, we're going to look at the MVP for Star Alliance in the winds of exchange. What is my favorite card from this house? What is the card that is just iconic. It's doing the work in the identity of the house. You're going to see it. You're going to get great work out of it every time that you see that card and you can use it. Well, we're going to be looking at all these things. I'm excited to dive into it with you.

History of Star Alliance's Mechanical Identity

So let's look at what actually brings consistency to this house. They've been around for a while, right? They were introduced in worlds collide, where they were really powerful, lots of house cheating, lots of powerful effects, lots of really cool thematic things. They brought a theme of getting a benefit from having a bunch of different cards on the board from different houses of cheating out cards of other houses.

And they usually have a small [00:04:00] board presence, but with very peculiar two-sided board wipes that you can manipulate to your advantage. Now, the upgrade. Grade theme and the two-sided board wipe manipulating it to your advantage and the house cheating and getting cards of other houses out using them is all still present here. They might not be as quite over tuned as they were back in worlds collide, but after their past few appearances in mass mutation, and dark tidings, whereas they had some hits and misses. This is a pretty good set for them. There are some duds, some really slow pods you might have. However, they do have a lot of fun stuff going on and I've seen them perform really well.

Draw Card Effects

They do have bit of consistency with draw. We don't have a whole lot of pure draw in the set. There's just a bit of it sprinkled across several different houses. But we can't ignore things like Camraderie and CPO Zytar for getting some extra draw into your deck. CPO Zytar being the enhancement. Uh, the enhancement creature at common that brings a damaged pip and two draw icons into your deck. And so just imagine as far as card value is concerned. [00:05:00] If this card said, play, draw two cards, deal one damage to an enemy creature. That's pretty good. And so you're going to be spreading that out across other cards, randomly in the deck and getting a four power one armor creature for your trouble. So. That's pretty good. And Camaraderie is a lovely draw card. It's well tuned to the effect of drawing two cards for each of the non Star Alliance neighbors of exhausting, a friendly Star Alliance creature, right? Where the neighbor pip. So that's not hard to get to. That's not hard to manipulate, right? Drawing two cards for each of its not Star Alliance neighbors. Especially if you have token generation, you can generate tokens on other side of the target creature before you play this. So not too hard to manipulate at the very least you're getting two cards in an aember pip. At most you're getting four. So I really like it as just the right cost for a little bit of extra card draw. So they've got a bit of consistency there. Look out for a few CPO Zytars and Camaraderie and uncommon. So you might not see it in, in multiples. But you're going to have a bit of draw there. If you have those in your deck, not enough to really send the whole deck over [00:06:00] the top, as far as tons of drawn consistency, unless you get a ton of drop pips from this and then maybe other enhancers, right?

House Cheating

But we also have consistency in that you get to use your creatures kind of out of turn, you get to house cheat using creatures. Right? We have things like badge of unity, CXO Taber, and SV3 Lander, badge of unity. Let's a creature be used belonging to star Alliance and its other houses. So that's great. Even just for a quick reap on a, on a turn where you, you play it. They're a CXO Taber allowing you to play or use any non Star Alliance card, which was fantastic. And then a really powerful card, SV3 Lander, which is an artifact that makes a token on play and has Omni sacrifice S V3 Lander. You may use friendly token creatures for the remainder of the turn. So this is great if you have a token and you're not in the tokens house, you can go ahead and still get a crazy amount of value for those tokens finding or reaping, whatever you want to do. With SV3 Lander. So SV3 Lander I think is huge because you can make the tokens to use them next turn, no matter what, no matter what house they're in. Or [00:07:00] save it for a turn where you really going huge. You know what, it's time to press your advantage. So I love all of these. They have some good consistency as far as getting uses out of your cards.

Archiving

Star Alliance does have quite a bit of archive, which is great. And you may have noticed in the, Saurian playbook episode a while ago. Uh, I mentioned There's a few things that let you do totally unrestricted archiving. And I wasn't, I wasn't totally clear in my exact definition of that. And we can kind of include recorded history in it. Right. You only kind of get to use. One card of each house, but it's still very good. It's still very good. And I mentioning it here, of course, with all the, um, with some good archive effects. Uh, in Star Alliance, the repeatable token maker, teamwork. I'm not too worried about. It's fine. We're not really talking about that today, but Ganymede outpost the artifact that at the cost of putting a creature on the bottom of a deck, lets you archive two cards from hand. It's absolutely fantastic. After just two turns, you can have an archive of four cards, especially if they're all from one house, maybe you're building up a brig, Brobnar turn right up, just consistent, [00:08:00] good Brobnar commons. You can just throw everything out on a future turn. And so Ganymede Outpost is absolutely absolutely a fantastic card. It's one of the best ways to get some archive and consistency. Set yourself up for a big out later. So look out for Ganymede Outpost, especially in multiples. If you have it. It's fantastic. Not recorded history is the action card that says reveal up to three cards of different houses from your hand. Archive each car revealed this way. And one of the kind of old school terms for an archive with a whole bunch of different houses in it is a dirty archive because when you pull that archive, you're on only one house, right? So you might not. You might not have a way to deal with the fact that you've just thrown a bunch of extra houses that you're not in into your hand, and that might be slowing you down. But that's okay in this situation because you have total control over what goes in there. You can just archive one card. If you want to write, this is a little bit like lab work from old sets, archiving one card. And if you want to, you can pick up to a couple other cards to go in there. You can toss a few cards that you don't think you'll need in this matchup. You [00:09:00] can toss just one card in there that you do, or if you're not too worried about what it'll do to your hand later, you can go ahead and toss all three cards in there and then pull it whenever you need to Recorded history is a fantastic card, especially great as a player one, turn one, because you've got one extra option, right? And you're seven cards in hand. You're playing once you've got six to pick from. Absolutely fantastic card. Archiving it is a premium this set. So Ganymede out post recorded history. Uh, being at uncommon and common respectively. Fantastic for consistency. In this set.

Token Creature Consistency

Now there's another kind of consistency that if you listen to, some other KeyForge strategy podcast. There's a sloppy lab work, which is fantastic with JT Russell and Quickdraw. Um, there's a, we can key warrior podcast. Oh, we've heard a little bit, especially over on Sloppy Labwork about token consistency. Right. Because if you tokenize a key card, one, you were deciding to tokenize at the risk of tokenizing, a key card that was, you know, a choice you made strategically, but there are some ways to get that back or totally control what gets tokenized. So, you know, we like to call this [00:10:00] token consistency.

I think that may be the Sloppy Labwork people head up a better phrase for it, but that's the one I'm going with here. Right? So go check them out. The token consistency we have here at common and uncommon in Star Alliance is transporter platform and grunt work. Transporter Platform uh, showed up in the very first set that Star Alliance showed up in it's an uncommon artifact. It says action, return, a friendly creature and each upgrade attached to it, to their owner's hand. You get to play upgrades with bonus pips and then bounce it to your hand. Then play them all again. So it's really great for some aember bursts that way, getting play effects again. Right. All this sort of thing. And what it's fantastic for here, winds of exchange is once you get to see what your tokens are, remember, you have to make them pick a spot on the battle line, and then you can look, look at them. You can't look at them. As they're coming off the top of the deck to be made, right. You got to pick that battle line spot. And if you need that card back in your hand and you were taking that risk because you know, you've got Transporter Platform out. You can get that token out there, or maybe it's already out there and you [00:11:00] say, sweet. I need that in my hand. I need to save it for later. So you just Transporter platform it up to your hand. Fantastic card for token, consistent consistency, as well as playing a whole bunch of pips on your upgrades, especially if you're getting enhancements like aember enhancements, drawn enhancements and stuff like that. It's fantastic. The other one I mentioned is grunt work. This is an action card with a pip. It lets you look at the top three cards of your deck and put them back in any order. Then you make a token creature. This is fantastic because it gives you, uh, an option one out of three to make a token creature out of. I absolutely love this. You can pick the best thing to become a token creature and rearrange, uh, what you're about to draw, whether you've got draw effects, maybe you're just drawing one up or if you're drawing out two, it doesn't really matter, but you get to tokenize exactly what you want. And I honestly cannot overstate how important that is in this set, because maybe all three cards are not high impact, but you can pick even based on house if they're not high impact. Not none of the three are huge to your game plan, but you can pick based on [00:12:00] house so that you can filter. You can filter out a house. You don't want to see. And be getting houses. You do want to see so that you're handcrafting even better. So Grunt Work gives you token knowledge. It gives you hand cracked crafting in most situations. It's absolutely fantastic. And there's a couple other cards that interact with this. Navigator Ali. Uh, reprint that says play after fight after reap, look at the top three cards of your deck and put them back in any order. So if you have token making effects and you're using navigator Ali, that's lets you do it, uh, over two cards, right? Shout out to future booster as well. The artifact with a pip that says Omni, look at the top card of your deck. You may put it on the bottom. All of these are great for token consistency and future booster is doubly great because that lets you filter your deck. Uh, let's say, let's say, you know, you have a bunch of sanctum in your hand and you look at the top card of your deck and you know, you want to go sanctum and you look at a non sanctum car. That's not critical to your game plan right now. Go ahead and put that on the bottom, because now you have a better chance of drawing the remaining sanctum. In you. Into your [00:13:00] hands so that you can play more than even just four cards. Maybe we'll draw up to five. You have a chance to do that? You'll have five sanctum cards over more to play next turn, because you got rid of that non sanctum card because you want to be handcrafting, right. So really useful. A lot of this stuff is very, very skilled testing. So future booster, fantastic for deck filtering and token consistency. They have a few things, uh, even at rare that really, that really helped this.

Power Combos at Common and Uncommon

So looking at their power combos, what's really exciting about, what's really exciting about Star Alliance in Winds of exchange is that they do have quite a few power combos that are going to show up in some of your Star Alliance decks at common and uncommon. These are so fun. I'm so glad these made it in. And if you're real fortunate, you get some high powered versions of these. So starting off, we have rogue operation, which is an action card, which says play discard the top two cards of your deck. Steal one aember for each house represented among the discarded cards. Are risky to play if you've got a key card that is better than stealing, right? If that key card is better than a steal one, [00:14:00] You might not want to play this. However, we just got done talking about your deck filtering and draw consistency with things like Grunt work and navigator Ali, right? And you can set up the perfect rogue operation. You have perfect rogue operation knowledge. If you've done the Grunt work, if you've hired a navigator Ali, then you have perfect knowledge for your Rogue operation. And it's actually really on theme because you've planned your rogue operation and stolen, too, knowing exactly what was going to happen. Right. Knowing exactly what was going to happen. So this is a fantastic combo rogue operation is very good. You can play it risky and steal at least one, and that's fine.

And usually steal two,. Um, or you can use a grunt work, or navigator Ali, if you have those available to steal with perfect knowledge. So it's fantastic. Absolutely love those combos rogue operation is common. Which is fantastic. Now, of course the aforementioned transport or platform, this has been a burst card in most sets that has been present. And now we have transported platform plus collector Boren, plus just all the upgrades that come with pips. Collector Boren is a [00:15:00] fantastic creature. Three power of human that reads play. Put an upgrade from your discard pile into your hand. Consistency. Yeah, consistency. Through recursion. And then after an upgrade is attached to collector, Boren ready collector Boren. So collector Boren has a great effect that's activated by an upgrade going on to Collector Boren. And if there's an upgrade already in your discard, then you can go get it when you play collector Boren. That's awesome. And now combine that with transport a platform, right. Where you can play on collector Boren, ready him, and probably reap our fight. If that's an appropriate use. Maybe do another upgrade. Do it again. And then bounce that back to hand. Send him back down to the board. Go get another upgrade. If you've got one in your discard pile and then play them. And usually you can hit rule of six. If you get pretty fortunate here. And keep an eye out for your decks that have enhancements on those upgrades so that it can be doubling that up with those transporter platform returned to hand and then play again. It's fantastic stuff. You also have just a lot of other transport or platform plays collector. Borens just my personal favorite. That's really, really [00:16:00] powerful. You have CR officer Hawkins who can deploy anywhere in your battle line and gains one for each of its nonstop Alliance neighbors. A fantastic doubly. Fantastic. When you have a non star Alliance token, right. And so any of these play effects that you want, uh, can be taken advantage of with transport, a platform navigator Ali scout, chief Korijir that had makes a token creature on play. If you want to be doing that. Um, so a lot of good stuff, a lot of good stuff you can do doubling up those pips, getting a few repeated play effects.

Token Creature Overview: Cadet

And then one of the other power combos I'll mention here, as we transitioned over into our token creature talk is cadet. It's a one power. It says destroyed or ready cadets, most powerful neighbor. There's a lot of decks that this destroyed ability is not going to be that great. And maybe you can destroy it once or twice, if at all, to get a neighbor readied. That's fine. However, if you've got some effects where you can repeatedly and consistently in some way, Kill off that cadet to ready it's most powerful neighbor. You can rule of six, some [00:17:00] stuff pretty easily. Let's say for example. Let's take, for example, you have an Autocannon now the rare artifact that deals want to accrete your after it enters play, and remember the token creature can Dodge a Quixxle stone, but not an Autocannon. And so let's say we've got auto Canon in play and then the four power Ekwidon creature recruiter. That after reap makes a token creature. So it can, after reap, it makes a token creature. Uh, let's say that, uh, let's say that recruiter is on the flank just to, you know, be ideal here. And then we make that cadet. It goes next to it goes onto the flank next to a recruiter. It takes one damage. It is now destroyed that destroyed ability triggers a red is the most powerful neighbor. It moves to the discard pile and oh man, nav recruiter is ready again. And recruiter can reap make another token.

It's destroyed readies again. So you're going to hit rule of six, or you're going to run out of token creatures in your deck. If your deck is low. And so there's a lot of ways to actually just combo off with cadet. So keep an eye out for some fun cadet setups that you [00:18:00] could use maybe for Alliance, or if you have a deck that can use it naturally. So keep an eye out for cadet and this absolute uh, combo potential that it has to hit the rule of six on something and just go just go crazy.

Token Creature Overview: Bot

Then looking at our next token creature in Star Alliance, we have B0T. This says action use another friendly creature. Now this is only a net positive if that creature could do something that bot can't. So anything bigger than B0-T could fight and you've got more power going out there or any ability you'd like to activate I will say so far that i haven't seen a super strong deck that leans on the bot token for that ability it is very nice to have options when you have other creatures out in play maybe you've got a crim torch tooth right that you want to Send into the opponent's battle line On an off Brobnar turn or you've got let's say like a Gemcoat vendor that you want to steal with right so it gives you options for anything else that's out that hasn't been fought or blown up off the board And so that's good i just don't have a lot of experience with this really taking a deck to the next level Uh, but if you've got [00:19:00] one send it to me at podcast and KeyForge public radio.com and tell me how it works i would love to see it and see how bot. Can be excellent because like cadet, bot is also only one power and so it's easy for damage pips or other creatures to fight it off if that's something you know your opponent wants to to keep you down on is fighting those off.

Token Creature Overview: Explorer

Next we have explorer this two power creature that says after reap look at the top card of your deck you may discard it. This is a deck filtering champion if you've got one or more explorers out Uh before you start to reap with them ask yourself what's the best card in my deck for the situation? What's my biggest out what's the response i need? Uh what's the absolute best thing i could do with my next turn and filter out anything That's not that right maybe you're looking for a specific card Maybe you want to just ensure that the next card you draw is of a house that you're working towards and that you're handcrafting to get more of those in your hand right filter out anything that is not ideal as far as card effects [00:20:00] or outs or responses are concerned or maybe simply on house for handcrafting. The other thing you can do is know exactly what you're tokenizing this is an absolute all-star next to the other deck filtering cards that you might have and Star Alliance right you can look at it choose not to discard it and put it there and then tokenize it if it's a card you know you're comfortable tokenizing that's fantastic if you've got some other token creating effects going on and i love that this is on after reap so you're making aember while filtering your deck i think this is quite good two power means it's going to be a bit more survivable. Perhaps not as much crazy combo potential as some other things but to power is going to be survivable and it's going to be very skilled testing you've got to know your handcrafting, you gotta know your deck filtering And what you are playing towards to use this really effectively as you use and get an aember for that after reap effect. So explore. i really like it's a deck filtering champion keep an eye out for it practice with it use it to practice your handcrafting deck filtering skills and see what happens after a couple of plays there.

Token Creature Overview: Aemberling

And then lastly [00:21:00] we have Aemberling. this is the special token if you get the rare artifact Norbyn's Cavern then this comes into your deck writing over anything else. Norbert caborn gives all Aemberlings plus three power and skirmish so it just turns them into fighting powerhouses there and Aemberling themselves cannot reap. they start out as one power And Aemberling may be spent as if it were aember in your pool which means you discarded ignoring wards. So this is really really cool because it allows you to check for a key along two axis, right: aember And creatures that are behaving as aember aemberly. So however you're not getting the value from the reaping. As soon as aemberling could have reaped twice it's providing more value probably than it did than it did just as getting spent once as aember there now if your deck has other ways to generate aember or kind of an aember advantage off of tokens like a ragnarok prep, membership drive, token of appreciation, Then i think you're really doubling down on what makes aemberling good as both something you can [00:22:00] spend as aember and a token creature even though it can't reap. So keep an eye out for that downside not being able to reap and just the choices you're making as far as how much you tokenize and what else you're going for but i think there's a large number of ways That this can be really effective because checking across two axes aember and creatures Is you know, not something every deck is going to be prepared to deal with unless you're against yeah winds of exchange Brobnar. Sorry.

Star Alliance MVP

Lastly the Star Alliance most valuable player. What card is the mvp for Star Alliance in winds of exchange and i mentioned this offhand once but oh my gosh it's Echo Reflector. I love this card it is an upgrade with an aember pip it says this creature gains your opponents keys cost plus three aember. It is so good because inset it's a common so you're going to see maybe one or even two of them are more in a deck and that's great You can put them on to collect or boring you can bounce or transport a platform to get that aember again you can set up your scaling aember control [00:23:00] like closed door negotiations rant and ride or martyr uh all of which can have really big effects when your opponent uh, goes up to seven or eight or even more Right and this says well if you can't kill that creature you're not going to be forging until you get to nine and it can really set this stuff up and you can put it on whatever creature you want to one that you want to incentivize them to attack or one that's going to stick around for a while. So i love echo reflector i think this is a fantastic card i've had a ton of fun with it it synergizes well with so many other things in the set so echo reflector my personal mvp keep an eye out for it It does a lot of really great work in this set

Outro

This has been KeyForge public radio my name is zach thank you so much for joining me on this journey to talk about Star Alliance and their playbook and winds of exchange i think this house is a lot of fun i think they've got some good stuff you're going to have some duds but you're going to have some great ones too so keep an eye out for what you can do with Star Alliance from winds of exchange visit the KeyForge public radio website at [00:24:00] KeyForge public radio.com to find all sorts of things on there you can visit us on most social platforms. Forms as well the links the links are on the website if you want to be seeing some KeyForge content as you scroll facebook instagram tik tok wherever If you want to see and hear me well sorry about that but if you want to see and hear me on those platforms give us a follow we are on all of those Thank you so much to everybody who supports us on Patrion, especially our airwave advocate level supporters like paul Roadrunner. when you're a member of the patrion you get to vote on content and you get to participate in chats in the discord and on patrion itself and hear updates about the show and just what's going on with it what's going on behind the scenes what my plans are what we're trying out sometimes i ask for advice from the subscribers to say hey i want to do this but i need your feedback first so if that's something that interests you to be involved in KeyForge public radio and help the show continue to grow and be excellent as does. Jump on there we would love to have you it starts at just $4 a month with options for more. Make sure you're following the podcast Whatever platform you're listening on just hit follow or subscribe on [00:25:00] there so you don't miss our uh so you don't miss an episode we're talking about playing to your outs next wednesday so be so be on the lookout for that i'm very excited about that topic it's going to be fantastic And if you haven't already please consider leaving a review if you're enjoying the show. When you do that it is your vote of confidence that you are leaving there for other people to see in KeyForge public radio as they come into the game as they want to learn more as they want to grow even if they've been around for a bit And your vote of confidence helps them say oh you know maybe I'll give this a shot. maybe i'll give this a shot Thank you so much for listening Remember that the most important part of KeyForge with the person across the table and like your radio dial me or KeyForge skills always be well-tuned.

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