kpr_ep20_housemarsplaybook

[00:00:00]

Cold Open

Hold in those grunts, get those rebels and researchers ready because you're starting an invasion.

Let's get sweaty.

Introduction

I'm your host, Zach Armstrong. This is KeyForge Public Radio where we are helping you get better at KeyForge. And today we're talking about House Mars. Winds of exchange. The Mars playbook, what are they good at? What do they do, and how are you going to respond to them when they're in across the table from you?

And if you're evaluating decks either in a fun sealed match, sealed Alliance building for Alliance itself or for straight up Aon, you're gonna wanna know what to look for in Mars for winds of exchange. And I've gotta tell you. They've got some game winning formulas. They've got some stuff that they are very good at and everybody knew they were pretty strong.

[00:01:00] Maybe not billing them in the predictions in some of the top houses, but in this organized play season, we have seen a lot of Mars on top alongside, especially Unfathomable, Ecuador and Brobnar. Mars is doing a lot of work, so what are they good at? What are some of the things we can trust Mars to do for opening up a deck and looking at a Mars list? What do we want to look out for? What can we expect? We'll be looking at their common and uncommon rarities today so that you know what you're gonna expect In most of these games, they do have a few game shifting rares, but we're not focusing on those today.

Just the stuff that you're gonna see day in, day out. Playing with the house. Mars, right off the bat. Something they do quite well in this set, funnily enough, is removal and holding the board. And there's a couple, uh, synergies going on here across many different cards that help them hold a board in some cool ways.

Creature Control

First off, they have two fantastic removal cards in this set that are at common.[00:02:00] We have ammonia clouds, a reprint from Cloud of the Archons that deals three damage to all creatures. The reason I love ammonia clouds is because you're not getting any chains for putting all that damage out there,

and so the decision is up to you as to whether to go ahead and do that to all creatures. You might be wiping a lot of your own tokens if you have those out. Doing some damage to your other creatures, you might be wiping out your opponent's board. And so in this set, especially if you're in a winds of exchange match, you're gonna be doing a lot of work with ammonia clouds to remove a lot of small creatures, a lot of token creatures.

and in some inter-set play, you're gonna be able to, of course, uh, as with most of these wipes, Get around, taunt, get through elusive and blow up things, things like Eddie's daughters and that variety of threat that you want to get to, uh, that you want to get to right away.

One of the other reasons a board wipe like ammonia clouds in Mars and winds of exchange can be strong is the fact that Mars can bounce back very quickly from [00:03:00] a board wipe. And Because they can reestablish a board state really quickly now we'll get into in a little bit how they replenish that board state really quickly with tokens and what cards help make that a really good play for them. Right. Wiping the board and then getting out, getting out, uh, more Mars creatures, the same turn so that you're not actually ending up zero to zero on creatures in the board.

Another great straight up board wipe and more of a true board wipe since it destroys pretty much everything is kaboom. This common Action card archives all Mars creatures from play to their owner's archives and then destroys all other creatures. Now, you do get a few chains from this, but it's usually totally worth it.

You get to tuck away all of your Mars creatures, put them away for next turn, and then you're good to go. You're good to go. And like with ammonia clouds, of course, you might be able to go ahead and create a few new tokens, uh, out of your hand or from your artifacts, some other abilities, in response to your own board wipe.

Now one [00:04:00] fun trick to be aware of here is when you have a Mars token, of course those get targeted with kaboom, so whatever printed card they are on the other side, they go straight to your archives. So it is one tricky little way to go ahead and get that tokenized creature card that is something printed on the other side that you want over into your archives.

Of course, it takes an extra turn, but some way to do that is better than no way to do that. We have a few honorable mentions, of course, like genetic blast that deals too damage to every creature with the same name. And that's two-sided in case, you know, you both have a board full of prospectors, destroy them all, which, uh, notably lets you destroy just any creature you want to, and then an artifact and an upgrade.

And so it's some really valuable removal all at once. Creature. Upgrade and artifact. It lets you target all of those three different things. Very, very good. And that's just an uncommon, so not impossible to find in a deck that, uh, you want to use or hold in a sealed match if you know they've got a dangerous upgrade or [00:05:00] artifact that's going to come out in a little bit. So they have tools to deal with all sorts of situations. And the great thing about their token generation, like I was mentioning, and then uh, one of their other famous cards we'll mention in a minute, Marc needs aember.

They have a lot of these tools that can synergize with these kinds of wipe. We'll talk about, uh, aember control later. But Mars needs aember, which has every damaged enemy creature capture an aember from its own side. If it's a non Mars creature, ammonia clowns sets that up really well.

Token Swarm Synergies

Having a swarm of tokens to crash into enemy creatures works really well. So there's a lot of synergy there. And if you have a lot of their classic token makers that you get at common and uncommon, you can wipe the board with one of those cards we mentioned earlier and then go ahead and reset your board.

And if you're blowing up something like a Ironyx Vatminder, you're already creating more tokens when you blow up. And perhaps trade one for one, your creature for an enemy creature Iron X vat minder being the three one Mars creature that has play Dis [00:06:00] play slash destroyed. Make a token creature very, very good for getting and keeping aboard.

So when you wipe aboard and if you have a few of the artifacts out, like mark two generator, which is action, make a token, and it comes in ready ion outpost, which is the artifact that lets you put a friendly creature on the bottom of your deck and then make two token creatures.

Even if you just have one of each, you are making three token creatures right off the bat so that you're ending your turn, having wiped the opponent's board with a good delta. The difference between the, the most number of creatures of a single house on your side versus your opponent with a delta of three or or four.

Depending on how many you're making. Imagine. Imagine a situation where you've played ammonia clouds, it wipes the enemy's side. You that finishes off your iron X vat minder, you make a token creature, and then you have mark two generator and ion outpost. You're back right up to four and you can reap for four, fight.

Do whatever you need to next turn. So their token generation is second to none. And one of my absolute favorite cards in [00:07:00] this set is Space Invaders. Space Invaders does this where it lets you tokenize, creatures from your hand. You play space invaders, you reveal any number of creatures from your hand and put them into play as token creatures.

Now, This card is sneakily one of my favorite cards of all time. It's not as flashy. It's a little bit more, it's very cool. It's a little bit more subtle than other high impact cards. But here's the thing. It lets you get non Mars cards out of your hand during a Mars turn. So it's efficiency. It lets you tokenize.

It lets you tokenize knowing exactly what you're tokenizing, which is huge because so much of the risk, the payment of tokenizing, of creating a token creature in winds of exchange is not knowing what you are tokenizing and taking that risk if there's a card in your deck that you still need, right?

So you have, you're filtering your hand, you have perfect knowledge of what your tokenizing. And it scales. If you've managed to draw a whole lot of extra cards or, uh, for instance in a great situation for this is player one, [00:08:00] turn one, you only get to play one card, but you play space invaders and then a couple other creatures that you're like, no, I want these as Mars as my tokens, whatever they are.

Maybe Mars, maybe not. Then you are so far ahead on that first turn. You've just jumped up to what feels like the mid-game. Right. So, so far they are great at controlling the board. They are great at, making token creatures on mass. And then whatever happens with that board, they have a way of taking advantage of Mars needs.

aember as aember control has damaged. And I mean, non Mars creatures capture one from their own side. Psychic Network is an action card that says Play steal one for every friendly, ready, Mars creature. If you are making a lot of these and you start your turn with 3, 4, 5, 6 ready Mars creatures, boom, you are stealing so much. With Mars needs aember and a shout out of course to the rare hypnotic command, which does a similar thing.

Um, but it's for every friendly Mars creature, they don't even have to be ready. An enemy creature captures one from their own side. Uh, [00:09:00] so that is very powerful as well. And you can play it on the same turn that you've made a whole lot of tokens. So shout out. Shout out to that rare. All of this starts to bleed together.

Their board control token generation and their aember control are all the, these different parts of the harmony of Mars singing their song, right, of Mars singing, their song of aember, control of board control, of, of really, um, of really taking advantage of any kind of board situation. There are Mars setups that can, that can do many.

Different things. Right? And the great thing about their creatures with this, with this kind of board control going over into their board presence. Is that they have a lot of creatures that are pretty much a must answer creature. What I mean by a must answer is that when you play this card, it is a threat that your opponent has to figure out how to deal with, or you are going to be gaining a significant advantage, moving you towards your victory condition, mostly [00:10:00] by slowing them down.

Uh, usually in the case of Mars, slowing them down instead of presenting, a threat of a combo. Uh, however, uh, I will mention those combos. I said earlier, if you don't deal with the full Mars board, not only can they reap out, especially if it's not only can they reap out whether it's token creatures or not, they also might be setting up for a Mars needs aember or a psychic network, right?

Which is very aggressive. And forward pushing. Um, in that vein, they can also take advantage of Crystal Hive, a reprint from column the Archons, which is a artifact that says action for the remainder of the turn gain one aember after a creature reaps, which is fantastic and rewards you for having that Mars board.

Must-Answer Creatures In Mars

And they have these must answer creatures, are a few things like, ether Spider, another Reprint seven Power Beast, ether Spider Deals, no Damage when fighting. Each aember that would be added to your opponent's pool is captured by Ether Spider instead. So Ether Spider. It is so powerful because it takes any and all aember that would [00:11:00] enter your opponent's pool.

They're not gaining any aember while Ether Spider is out there. This is fantastically powerful. If you have any way to ward it or put it behind, uh, taunt, then that just gets that much better and demands that they have an answer if they ever want to have aember. Ever again. Right? So ways to protect it are fantastic.

This is a huge tempo. This is a huge tempo play because you're taking their aember, you're not letting them get to that, you know, their gated forge. A key step, right? Where you need to get through three of those to win the game. And you are keeping them from advancing at all while hopefully you're advancing your own game plan and maybe keeping them down.

And as far as removal goes, I'm gonna toss out a fun combo here. There's a card called Exterminate Exterminate, an uncommon action card that reads Play for every friendly Mars creature destroy a non Mars creature with lower power. And in the case of Ether Spider, it can't fight, but it's got seven power and so you can blow up anything up to a six with exterminate, exterminate with ether spider out on the board about that.

Aember Control

A few of the other, [00:12:00] uh, tempo aember controlled cards they have are Nsic Resonator, a soldier, and a Martian. It's a two power, one armor, and it says, for each friendly neighbor, NSIC Resonator has your opponent skis cost plus two. You have, uh, also for Tempo iel, the Iron Captain, a four one Martian and Iron X traded that says, play each friendly Iron X creature captures two. And there's a number of those in the set you can capture. I mean, that scales so quickly. Capturing two onto a four, one is already pretty solid, right up to seven, and you're capturing two to keep them off a key.

But every, every Iron X you have on the board of which there are a few like Iron X vat minder. And the token rebel is Iron X traded. Uh, you are capturing two onto each of those, which can get really big really quickly, and it starts to require a lot of fighting or just a straight up board wipe to go ahead and get all that aember.

I. Back. They also have one of my favorite key cost control cards in Mars. They have mix the tall minded five power martian that says your opponent's keys, cost plus [00:13:00] one for every friendly Mars creature in play. If you're making tokens or you've got a few things to play from hand, you can finely tune exactly what you want their key cost to be.

Because remember, this gives you a strategic choice. If you have a choice in how many you can make, let's say there are, uh, . Threatening to forge at, uh, they have nine aember, so they're threatening to forge for six. If you really want to, you could go ahead and just get three creatures out and mix, of course, triggers itself.

It counts itself and have them forge for the full nine so that that nine aember is quote unquote lost. Right? They still get to forge a key. Um, but if they, for, if you let them forge at six later, then they still have that three aember. Hanging around, uh, or do you push it up to 10 because you want them to go even higher?

Maybe you've have a rant and arrive over in Brobnar that you're holding. Maybe you know you're holding another mix somewhere, or you're gonna drop a nsic resonator next turn, and you can really fine tune exactly how much you want them to spend. So a fantastic card triggers itself. It's already a plus one on a five power body on [00:14:00] its own, and then it's a plus one for everybody else who's out there.

As far as threats go, there's also Mero. The Red Mero is a five power martian that says your opponent's cards cannot leave your archives. And it says, action gain one for each card in your archives. So already some potential high-end aember burst if you're archiving a lot. And that ability, your opponent's cards cannot leave.

Your archives refers to a kind of ability, a theme that we have on a number of different Mars cards where you take your opponent's creatures and put them into your archives. Things like scoop up, which targets a friendly and an enemy non Mars creature and puts them into your archives. Things like suspended animation that puts a damaged enemy creature into your archives.

And whenever they leave, uh, whenever they leave your archives, they go back to your owner's hand. And so Mero, the Red locks all those opponents cards into the archives and is an aember burst card. So Mars has a lot of creatures that do either a whole lot of one thing or give you a lot of [00:15:00] options on them.

Like Mero Mix, a Nisc resonator, or the key cost increaser from earlier, that's plus two per neighbor, which is bonkers, right? They have a lot going on on each card. The average utility of each of their creatures is . Quite high. So as you're building this board, your opponent's gonna want to fight them down.

They'll be damaging their creatures from Mars needs aember. Um, and not only are you presenting a threat of reaping out if you have a lot of Mars, not only are you presenting a threat of high key costs or, uh, keeping, keeping those abducted cards in there with memo rocks, the red, you're also threatening the big payoff cards for a hoard of martians like psychic network or the rare hypnotic command. So all of this just sings together. The really, their creatures are a bit higher power than normal. On average. You also have to partner with a lot of these different cards. You have IX Rebel, a two Power Martian ironic creature that has deployed. So you can put it anywhere in the battle line and on play it readies.

Each of ironic rebels, Mars neighbors. That's less. You use that. [00:16:00] Actionability to gain aember for your archives. On memo rocks, the turn you play it, that's lets you just do a few additional, uh, reaps or fights. Whatever you want to do. It's just speed and it's utility. It's fantastic. It lets you turn on a little bit of a psychic network right then.

Lots of good stuff. So they can take over a board, especially with their tokens when they have a Martian token. They have a lot of strong creatures outside of that. They have good removal and good ways to recover from the removal when it blows up their own. Board along with good aember control. So you're usually going to have aember control along with the ability to flood the board in Mars.

So you're gonna be able to control the board, control the aember, uh, you're gonna be able to get rewarded for holding the board while being able to generate things to hold the board without a whole lot of effort and with some selection in what gets tokenized or perhaps your decks out simply is to do token spam.

Whether it's a Mars token or a non Mars token. And then if that's your goal, great. You're [00:17:00] rocking and rolling. And as long as you've got your token makers and you're starting to reap out, you're archiving your clone homes, right, which make Tucker, which make a token creature and archives. If you have more friendly creatures than enemy creatures, as long as you've got that, you are golden.

Now, last but not least, we're gonna talk through their token creatures to talk about how good each one is. Now here's the thing, including their special one, because they have three standard ones that you can get no matter what, and then one special one that comes from a special rare. All of these are one power except for one, and one power can be fine if it's powerful enough.

To be worth it, which we do see on things like prospector over an Ecuador, right? But these are easy to fight off, especially if you are inset, especially if you're facing Brobnar or something with a lot of damaged pips from different cards. These are relatively easy to get rid of. So with that in mind, we'll go down the list.

Token Creature Overview: Researcher

First up, we're gonna look at researcher. This is a one power Martian scientist, and it has an omni ability reveal [00:18:00] Lamar's card from your hand and archive it. Now, that can be quite good in a lot of decks. If you have something like Legionnaire trainer bringing them in ready, then you have a ready

Creature with an omni ability. Boom, you can go ahead and use that and archive a Mars card from your hand. Now you are revealing it, you're giving information to your opponent, but at least that is their's. You know, they know it, but it's theirs to use that well or not right or theirs to forget if you're in a, a high, uh, a high intensity game.

Right. So a research researcher can be quite good. If you've gone through a lot of your Mars cards, you might only be archiving a small handful off of these, and they are easy to fight off. However, it is a pretty useful ability. One edge case I do have to shout out is that if you're not in Mars, If your active house during any turn is not Mars and you have an enraged researcher, remember that the rules for enraged, that enraged token on your researcher say when it's used, it must fight.

If evil. If your active house is not Mars, that researcher is not able to fight. Therefore, an enraged researcher [00:19:00] can use the OMNI on a non Mars turn. Now, if you're on a Mars turn, guess what? It can fight. So if it's used, it does have to fight. Right. So researcher, uh, pretty good. You're gonna get a little bit of efficiency there.

Not as much as perhaps some of us were dreaming when we had this card spoil a little while back, but pretty solid and I think in some decks that want to set up for big Mars turns and don't care too much if the opponent knows these are gonna do, uh, just fine. However, I haven't seen them taking over a whole lot of games.

Token Creature Overview: Rebel

Rebel is the next one, the next token creature for Mars. Here in winds of exchange in KeyForge, it is a one power martian and ironic. Now remember we have Iel, the iron captain from earlier who has ironic creatures each capture two and enter enters play. We also have the uncommon artifact iron expand, which gives plus one power, plus one armor to all ironic creatures making something like rebel, A two one.

Which is fantastic and it has after reap deal one to a creature. Now I understand why this is one power because you can get an aember [00:20:00] and a damage to send to a creature of your choice, you know, on a reap here with ironic, with . With Rebel, so that is fantastic. It's of course, easy to deal with, easy to fight off.

As we've talked about in previous, uh, playbook episodes, like looking at a senator over in SAR and just going up to two power is so huge for a token survivability that, the ability on Senator being underwhelming really isn't that bad because it's, it's two power. You can still do a lot of good stuff just by having a two power token if your deck wants to use them.

So I like rebel. It's fantastic if you get to reap with them. If you're making a ton of them and you're flooding your opponent with them, that's gonna set you up from ar these aember that's gonna set you up to be sending that ping damage wherever you want to, to pop wards, to deal with, uh, small creatures that are threats, right?

So good. Not gonna be really survivable at one power, but if it is living and you're reaping out with a board of rebels, you are getting to do an awful lot at once because just a reap out threat. [00:21:00] Is huge. And if you're also doing some damage to support your other game plans, induce removal, some removal, that's fantastic.

So a good token, not gonna be a real survivable, but see how much advantage you could take of it, right?

Token Creature Overview: Grunt

The last regular token is grunt. And here's the thing. Here's the thing. Grunt is very good. Grunt is three power martian soldier. That's it. It's blank because three power with no drawbacks on a token is just fantastic.

Uh, this is of course being recorded and released in, uh, late 2023, where towards the end of the organized play season, and I've got to shout out Team Sass who wins a lot of these things. They're, uh, neck and necker, maybe just ahead of team, reap out and getting world's invites and that sort of thing. Team SaaS has been sending a grunt deck called the Ooze that trains all three houses to so many vaults.

I will link it down in the description for you to check out what a top tier grunt deck looks like because grunt, being [00:22:00] able to do grunt spam and I've seen a number of these decks that may be able to perform at the level that ooze, that trains all three houses does. Grunt spam is a good. A good thing to have in a deck where you're throwing out a whole bunch of grunts, you are reaping out like crazy.

Maybe you're stealing with psychic network, right? Grunt is one of the best tokens to survive and then let you execute on a Martian game plan. I love grunt. I have my own grunt flood deck that I don't think is quite near the level of ooze over on Team SaaS, right? However, Grunt decks. Grunt spam is just fun.

Uh, if you have a grunt deck that you think has quite a few token makers and might be pretty cool, and it might be a deck where it says it just wants to make tokens and it doesn't care too much. What? What it tokenizes. Once you have all the pieces, right, try it out. They're a lot of fun. I have fun with them.

And it's just solid because it's survivable, it sticks. So you can fight, you can reap a three power on a fight where you're getting a bunch of them is good. Reaping of course, is very good. If you've got a ton of these right, then you're reaping for whatever you want to. [00:23:00]

Token Creature Overview: Blorb

Lastly, we have blurb. This thing has been a beloved meme for a while.

It is a one power token creature with the Beast trait. It is elusive and it says Blob cannot reap. Hmm. It has the destroyed ability. Return blob hive from your discard pile to your hand. Now Blob Hive is an artifact with a location trait and it reads Omni Destroy a friendly creature. If you do make two blobs, then if you control 10 or more blobs, destroy blob hive and forge a key at no cost.

If you've seen this around already, or you're doing the math right, that means you can destroy a creature, make two blobs, and then if you have 10 or more blurbs, and this is Omni, so any turn. Then the blurb hive destroys itself. You get a KeyForge free quote, unquote, you've made a lot of blurbs, goes to the discard pile, and blurbs have that destroyed ability where if you can destroy a blurb and then return it to your hand and then play it, assuming you are in Mars or you have a way to house cheat, then you can get that blurb hi back out, and maybe threaten that the next turn.

Now, I don't know if any, uh, anybody who [00:24:00] designed a blower hive is listening to the podcast, but I've got to compliment the team on just how balanced this is because forging a key with blower hive is not just a meme. It is possible, but it's also not so strong that this meme combo is taking over tournaments.

Right? But there are some really cool blur five decks. I don't know if I've seen one that's actually ever gonna win a Vault Tour, but I've seen some that are a ton of fun that are really strong. That are really strong for, for what they are. So the blurb cannot reap, which is the major downside, but of course that means it's removing that aember gain towards your wind condition of four J three keys, right?

And replacing it with, well just get a ton of blurbs instead, and then you can repeatedly forge for free. So blurb. Blurb needs a couple synergies to really work because sometimes what happens is you get this blurb hive in a deck and it overwrites the token to make it blurb, and you don't have a lot of synergy with a one power elusive creature that can't reap, that wants to have 10 of it out to get your keys that way. [00:25:00] But when it's in a deck where it really matters, you're gonna see things like harmonic ritual or membership drive in Sanctum, which both reward you for having a harmonic ritual, a lot of the same house and creatures, and then membership drive, which makes a token creature and then gives you one for every token creature. You control. You also want to see things like over in Mars, like we were talking about, psychic network. So when you start to see a lot of the synergies in a list for Blob Hive, then it really starts to sing when you have more ways to reward yourself for blobs than just the blob hive. All that said, forging a key with Blob Hive is really one of the absolute fun, janky joys of wind of exchange.

Outro

It's so much fun. It's so much fun. So that's the Martian playbook. Uh, really, I spent most of the time telling you, oh yeah, they're really good.

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