29. 2023 KeyForge Metagame Discussion with SecondAct

[00:00:00]

Introduction and Guest Introduction

Welcome, dear listener. Yes, this is KeyForge Public Radio. As my lovely wife Megan said, I am Zach Armstrong and I'm so excited because we have a special episode today where we're going to talk about the 2023 election. Metagame, looking at especially Vault Tours and U. S. Nationals, a lot of the events that had articles published by GhostGalaxy on keyforging.

com, and especially things with so skipping the Opens at the World Championship, but things that had Invites to the World Championship at stake. So that's what we're talking about today. And I am very pleased to have with me from The Weekend Key Warriors podcast, Second Act. Second Act, how are you today?

[00:01:00] I'm doing all right, Zach. I gotta tell you, I'm pretty excited to be with you here on the podcast to be talking about this topic today.

Discussion on KeyForge Metagame

I think that the metagame is one of those things that people are really interested in knowing about because, obviously, before you go to a Vault Tour, that's what you're gonna look at.

What do I have to bring to deal with what's out there? So I'm glad that we're getting a chance to talk about it.

Yeah, for sure. And one thing I love about KeyForge is how different the metagame conversation is from so many other card games, where the metagame isn't, you know, what archetype, like, what one relatively specific archetype are you bringing, but you have to talk in even more general terms as far as archetypes, and then even archetypes are going to have lots of variation just based on what a deck.

Actually wants to do.

Exploring the Role of Second Act in KeyForge

Now, the keen eared listener will remember that part of Second Acts history here is sending me to the Shadow Realm in Vault Tour Philadelphia. This man is so [00:02:00] powerful in KeyForge that he only needed a single, well, not even a single aember, he only needed two or three creatures on the board to secure victory against me at at Philadelphia.

Was an epic battle right there, Zach.

That was. It really was. It really was. And before KeyForge even released, I heard that Richard Garfield snuck into this man's room, stuck a USB drive into his ear, and then downloaded the idea for the perfect deck, and that perfect deck was geared to song. And so, that is the kind of KeyForge mind we're working with here today.

Dear listener.

The Impact of Legionary Trainer Scholar in KeyForge

You also, I do credit you, we're going to talk about this early, I do credit you with bringing Legionary Trainer Scholar to a lot of people's attention at Nationals, and especially because you beat Nova with it, and listener, if you're unfamiliar with who Nova is, she is the mastermind behind Decks of KeyForge, the, the ultimate The ultimate deck organization system, as well as SASS, the Synergy Anti [00:03:00] Synergy score.

And there were lots of number changes to Legionary Trainer and Scholar decks once my beloved guest beat Nova, I believe, with, with Legionary Trainer and Scholar. Now, did you take a win, or just scare her?

No, I took a win during the regulation rounds, the double elimination rounds, but she did get her revenge in the semifinals.

Gotcha. Makes sense. Makes sense.

The Role of KeyForge Teams in Tournament Success

So, we have a lot of points to walk through today Second Act has put a lot of these together, I've got a number from our amazing KeyForge Patreon subscribers as well, and something MoosemanDude tossed out when I asked people for questions MoosemanDude wanted to know what percentage of Unique, because KeyForge has some notable teams who place well, and I think that's a healthy thing for the game, like Team Sass and Team Reapout, and when, [00:04:00] when if you're, you know, KeyForge hardcore fan, and you know some of these names, you're going to look at these top cuts, and you're going to keep seeing Big Z and Noble1 of Team Sass, you're going to see EwokJr, who did place third at Worlds, In these top cuts, you're going to see Dave from Reapout as well.

And if you're only looking at the names you know, you start to wonder, you know, okay, can, can, can normal people like me place in the top eight? So I crunched the math on this and I looked at USA Vault Tours. So I didn't look at Shanghai and Florence because those people were likely not getting out to the U.

S. for other Vault Tours and I didn't count nationals. So I just looked at the five USA Vault Tours and. There, it was 82 percent of the players who made TopCut were unique. Some people did repeat, but those top 8s are filled with people who Either like, you might know their name if you're a KeyForge, especially a KeyForge content fan, like [00:05:00] Nathan Starwald of TTR, um, or, or a handful of other people who made Top Cuts or Zok, who got a Top Cut locked in this season, myself, myself as well But there are a lot of people who are either from a local scene, or just like, not just big in the KeyForge internet sphere.

Like, it's very possible to make a KeyForge top cut, at least it was in 2023, I think it'll be true in 2024, with a good deck and some smart plays, and you can, you can muscle your way up into the Team Sass and Reapout land of Top 8, and there's usually any, like, really counting the spots, it's usually at least six spots or not those big teams.

The Influence of Winds of Exchange on the Metagame

And I think one of the reasons why we saw that this year was because of the fact that Winds of Exchange threw such a wrench into the meta that a lot of the traditional decks that had been with us for years suddenly were not as strong as they used to be and you could open a deck and have a legitimate chance to compete [00:06:00] with it.

And in addition to that, Winds of Exchange can be kind of inconsistent at times. So When you might have taken your Winds of Exchange deck and done really well at one Vault Tour, you might have taken it to another Vault Tour and then not done nearly as well with it. So, I think Winds of Exchange caused a lot of that turbulence, maybe, in terms of who was top cutting each time, and I think that was great for the game this year.

I think that if we had come back with a very stale meta like what existed before Winds of Exchange I think we would have been in a very bad situation at that point for the game, for the health of the game.

Agreed. I'm glad Winds of Exchange shook it up as much as it did. And, having played now I didn't attend the World Championship, but, J. K. Hopps of TeamSass generously sent me an unopened Grim Reminders deck.

Anticipating the Impact of Grim Reminders

And I love Winds of Exchange, but having played a few Grim Reminders games, I am very excited for the different kind of variants and more controlled variants of Grim [00:07:00] Reminders.

It was actually refreshing to not make a token creature playing with that because, yeah, turning your cards into tokens definitely can up the variants in some ways. Now, some decks will be consistent with it, of course, but, yeah.

You're always taking a chance.

I find the interesting thing about both of those sets is that both of those sets are going to be randomizing things a lot, because you're going to be flipping cards off the top of your deck a lot in Grim Reminders, just like you were creating token creatures, and then in Winds of Exchange, you needed cards to retrieve those token creatures, and in Grim Reminders, you're going to need cards to dis to retrieve things out of your discard pile.

Or sorry, Grim Reminders. I don't know if I said that right or not.

I think you did.

Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think, so far what I'm seeing in Grim Reminders is that there will be kind of a, a, the floor of how many cards you get that just discard stuff off the top of your deck. That is going to be, like, when you have decks that do that very [00:08:00] little, that's going to be much lower than, like, low token creature decks, even.

And I think there's going to be more tools that I'm seeing it common and uncommon for grabbing things out of your discard pile, like Invigorating Shower. The Untamed action card that's archiving an entire hou er, not archiving, but moving an entire house from your discard pile to your deck. And some other things.

I think there's gonna be There will definitely still be some of that variance from discarding off the top of your deck, but I think it's going to be more manageable. There's going to be more ways to turn it into consistent results than with your, like, average Windrow of Exchange deck. Because there were not many ways to get a token creature back up into your hand.

It was really just Sandhopper, Transporter, Platform, both at Uncommon, and, you know, very little else.

I'm excited about the potential of having the meta shaken up by a new set every six months. I think that will be really good for the game long term.

Yeah, I think it'll keep it fresh, and I think it's [00:09:00] gonna keep, it's gonna keep those top cuts open to, to people who have maybe fewer resources than the big teams, but are playing smart, playing hard with a good deck, and then you can, you can get up there,

which is great. Yeah, for sure. For sure.

The Rise and Fall of Scholar and Trainer

So, our second point here the aforementioned Scholar and Trainer.

So, talk about, talk about the dynamics. So, let me, I'll introduce the, the mechanics in case anybody hasn't played with these. So, Legionary Trainer is a common in house Saurian. It has, it's a two power creature. It has play, make a token creature. It has the Passive text Your friendly token creatures enter play ready.

So what this means is you play, you know, you put this into play so the passive effect is going and then you make a token creature ready. And Scholar, of course, is the Saurian token creature, one power, after Reap, draw a card, so which is great. Because you're drawing a card, you're getting an aember, and it's not killing itself, or, it's not blowing up like Prospector would to draw a card, so it sticks around.

And so when you have Legionary Trainer, you can play it, [00:10:00] already get a Scholar, and then if you have more ways to make Scholars, then you're making a bunch of them, reaping, and drawing a whole lot of cards, which is very good. And KeyForge. So, that's that's the combo, and so, SecondAct, why don't you tell us your experience and your observation with Scholar and Trainer this season, because it kind of appeared around the time you were playing it at the National Championship here in the U.

The Story of Second Act Who Lionizes Helium

S.

It's funny, when I first opened up the deck that I played at the National Championships Second Act Who Lionizes Helium, so it

It's a named deck. It's so great. I love that.

Well, it was funny too because I ordered two of the pledges that got you three namedecks each in the hopes of getting between the six namedecks at least one that was decent that I would, that I would want to play.

And, you know, I. And when I first opened them up, I remember telling my team, like, oh no, these decks are gonna suck, they've all got Saurian in them, and[00:11:00] Then, you know, I started actually playing them. And I think this is actually a really valuable hint for people, is one of the best ways to figure out what you've got is to just play your decks against each other and see what happens.

Oh, absolutely.

That's what I did a lot of, is I did a lot of playing my decks against each other. And as I played these, like, mini solo tournaments, it turned out that that deck was winning an awful lot. And, all my friends threw their decks that were really good against it, and it was beating those decks too. And, I, but I kept looking at it, I kept being like, well, you know, it just seems like it's kind of brittle.

Like, you know, if the combo doesn't come out, it doesn't have a lot to do. So, I was not crazy about it as we were going into Philadelphia, so I went with, you know, my MM standard, you know, the deck you faced in Furnaces and Logos and all that stuff.

They were like, who's got KeyForge's strategy [00:12:00] podcast? Let's get them at the same table.

exactly. But, the more that I played with Helium, the better I started to feel about its consistency.

And finally I was like, you know what, I've got to take a chance here because One of the things that I do is I have a massive pile of proxy decks.

sure.

those proxy decks are all the most well known decks in the world. And so I can practice against all those decks without having to go on TCO and load them up.

I can have my friends play them or whatever locally. And as I was doing all these practice games, It was the only deck I had that could beat Fraud. It was the only deck I had that could beat Z's deck Pink Jacket. Basically, it was the only deck I had that seemed to actually be able to win in these very difficult matchups.

Against Jock, it had a favorable matchup. And I was like, okay, I've got to try this because I think it gives me my best shot to win. So, [00:13:00] I walked into the Nationals event and One of the things I was really worried about were decks with a lot of C.

Hmm. Yeah, a lot of creature control. Yeah.

Exactly.

Yep.

And one of the things that happened was, well, the first deck I ended up playing against was George Cagle playing Gasoline.

Oh, he brought, he brought Gasoline Maximiliano

for for anybody who wasn't around in 2019 at this point. Wow, that's gonna be That's gonna be five years ago real quickly here. This deck won two Vault Tours, both piloted by George Cagle, and George is fantastic on Reapout, I believe. George is a fantastic player, fantastic guy.

I've interviewed him before. I believe it has library access and bait and switch, right? Or maybe it

No, I don't think it has Shadows, actually.

No, yeah, it has Library Access. Oh, because it's a Lands deck. It's Library Access to Pentheseed.

Right.

[00:14:00] Yep, and so this deck won a Vault Tour, and then one of the main cards, Library Access, was nerfed.

And then he won another Vault Tour after that card was nerfed through an Arata. So it's a very famous deck. As far as, as far as the KeyForge competitive scene, it's concerned one of the only decks to pull off a two vault tour feat.

But I will tell you that one of the things that was a huge advantage for me walking into that game was George had no idea what my deck was trying to do, and I knew exactly what his deck was trying to do with Winds of Exchange being new and George not having been to a tournament with it yet, and me having played the proxy that I have of gasoline a zillion times Like, I knew exactly what I needed to hold in order to deal with things, and then Helium just went off and won the game. I ended up in the next couple games against people who had a lot of C, and I got very lucky in a couple of those [00:15:00] matches for how people matched up into me.

Where I had one opponent who made a mistake fighting into something with Spartasaur on the board and wiped his entire board.

Oh, yep. Spartasaur. Yep. Spartasaur is fantastic.

And, so, and then of course I you know, was able to end up against Nova, and Helium just exploded out of the gate, and it was a really interesting play where, very early in the game, where Nova had an Axiom, which, you know, you have to have a board sweep against a Scholar trainer deck. Because if that goes off, it's really the only way to get rid of them.

And what I always say with the Scholar Trainer decks is if they get the first turn off, that's problematic, but it can be dealt with. If they get to reap them again, you're usually done.

Wow, okay.

So, it's important [00:16:00] to, if you're facing a Scholar Trainer deck, to hold your board sweeps.

Right. For sure.

But, that was still new enough into the meta at that point and Nova hadn't encountered it yet, so she discarded her Axiom. And, uh, yeah, she did not make that same mistake the second time that we played.

right. Yeah, Nova, famously sharp and learning from the Regulation Rounds loss for the Top Cut rematch later, for sure. And you made a note here that at the World Championship, so you brought Second Act Who Lionizes Helium, your name deck that was pulling all this off, to, and it was about the middle of the season, the National Championship in the U.

S. at Indianapolis. And then fast forward, fast forward to the world championship and let's see, Scholar and Trainer, out of the top four decks in Archon, one of [00:17:00] them was a Scholar Trainer deck. And, I think I brought it up, and if, yeah, it's three Legionary Trainers, which is plenty. And then two Inspiring Orations, and four of the uninitiated, that's Exalts a friendly creature, make a token creature for each aember on that creature. So, oh, and Curiosaurus, which I don't know how this deck plays, but That might be, that might be pretty important.

Curiosaurus is a really interesting addition to the deck. Obviously, because it's a legacy, it's not something that you would normally see in a Trainer Scholar deck.

And it's such a complicated card to play with.

The card, the card that I feel is probably the most important card to have in a Trainer Scholar deck and Helium doesn't have it and that's unfortunate but pax Soriana is amazing in a Trainer Scholar deck.

Yeah, so Pax Sauriana is an action card that reads, Play Ward all creatures. So that's friendly and enemy creatures. Yeah, and so is that is, is the Pax [00:18:00] Oriana important for the reason of keeping those scholars alive for that that kind of second turn to keep the momentum going like you mentioned earlier?

Exactly, if you can get down a, a bunch of scholars and then you can get down a Pax Soriana so that they can then reap again the next turn. By that point you're gonna have half your deck in hand and whatever your outs are you're going to have, you're gonna be able to get to them. In Helium the outs are the befuddles, But in other decks I'm sure they have different ways of doing it.

Maybe they have corner of the market, maybe they have other things. But no matter what it is, being able to reap the scholars a second time will get you to all the tools that you need.

Yep, for sure, for sure. So we had one deck with that game plan in the top four in Archon, and then over in Alliance, where people just have to look for multiples of a common for their Saurian pod, out of the [00:19:00] top four, Two of those decks, so a full half of the top four, were Scholar trainer builds at that point.

And I believe, if I recall correctly, they were a significant part of the field, with Legionary Trainer being the second most popular card in the entire Alliance World Championship by count, behind only Befuddle, I think.

I believe that is correct. I heard a story, I don't, I wasn't there, so I can't verify it, but I heard a story that during the keynote speech they were talking about Alliance. There were many European players who were saying ban Scholar Trainer.

Oh, wow, sure. I could see that. I see the value in, you know, giving And, not banning too quickly, if just to see where the meta settles, but yes, Legionary Trainer and Scholar showed up yeah, showed up in force, in force at the World Championship for, for sure, [00:20:00] for sure. sO that was, that was a fun moment a fun throughline in the In, in the 2023 scene with what we know of Grim Reminders, do you think Scholar, Trainer what kind of threat will it continue to be with what we know of Grim Reminders?

And I know this is wild conjecture at this point.

Well, Grim Reminder does, Grim Reminders does seem to have some pretty good board sweep cards. And board sweep cards are going to be a big problem for Trainer Scholar. That said, I think it's still going to continue to be a thing because I think it's so fast that it can win before you can find your answers.

Mm.

Now, it also sometimes just stalls out. Maybe your scholars get, maybe your trainers get tokenized or maybe the cards just come out wrong and it, and it just doesn't work. Get the fuel it needs in order to keep producing the scholars.

The Importance of Deck Selection and Meta Calls

So, these things happen, but a good trainer scholar deck I [00:21:00] think is going to remain part of the meta going forward.

Yeah. And what I, I agree, especially because it's made of you have to find another, a pod with a scholar in it, and then a pod with really at least two, preferably more Legionary trainers, and even an archon, that's just getting a few commons, so if you just, if you're, if you have a normal sized collection, and by, I guess by normal I mean if you're getting up into like 50 decks per set at least, or up to 70 or 100, like you, you have a likelihood of finding finding a deck that can, that can at least do this so you can check it out, like it's it's gonna be, it's gonna be a bit easier to find this kind of thing than it would be You know, some corner of the market shenanigans that are rare over in Ekwidon, or stuff like that.

So, it being at Common, I'll keep it up, I think.

yeah, I will say this though. I have, besides Helium, I have another trainer scholar deck that has the ability to [00:22:00] fire off in Saurians. It's got a very good Saurian pod, but the other two houses aren't very good. And the thing that really makes it work for Helium is that the other two houses provide the support that you need for it.

And for Helium the fact that it has three befuddles and an abyssal site in Unfathomable and the fact that it has board sweeps and artifact control and a little bit of amber control in Mars really helps to balance out the trainer scholars.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's a lot of good support. Yeah, the Befuddles and Abyssal Sight especially. Those are the those are some of the, I think Befuddle was the number one common in Alliance decks, at least, at Worlds. So, that card is, that card is very good.

The Decline of Infurnace in the Meta

So, speaking, speaking of WoW more generally I'm gonna read second deck pulled up, pulled up a number of a couple of these numbers and I'm gonna read him and ask him his own question. [00:23:00] So, Vault Tour Vegas, Vault Tour Vegas, the field was about 61 percent Winds of Exchange with 5 in the top 8. Dallas was 60%, 62 percent wins of exchange in the field with six in the top eight, including the winner, and then Seattle Vault Tour was about half with five in the top eight, but with Worlds, we moved to, oh, and I assume this is, is this Archon, I assume?

This is all archon,

Yeah, this is all Archon, yep. So, and then Worlds, the Archon World Championship with 32 players was only about a third Winds of Exchange and it got two up in the top four. So, so John, what are your thoughts on does this mean that later Vault Tours were, like, playing too much WoW? Was it just that's what people were bringing because they, they They think they could Hyrule, or has the meta just not caught up to answering Winds of Exchange decks yet?

I'm inclined to think that Winds of Exchange is just [00:24:00] simply stronger than other sets. I think that you can have some very high end Coda stuff and high end AOA stuff and high end other sets. That can be very good and you're always going to have those decks in there. You know, you're always going to have your pink frauds that are going to be competitive.

However, I'm inclined to think that Winds of Exchange is going to continue to dominate the meta. And I guess part of my thinking for that is that Winds of Exchange had all that dominance on a very small fraction of decks opened. If you look at the actual numbers on Archon Arcana, Um, Winds of Exchange had probably about half the number of decks opened that DT did.

And there were a lot of people who claimed for a long time that, well, if DT just had as many decks opened as Coda did, then it would be just as competitive as Coda. Which may or may not be true. But Winds of Exchange was more competitive than Coda on [00:25:00] a very, very, very small fraction of Coda's decks.

That is a very good point because over half, or equal to half perhaps of Call of the Archons top cuts were a single deck. It was, it was pink fraud, but on Team Sass, going from, going from competition to competition, making top cuts. So like, it, it, that one deck was at least half of Call of the Archons top cuts, and we saw all sorts of wins of exchange.

All sorts of winds of exchange in the top cuts. Now, there's a couple common denominators. There's a lot of Mars, a lot of Ekwidon, a lot, I think, Unfathomable. If I recall correctly, Unfathomable is actually the most consistent house in top cuts simply for its, its unparalleled unparalleled control at common that you can get a bunch of. But I, I agree that that's a very good point, and with, gosh, only half of Dark Tidings, even, and Dark Tidings came out, it had delays, it came out [00:26:00] mid pandemic, it was pretty janky, and with, with half of the registrations of, of Dark Tidings, if WoE was having this kind of performance, I think, I think that pretty definitively speaks to power level, like you said.

I'd agree with that.

Yeah. Now Murph had a very good question and I would love to answer that, so I'll let you get to introducing it.

Yeah, yeah. So, Murph Murph, the master of good questions here. Murph asks, so, WoW had a lot of prevalence and top cut in finals in Alliance and Archon, but a pretty big lack of finals conversion, as in a lot of WoW was showing up in. Top 8s, but not actually taking home a lot of Vault Tours, because we saw, you know, a Vault Tour and a Nationals win from Jox from Nova, as we mentioned earlier we saw we saw Team Reapout's Miss Minity piloted by Flaming Hobo, And that's a Pinkfraud esque deck.

It's got a couple differences, but it's Call of the Archons with a [00:27:00] similar game plan. So these are all the things that actually won while Winds of Exchange was filling the ranks of the top cut, but not exactly converting. So what are your thoughts on the reason things didn't convert for those Wo decks?

Mm hmm.

think Wings of Extinction did have one winning deck, which was Faith. I don't remember which tournament that was, Dallas maybe? But I think that, in general, the reason why you didn't see more Winds of Exchange conversions is just because when you get up into the top 8, it really is a crapshoot.

You look at a deck like Pinkfraud as an example, and Pinkfraud did not have a great record this year. It made a lot of top 8s, but it didn't go a lot further than that. And was that because of the fact that Pinkfraud is not a great deck, or because of the fact that Dr. Sheep is not a great pilot? No, neither of those things is true.

It's a great deck, and Sheep is a great pilot. The Reason is because it just ran into fluky matchups along the way, or it had bad draws, and luck is very much a [00:28:00] part of KeyForge. And so, you're going to have some times when, you know, you expect a matchup to go a certain way and it goes another way, or you just have a deck that runs into an impossible matchup and it loses along the way.

And so, you just never know exactly what's going to happen, and I think that happened to Winds of Exchange a lot this year. I think you could replay the second half of the season and have Winds of Exchange win every Vault Tour.

Mm.

With the same top eights. It's, it's just a matter of how, how the cards fall and how the matchups fall.

Yeah. And you were right in your estimation that it was the Dallas Archon Tournament won by Faith B. Traptogram, the center piloted by none other than KeyForge Public Radio's very own Patreon Sith Magmar, a. k. a. Corey Hurtado of Team Reapout. That was a pretty big pretty big event for Team Reapout, taking both the Archon and Alliance tournament tournament champions home there, which was pretty

So, I did want to point something out regarding that deck, by the way.

Yeah!

And regarding the idea [00:29:00] of metacalls in general. So, Faith's success and the expectation that I would see Faith or a very similar deck at Vegas was one of the reasons why I switched off of Helium for Vegas and switched to Mira, one of my AOA decks,

Hmm, okay.

because Mira had an almost perfect chance of beating Faith because Mira had one key card that Faith was just destroyed by, which was Snecklifter, because

Oh,

Faith is dependent upon three Sandhoppers, and so if you have a Snecklifter, you play Snecklifter, you grab the first Sandhopper, you Sandhopper the Snecklifter, grab the second one, Sandhopper, grab the third one, and then Sand, and then do it again and grab whatever else you want.

That's right. So, for so, Sandtopper, if, if, listener, if you've been playing Winds of Exchange, that's the artifact with an action, return a friendly creature to its owner's hand. If you do, you may play a non Ekwidon creature from your hand, and Snecklifter is a rare[00:30:00] Shadows creature that says, play, take control of an enemy artifact, if it does not belong to one of your three houses, it now belongs to house Shadows.

And so the combo that Psychonact just walked us through there, is where Snecklifter, you play Sneckdiffler, Snecklifter, you steal a Sandhopper, and Faith has three of them. You steal a Sandhopper, it's now Shadows, because you don't have Ekwidon in your deck, because Sneklifter and Ekwidon don't exist together, at all, and then you action the Sandhopper to bounce Sneklifter from your hand, and now you can play a non Ekwidon creature, which you're just gonna pick Sneklifter again to go grab the other Sandhoppers.

And then you just, you take all of the Sandhoppers, and then whatever else you want. At the end. So yeah, that is a, that is a, a, a big, a big matchup deciding card right there in Snecklifter.

Now, the lesson though that I learned from that was that if you make your metacall about, Trying to face a particular deck, or even thinking that other people are going to copy that deck. There's a good [00:31:00] chance that it works out poorly for you. And it worked out very poorly for me. In a, in a tremendous feat of irony, the two decks that I lost to at Vegas, the first deck that I lost to was a Trainer Scholar deck.

You know, like the Trainer Scholar deck that I chose not to play. And then the second deck I lost to was the very strong Trainer Scholar deck that I chose not to play

Oh, you,

I was knocked out by my own named deck.

Oh my gosh. So was this a teammate piloting it, I

It was in fact the teammate piloting. He actually, we attended two Vault Tours together this season and he knocked me out of both of them.

Wow, amazing. And the second time with Ekwid's your name on it.

Yes.

Yeah, I do think that is generally It is a rare case where it is a smart decision to start to tech against one specific deck just because the chances, the chances that [00:32:00] they just hit a bad matchup earlier and you never face them anyways are pretty good.

I think where you start to, where you start to practice is where if you're pretty sure you can get top cut and you know who else is attending and what they might be playing, like if you think you're going to see Jok or Ooze that trains all three houses and You say, okay, well, let me practice that matchup.

If I know I can make it to top eight. Because, side note, dear listener, like, if, if you can make it to a top eight, count, like, count yourself, like, give yourself a big W, like, buy all the gold stickers, get yourself a milkshake at Chick fil A. Like, that's, that's a big accomplishment, to, like, make that top eight.

And, like, yes, you wanna, if you wanna get real serious, you can practice those matchups, but it's gonna be tough to actually move off of a really good deck, just because you think, you know. There's gonna be one sweet trick that will take out one other specific deck in, in the field, in the field there.

Cause you might have to stare down three Sandhoppers and you might just have to be better [00:33:00] than Sith of Agmar playing a deck with three Sandhoppers and a whole lot of bonus icons. Excellent. So, we're gonna talk about we're gonna talk about a historical, a historical boogeyman. Now, and so, mass, a little bit of context, mass mutation came out right, earlier in the pandemic, towards the start of the pandemic, and Infurnace had been around since Worlds Collide, and mass mutation kind of supercharged it.

And Furnace, which has play, purge up to two cards from a discard pile. Your opponent loses amber equal to the total number of amber bonus icons on the purged cards. So, this, this card was the absolute boogeyman of all leagues, online leagues, over the pandemic. Everybody was was hating on this card or talking about how to play this card best or or to play around it if if possible Which I mean in my experience was just playing Infurnace and purging my own pips before before my opponent could [00:34:00] so but what what happened to Infurnace in The meta this year and and at worlds specifically second act you looked this up and I thought this was really interesting

Yeah, I thought it was very interesting too. So if you look at the early Vault Tours at Philadelphia, it's the most common card. It, at

you and I both contributed to that

yes.

Yep

At Nationals, it was the second most common card. At Roseville, it was the most common card. And then, there, I really feel like there was a, even though Roseville and Seattle were very close to each other, I feel like there was a big meta shift that occurred from Roseville to Seattle, and a lot of the statistics seem to kind of bear that out.

Where Seattle was where woe started surging. And where a lot of the more traditional stuff started falling off. And so, Infurnace drops to 6th at Seattle. And then by the time you get to Dallas and Vegas, it doesn't even show up at all in the top cards.

[00:35:00] Wow. Okay. I had, I had not tracked that pattern yet. That's really insightful. So what what are your thoughts on why that was? I have a few thoughts from my experience with WoW, but why do you think Infurnace dropped off so sharply? Hmm.

I think a lot of it was because of the fact that it just didn't mash up well into a lot of Wo decks. Because a lot of Wo decks were not depending upon Their ability to use pips to generate amber. I mean, yes, you had the occasional Cursed Relic deck and something like that that might have a lot of pips in it.

But for the most part, most of the decks that we were seeing were decks that were using creatures in one way or the other to generate amber. Like either the Scholar decks or maybe a deck with something like, I'm trying to think of the name of the card, the one that doubles key

Crystal Hive. Oh, Double Keys.

Excuse me. Heavy

Subsidies.

Heavy Subsidies, right.

So, you have all these other ways that [00:36:00] decks can now use reaping, and so a lot of decks are now suddenly reaping again, and Infurnace does not match up well into reaps.

No. No. And yeah, and a side note there, shout out to Big Z of Team Zas who bought his deck Pink Jacket because it generated a ton of amber off of Song of the Wild and Ghost Talk and some other non pip stuff. And he won a lot with that deck, but had bad matchups into Woe, great matchups into Infurnace for exactly that reason.

So, shout out to Big Z for that smart there.

And I think that that deck had Infurnace in it as well, if I remember.

Oh yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. Most of the best mass mutation decks do.

Yeah, so, and then if you look at it, if you look at the international events, Infurnace is in first place at the Florence Vault Tour, it's in fourth place at Shanghai, and it [00:37:00] was seventh at Worlds, so Worlds kind of, Worlds in many ways was kind of like Seattle, where you were seeing kind of the The metas come together.

Yeah. Oh yeah, the metas of everybody traveling in from places where perhaps Infurnace had been a bit stronger.

Where Infurnace had been stronger and where WoE wasn't dominating the meta quite as much yet. There seems to be There certainly was in the US and I think there was internationally too, and I also and I see this on TCO quite a bit where back when International players were first getting their Winds of Exchange, and I didn't see a lot of them playing Winds of Exchange on TCO.

But now, if I go in to face an international player, they're almost certainly playing Winds of Exchange. I know, walking into that matchup, there's probably a good chance I'm going to be facing Winds of Exchange. And so, like, right now on TCO, I'm playing a lot of my anti Winds of Exchange decks, because that's a lot of what the [00:38:00] TCO meta is at the moment.

So, you definitely see this meta shift over time.

For sure. For sure.

Meta Shifts and Game Mechanics: Wards

Speaking of meta shifts, you, you put on to our notes here a, a, some notes on a, on a, on a a, a game token, a game mechanic that has been around since Worlds Collide, but kind of, mostly evaporated here in Winds of Exchange, and it's, it's wards. There are not a whole lot of wards.

in, in Winds of Exchange, and I mean, famously we've mentioned Pax Soriana, which wards everything on the board. So, hilariously, if you have that card, you still need as many ward tokens as you've ever needed. Because you're warding every creature, every creature out there. So, what you, you have some, tell me your thoughts on the dynamics of wards being more, or being less prevalent here in, in Winds of Exchange.

The Evolution of Wards in KeyForge

Well, I think we've seen a gradual drop in [00:39:00] wards over time, because wards obviously came in in Worlds Collide, and they were everywhere in Worlds Collide, and there were some ridiculously strong cards that would ward things I think about cards like Medic Ingram, or Hologramophone,

power, yeah.

Power,

Yeah, my goodness.

Yeah. Or Imperium. Imperium was ridiculous. So there are all these cards that give you wards that are very strong cards and I think that Wards remained a big part of the meta.

Impact of Wards on Different Sets

Like, a lot of those cards went away. Ancient Power was still there as we went into Mass Mutation, but most of the rest of those cards went away.

We did get Defense Initiative and a few other things that granted wards. But wards definitely fell off a bit in Mass Mutation. And then fell off a little bit more in Dark Tidings. Until, in Winds of Exchange, there's Pax Soriana. There's Cultist. [00:40:00] And

sure.

I'm not sure if there's, I'm not sure what else there is that wards.

There might be other things that ward, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.

Predictions for Wards in Grim Reminders

So, I think that my guess is that we're going to see Grim Reminders. I haven't looked at it in detail, but my guess is that Grim Reminders probably stays somewhere around low levels of wards. Because ward is such a powerful mechanic that when you spread it out all over the place like it was in Worlds Collide, it can Make certain deck archetypes very, very difficult to fight against.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

The Power of Wards in House Saurian

It was, it was one of the sources of people really despising House Saurian when they came out in in Worlds Collide, where they had so many wards on creatures that were already big and already had armor, and it was just so [00:41:00] hard to deal with them because if you had wards on everything, you need to be able to remove them twice, whether through fighting, Or at least damage them and then remove them, which took which took at least two cards and the right cards to get it all, to get it all laid out.

So yeah, it's been a very powerful mechanic, a very powerful mechanic in the past. In the past.

Potential of Worlds Collide Decks in 2024

Do you think, do you think there's going to be some Worlds Collide decks that do some heavy warding that might be worth looking at going into 2024?

I mean, I think what we've seen is that there are the occasional Worlds Collide deck that is still relevant to the meta. Jacques is obviously a Worlds Collide deck, so that deck has been very successful in the current meta. So, I do think that the right Worlds Collide deck can still do a lot of damage, but Most of the World's Collide decks just didn't seem to really fire in the meta this year.

The Importance of Creature Control

And I think a lot of that comes [00:42:00] down to the fact that going against a, uh, Winds of Exchange deck, one of the things you really need to have is you need to have creature control. And World's Collide is famously bad at creature control.

The Paradox of Creature Control in Worlds Collide

Which is ironic, because I used to listen to the Captain's Compod podcast quite a bit, and he would do great analyses of what each set was good at.

And it turns out the set that has the most creature control cards is Worlds Collide.

Really?

Really. According to what his podcast said, and I'll trust him on it. However a lot of those creature control cards are not super effective.

Yeah,

Yeah, that makes sense. Often very situational as well.

exactly. Like a lot of the Bane cards, for example.

Oh, gosh. Yeah, those were, those were Listener, if you didn't have to suffer through that cycle, it was simply dis action cards with no pip [00:43:00] that would pick a trait. And I think there was a set of I don't know how many. I didn't Care to memorize that.

But it would just they would just have a trait and it would be like human's bane or dinosaur's bane and it would just be play, destroy a, you know, human creature, dinosaur creature, thief creature. They were famously

on them.

Oh, did they have a pip? Well, that's a small mercy.

yeah.

at least.

But most of the time they would target your own creatures before they would target your opponent's creatures.

Yeah. Yeah. They could have at least put, like, If they put, if they turned them into a possibly, you know, a possibly blow up your own stuff like two or three pip amper card, that could have been interesting, at least. But, yeah. Yeah, yeah, Ward is definitely very powerful and, and, Pax, yeah, Pax Oriana I think proves that out in the right deck, because there's plenty of decks that, that can clear the board a bit and then end Saurian and then play that Pax [00:44:00] Oriana,

Exactly. And that can be very difficult to deal with.

The Eternal Question of Artifact Control

Our next point is one of the eternal, the eternal questions of KeyForge is the Artifact Control question in Nova's SASS ratings, it's called R, so for, for Artifact Control, and having hard Artifact Control means you're actually blowing up or otherwise, you know, absolutely getting rid of an opponent's Artifact, because if you just take control of it, it might have a passive effect that is, is still going to be, is still going to be in play.

And the question historically has been, do you have to have hard artifact control in your deck to actually really blow stuff up? Do you need that to be successful?

The Impact of Artifact Control in Major Tournaments

And second act, I think you, you've listed at a couple of the, the big tournaments here, Worlds, and a few others, what the decks and some of the top cuts had here.

Do you want to walk us through that?

Right, and I looked at mostly later in the season kind of when the meta [00:45:00] had settled down a little bit.

That's good,

and so if you look at worlds and the top four, in the top four worlds you had Gare and that was the world championship deck. And it did have a Poltergeist in it. So, there's an argument for having hard artifact control.

Symbol, the second place deck, had Election, which I don't know if you consider that to be hard artifact control or

it, it, I think, well, so, I would say on a strict definition, election is for, so for the uninitiated, I have it up here, election, election is an artifact, it's wacky, it says each creature gains after reap, put a yay or nay counter on election, then it has two other two other lines of text, if election has six yay counters on it, destroy, destroy.

Destroy. Destroy. It and each creature. So it blows itself and each creature up if there's six EA counters on it. If election has six nay counters on it, destroy each [00:46:00] artifact. And so, I think by a strict definition it is hard artifact control because it destroys the artifacts fully. It's just typically very difficult to get out and then have total control over, but I can see how it perhaps and I would have to see the deck in action to see if it does this regularly, if it can pull off playing legionary trainer into scholar and then getting six reaps in a turn, you can reliably pick, you know, pick the result of election itself, since all creatures are gaining that, that voting ability.

Yeah, and it is entirely possible that That that is actually workable in that deck. Now, I think most of the time it's not reliable hard artifact control, but because of the Trainer Scholar, it might work there.

Yep.

The other two decks that were in the top four worlds, they had no hard artifact control. If you go to Vegas, Vegas was [00:47:00] I was particularly bereft of Hard Artifact Control.

The deck, Wimpy that my teammate was playing, um, had an uncommon currency in it, which isn't even really Hard Artifact Control it's just Artifact Stealing. And that was the closest thing there was to Hard Artifact Control in the entire top eight.

That's fascinating.

That's

there was none there.

Yep.

At Dallas, there was another uncommon currency in Drawphantom, but then the big hard artifact control card was Fraud has its EMP Blast in there, and so that was the major artifact control card in the top eight.

And EMP Blast is certainly hard artifact control.

Yep. Yep. Blows up all artifacts.

And at Seattle, um, the deck Chandra that JDG was playing there had Animator in it. Which, you could kind of consider hard artifact control because Animator is a Logos artifact that turns [00:48:00] artifacts into three power creatures. So you could theoretically turn your opponent's artifact into a creature and kill it that way.

It's kind of a really inefficient form of artifact control. There, there was a, exactly, there was a deck called Solid Bite that had an auction off. So that was definitely actual hard artifact control. And then there was nothing else.

Right.

And there was a little bit more in the top eight at Florence Because Geir was there again, it also won that.

There was a deck called Red that had a double Borrow in there. So, that isn't really hard Artifact Control, but it's some Artifact Steal. And then, the best Artifact Control deck, other than maybe Fraud, that we saw, a deck called Griffith had double Reclaimed in there. Which was also, I believe there was a double Reclaimed in Pinkjacket as well, when that was showing up early in the season.

Mm.

But the important takeaway here is that there was not a lot of artifact control in these top eights. And [00:49:00] I'm always wondering about do you need hard artifact control or not.

The Future of Artifact Control in Grim Reminders

And I look at a lot of the artifacts that are coming out as sets go on here. And the artifacts just seem to get stronger and stronger.

You look at the curse cards that are coming up in Grim Reminders and some of them could really mess you up.

Yes. They're huge.

And then, you look at just some of the very strong artifacts that exist in Winds of Exchange, and of course Ettin's Jar is still out there, Autoencoder is still out there. So, I oftentimes do feel like if I'm, if I am ever going to purchase a deck on the secondary market, it's going to have hard artifact control.

I will not purchase a secondary market deck without hard artifact control.

Yeah.

But if I open a deck and it's really good, will I not play it because it has hard artifact control? It's a hard question to answer.

Sure. Yeah, and I think [00:50:00] people, people are having success, people are having success with without it, obviously, by by your, your data. I mean, some people do have it, right? And the question, the question is, if you pack hard artifact control in your deck, And then you're not using it to blow up artifacts if there's not a lot of artifacts you need to blow up on the other side.

Then is it useless? Is it dead weight? And the other, the other dynamic about this question is that you, you talk about this is like, is it important? Is it not? But especially in Archon, where like if a strong, if a deck is strong, then the deck is strong. The deck might simply not have artifact control.

And the question The question isn't, can I put it in there or not, because it's Archon, so you can't. The question is the question is, do I go ahead and risk playing this, and can I, do I auto lose if particular artifacts show up across from me? Because, I mean, even something like auto encoder, something like auto [00:51:00] encoder is speed for the deck that plays it, so if your deck is very good, maybe you can still outspeed an autoencoder deck.

I think one of the biggest questions becomes with can you still beat a deck that plays a really game working artifact that exerts control over you? Like, Quixelstone, Heart of the Forest, or Eaton's Jar. Like, can you Can you beat those or do you need to beat those with artifact control that would actually blow them up so that you can get across the finish line?

Or do you just lose when those land across the table? And that was a big question in Alliance this season with and I don't remember if he originated it, I have the impression he did, but like Aviators, Heart of the Forest, Jenka archetype that was performing very well that was, I think won a few things, got to the top table at Dallas and so it's, it's a big dynamic to consider and you can, you can win without it but it's, it's often a worry in the back of, in the back of an [00:52:00] archon's mind.

So, a couple thoughts there. First of all, I do recommend to listen to Aviator's podcast about how he put that deck together. It's a fascinating podcast. I can't think of the name of the podcast right

Take That Smarty Pants is what it

That's Yeah, and he has a great episode about how he put that deck together that he was so successful with, so I do recommend that.

The other thing I'll say is that some of the decks that have done the best with artifact control, and there's two decks that jump to mind here for me. The aforementioned Pink Jacket is one of them, and then X Ray Creator's deck Jagahurt is another one. What both of those decks have in common is that not only are they packing Hard Artifact Control, but that Hard Artifact Control works both offensively and defensively for them.

So, they can use it defensively in order to just simply take out an opposing artifact that's a real problem. But, in the case of Jaggerhurt, that deck has a Reclaim by [00:53:00] Nature, and it has a Fangtooth Cavern that has three amber pips on it. So, what it can do is it can play that Fangtooth Cavern, get three amber, and then immediately reclaim it for another three amber plus the one on Reclaimed.

So you get seven amber from those two cards. That's a key right there. And then Pinkjacket had something very similar to that, where it had an artifact that had, I think, maybe two amber and a draw on it with a reclaim that you could immediately reclaim and get a bunch of amber and some draws off of it.

So Having hard artifact control that you can use both offensively and defensively like that is obviously the best of all possible worlds, but again, in Archon, you know, you, beggars can't be choosers.

That's right. That's right. And I think in Winds of Exchange, Auction Off occupies a similar slot. Not quite as high of a ceiling, but with Auction Off you can, you purge an artifact and then its controller gains one. [00:54:00] And so, Even if there's not artifacts you want to or need to target across the board, you can get a little bit of extra amber and if that artifact you're purging really isn't crucial to your game plan or your matchup, you can purge it and then you are well, you'd be, you, you wouldn't be redrawing that artifact anyways, but you at least take it, take it out of the game for whatever that's worth.

For whatever that's worth. Yep.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I'm, I'm curious to see what will happen in Grim Reminders when there's a couple of cards that will allow you to bring purged cards back into the game.

Yeah. Yeah, that's gonna get very interesting, and I'll have to see how I feel about that as we play with those kinds of decks. Traipsing back into the realm of bringing purged cards back. So, yeah. So, Two more, two more points here.

Reflections on Deck Ascension, Set Rotation, and No Restrictions

One one I might even dedicate a whole episode to, to [00:55:00] later, but Osram Talaika from the KPR Patreon crew asks, upon reflection of the season, what are the merits of deck ascension versus set rotation versus no restrictions?

I'll give a little context here. So deck ascension is an idea that FFG put forward around the launch of the that if a deck did well enough, earned enough. points you know, won, you know, won the right tournaments, it could ascend, really receive, really, it's an honor, it's a big win for the deck to ascend, and then it wouldn't be playable in official tournaments, because it has, it has ascended, and it's so good, and the idea is that it, if the deck is really good in beating everybody else, it takes the deck out of rotation as a reward to honor it, and also to free up you know, free up the meta a little bit, however much you can do that with a single deck.

Now, set rotation is something traditional in card games where after a point, old sets are no longer legal to play in these [00:56:00] tournaments. You just stick with new sets. And that is a traditional thing in card games, and KeyForge at first said they wouldn't, it is back on the table, it's a possibility with Ghost Galaxy they haven't decided whether or not they will do it, and then no restrictions of course is just, it's always a free for all to see, to see where, where things go.

So, Second Act, what have, what have been your feelings especially on Deck Ascension, looking at the 2023, the, the 2023 season?

Well, I have to say that it's a more complicated question than it was during the FFG days, right? Because during the FFG days, the prizes were amber shards. And I loved amber shards, but getting amber shards as prizes is not the same thing as cash prizes.

That's very true.

once you've introduced cash prizes, now it's suddenly much more of a problem to have a very successful deck ascend for that player, right?

That also depends upon what [00:57:00] happens when that deck costs a lot of money to acquire.

Yeah.

like, obviously the most famous example of this would be Fraud. Let's say that Pink Fraud were to win a tournament and were forced to ascend and couldn't be played anymore. The investment that was put into that deck might not even be gotten back on that.

But

sure. I do know with Pinkfraud in particular, Sheep had messaged me about this. That was, they obtained that deck really as a collector's item, and it is very good, but they didn't specifically buy it looking for a return on winnings. But as far as the math goes, listener, they paid 3, 600 for it in a public auction.

So it's easy to do the math on like, okay, if they paid that much for the deck, which was a very big sale, if they paid that much for the deck, you know. What do you have to win? What do you have to do to make that back? Even if that wasn't the purchaser's intent. So, but yeah, you're right that ascending a deck when there's [00:58:00] cash prizes on the line means the deck will win some money, but then be remo then its ability to win more money is removed.

Now, that being said, if they don't offer cash prizes next year, I mean, that wouldn't Make me too sad and it might might open that back up, but you're right that while cash prizes are on the line All of a sudden money and value and that opportunity starts to become a part of the equation.

yeah. And I, from a personal perspective I support Deck Ascension because I think that it helps keep the meta fresh, but I also understand where people are coming from when they're saying that, you know, if they put so much money into a deck, they want to have the opportunity to play that deck. And I think that if you did do Deck Ascension, what you would have to do is you would have to do it per level.

The more interesting question, I think, [00:59:00] and I think it was Joe from ABR. I could be wrong about that. It could have been someone else, but I think it was Joe from ABR put together an entire, like, proposal of how Deck Ascension could be done, and in Alliance, it's a lot more complicated.

Oh, of course.

Because of having pods, does that mean that the entire deck that that pod came from ascends, or does just the pod ascend, or does that just that specific combination of pods ascend, or how does that work?

yeah. Yeah, that is, that is a very interesting question for, for Alliance, and as far as the overall goal, if an overall goal of a deck ascension is to rotate out decks that maybe are showing up and regularly making top cut and you want to get some, some churn there for a variety the Alliance, of course, also has the restricted list, which is another tool as far as making things illegal to play, and thus creating some, some [01:00:00] churn in the meta, some churn in the meta there.

So, I do, I love the idea of deck ascension, especially for Archon, um, in general, like, like you do, especially If they, if they do right by it and turn it into really like a big honor, like enshrining the decks in some way. Like there's some kind of Ascended Decks Hall of Fame on the Master Vault. Maybe they even, gosh, like something that would be cool because I know they can do print on demand, is if you can buy a special, like, Ascended, like, anybody could buy, like, a special Ascended treatment of that deck on the keyforging.

com store, right? And it's like, this deck has ascended to, like, the KeyForge deck version of, like, you know, you're a demigod now! And now it's, it's, it's a part of Legend, if I actually do a few things to, to, to show that. That could be very fun and very cool. I'm often envious of the Flesh and Blood community's discussions around the Living Legends system, where they have heroes that you [01:01:00] pick to, to play.

You can build a deck around, and the more a hero wins, the more Living Legends points they acquire, and once they Cross a threshold they become unplayable after that, because they have won themselves out of being playable, and they, and they ascend in that way, and there's a lot of discussion around it, it mixes up the meta, and so doing something similar for KeyForge that actually fits KeyForge, I think would be could, could be pretty fun, could be pretty fun, and it's an accomplishment to get a deck ascended, that would be very cool,

I love the idea of a KeyForge Hall of Fame. I think that that would be a really interesting thing to look at. I know Vance Maddux and I were talking about doing that a couple years ago. And doing things like that takes a lot of time and energy, so it never went anywhere. But,

Yeah.

I would love to see Ghost Galaxy do something like that.

I think that would be a lot of fun.

Yeah, for sure. For sure.

Speculations for the 2024 Vault Tour Season

Alright so our final point here, so, SithofAgmar asks and I think we can, we can keep the [01:02:00] first parts of this short and really sit on the exciting part, which is looking towards the future here. And Sith asks, what did the meta look like before 2023? How has it changed through this Vault Tour season?

And what speculation is there for what it will look like heading into the 2024 Vault Tour season? Disclaimer. Ghost Galaxy has not committed to Vault Tours. They're definitely doing tournament programming of some kind, but they've not specifically committed to Vault Tours for 2024 yet, as they reflect and meditate during this holiday season.

Four to six weeks, right?

Yeah, yeah, the,

I keep hearing.

right, right, the four, four, well We'll get back to you after our four to six week reflection period. And also they can probably stick Jeremy in the bacta tank for two weeks so he doesn't die. That would be, that would be good. Keep, keep him alive, please. I, yeah, I think, I think people will start finding those answers to WoW in general.

Now WoW, WoW has, [01:03:00] what's funny is that consistent creature control, repeatable creature control is gonna be great. against Winds of Exchange. However, there's a few factors there that start to help the meta churn in the rock, paper, scissors way, right? One is that good Winds of Exchange decks are often There's some consistencies, but they're often pretty diverse in their In their win conditions, there's quite a few archetypes, all different kinds of, all different kinds of tokens are often viable, which I think is a huge design win in like these top eights we see, Berserker, Warrior, Prospector, Scholar, right, we're seeing, we're seeing all of these up there.

Fish, yeah, we saw Fish, Fish made a top eight. Love fish. And so, just having creature control doesn't necessarily mean, especially against prospector or fish, doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be interrupting their game plan against the whole, the whole set. ThE other the other [01:04:00] complication, the other complication is that as soon as you start to run something like Geared Song, the World Championship deck that only has 10 creatures if you've packed a whole lot of creature control, Geared Song is going to show up and say, Great, those, those cards in your deck are meaningless, because I don't care about my creatures after the turn I've played them.

So it opens up a pretty good churn of rock, paper, scissors as far as, as far as what what can beat your deck that can beat Winds of Exchange.

Yeah. And I'm of the opinion that we're going to see Grim Reminders come in and have a very large impact on the meta, akin to what Winds of Exchange did. I also think because of the fact that Grim Reminders is a more traditional set than Winds of Exchange is, because tokens really make Winds of Exchange a very non traditional set.

Thanks.

full agree.

[01:05:00] And because Grim Reminders is a more traditional set that does some of the normal things that KeyForge decks do, but I think in general the per card power level is higher than what we've seen in sets before Winds of Exchange.

Yeah.

And so I think what we're going to end up seeing is a meta that's going to boil down really to those two sets.

Mmm.

And you're going to see, yes, you'll still have the occasional deck from before, you know, your Gearsongs and your Pinkfrauds and and your Jocks and whatever else. But I think that the vast majority of the decks we're going to see now are going to come from those two sets.

Yeah. Yeah. I think, I, I agree. I agree. Having seen, like you said, I think your point was really important about that especially in one point earlier in the season, Winds of Exchange, as far as decks registered, has half of Dark [01:06:00] Tidings, and it's already showing up in such force in in 2023. So. I think, yeah, I think Winds of Exchange is here to stay.

I'm happy that it's not just one set of houses that's the absolute beast. There is a bit of a mix. I'd say probably at least five of the houses show up pretty regularly in in TopCut's decks. Which is great out of, out of seven houses. And Grim Reminders. Maybe, maybe another step in, I think, perhaps not Power Creep in that a full set by set Power Creep, but in that Ghost Galaxy maybe raising the floor of how efficient a KeyForge deck is at its game plan or how powerful it is at its game plan, which isn't necessarily I think a bad thing, one, if, you know, a new player is getting their hands on newer decks, and those decks tend to be a bit stronger and more exciting, one, I think that's good, but I also think that if they're kind of raising the floor [01:07:00] overall, it may just be fine tuning a bit.

their vision of KeyForge, where the games are perhaps a little more explosive, a little faster hopefully take just as much skill as, as a lot of our previous sets have. But I think, I think that's what, that's what I'm seeing so far with things like Grim Reminders. And any, anybody watching this on YouTube, because I am recording the video, will be seeing my, my cat desperately trying to, to cuddle me and eat my buttons.

As we talk about this. But, so yeah, I, I agree. I think it's going to be a lot of grim reminders. I think, I think Winds of Exchange is, is really here to stay. And I'm just, I'm just thankful that the good Winds of Exchange decks, one, are a ton of fun. I love playing grunt spam. And two, that there's a pretty wide variety.

Of them. I'm always finding new, really good moves in Winds of Exchange decks that I hadn't experienced yet before.

I think that one of the things that [01:08:00] is kind of sad is that certain sets, MM to some degree, and certainly Dark Tidings never really got to have any kind of day in the sun, because they were released during the pandemic, and then they were overshadowed after the hiatus by Winds of Exchange showing up on the scene, so, yeah, I do think that those decks Probably deserved certainly Mass Mutation deserved to have a little bit better of a time than it had, but, eh, it is what it is, and you can't do anything about it.

Yeah. And dear listener, if you've looked at my 2023 meta summary blog post where I put up kind of how the sets did by event, you'll notice that in Archon and Alliance, Poor Little Dark Tidings had no top eight conversions in the entire season and only, only a very small handful of entries only a very small handful of entries, which I think is less [01:09:00] about the However strong the set is, I think that particular statistic is less about the strength of the set, and more about the fact that nobody was attracted to playing their good Dark Tidings decks. Now, our aforementioned Patreon, Murph has a deck called the Soothsayer Judge. And I actually took a screenshot of the 0 top 8 conversions table and sent it to Murph, who has a very good Dark Tidings decks, you'll say, or Judge, and I said, this is what I call the Murph didn't go to any Vault Tours table, with no top 8 conversions.

Because I do think there are really good Dark Tidings decks out there. However, that poor set was not enjoyed by all. It had some jankiness to it and, and was released towards the end of FFG. Stewarding the game. So yeah, it had a, it had a hard time. And I, I would love to have seen more mass mutation in, in live events and have its own sealed vault tours and stuff like that.

But at least it got its, its due and its respect from dominating the [01:10:00] pandemic online scene for, for so long. We saw a lot of development in What's Great. We saw, we saw niche archetypes like, oh my gosh, I love Helena. Out of one of the Nordic KeyForge players Helena, complete, just, just control archetype like you've never seen out of Helena.

Those sets are kind of the collateral damage of KeyForge's really bumpy ride up to this point. And the fact that the game is, is still kicking, it had a 2023 scene it still has players picking up decks and playing it and learning and talking about it, I think is a testament to how great the core idea of the game, the game is, even if poor Dark Tidings and Mass Mutation really did not have their day in the sun.

Did not have their

Well, and at least they got KeyForge live.

Oh, yeah, they had KeyForge Live. Yeah, shout out to KeyForge Live. For sure. Yep, they had that. That's true. Alright, well, that's that is [01:11:00] our full set of topics. Definitely wanted to go a little bit longer than this one than we usually do today, dear listener. But second act, any final thoughts on the meta or grim reminders or winds of exchange that we didn't get to that you would want to leave our listeners with?

I think that the biggest thing that I would tell the listeners is Open your decks, play them against each other, and just let the decks speak for themselves and see what you get out of it. I think that that's going to be the best way to figure out what deck you want to play if you go to a major event or whatever.

Yes, definitely keep in mind, you know, what's in the meta, but don't let the meta define your choices. Like I said before, when you do that, that can end up being a major mistake for you. I also wanted to, on a separate note, Zach, just thank you for having me on here. I was very much appreciative of coming in on here to get to talk [01:12:00] about this topic.

And I have to say that I'm really enjoying having a KeyForge discussion with probably the only person in KeyForge who has a more encyclopedic knowledge of the card pool than I do, so

that is of, of whatever titles I hold I I will, I will defend that one against most people. The, the encyclopedic cardpool knowledge for, for sure. Yeah. And thank you for, for coming on especially having heard your podcast. I knew, I knew you were gonna have the thoughts and the brain to really make this discussion an awesome one for, for the listeners.

So, so yeah, I ap appreciate your, your time, your time and your thoughts. And tell us, tell us real quick about Weekend Key Warrior so people can go, so people can go be motivated to listen to that. Heh heh

So, Weekend Key Warriors is the other strategy podcast besides KeyForge Public Radio. And, what we do is probably a little bit more on a tactical level. Zach [01:13:00] does a great job of looking at everything from kind of a strategic level and a lot of overall. Looking at things that we go very much into tactical, like, here's a card this is what you should do with this card type of approach to it.

I would strongly recommend that your listeners check out our December episode. For our December episode we were able to have Nova on talking about Jok. And It was just a fantastic discussion where I think that I learned a lot from the discussion and I think our listeners will learn a lot from listening to the player that I consider to be the best player in KeyForge.

Amazing. Yeah, yeah, Nova easily a contender for that title for sure, for sure. Well, yeah, that's awesome. Listener, as always, there's keyforgepublicradio. com. We've got some blog posts going up there. And thank you so much to our Patreon supporters, especially our Airwave Advocate level listeners like Paul [01:14:00] Roadrunner.

And remember, like your radio dial, may our keyforge skills always be well tuned.

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