Keyforge

[BRickAstley]

Who here has gotten into Keyforge? I've gotten into it hard, bought 6 decks so far and played my first competitive event this last week.

If you don't know what Keyforge is, think Magic: The Gathering but each deck you play with is:

• Bought as a single unit, complete and ready for play
  
• Labeled with a unique name, so there is no mixing around of cards to modify the decks.
  
• Procedurally generated, each deck is guaranteed to have a unique card list
  

Also, you don't win by fighting and killing your opponent. Yes you have creatures you can fight other creatures with, but the primary goal is to use your cards to generate a resource called Æmber, which you use to forge keys (hence the name). First to 3 keys wins.

Early Polygon Preview

Official Rulebook

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If you *are* familiar with Keyforge... I got into my first organized tournament this last week. Here's a writeup I shared with other people playing it at work.

The event was really fun, getting to play my Provost "The Librarian" Elias multiple times against complete unknown opponents.

My Games:
1) Loss 3-1 vs: Cameron, Airport Musician
I got Library Access -> N. Seed -> Library Access comboed at the end, but got hit by all the other value in the meantime. Gateway to Dis'd my Dominators, 2x Ancient Bear'd, 2x Mimicry'd, etc. This deck went on to 4-0 and win the night.

2) Loss 3-2 vs: Kept Z. Urvinaldri, the Twenty-seventh
I got outvalued, and only drew 1 dominator and never had a good combo-y hand. I got both Bait & Switched, AND Too Much To Protect'd at really painful times.

3) Win 3-2 vs: Juleen X. Lockenpsen, the Fourth
Got some really good draws and board control.... and then forgot he had Strange Gizmo and had my board of ~15 cards get wiped. Still managed to scrape out a win on the last turn (He ended with 2 keys, 9 Aember).

4) Win 3-1 vs: Quari, Tsetrail's Butcher
Got my combo early, last turn I got to reap for 12 Aember. Other deck never really got it going.

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There is also a site for unofficial online play that I haven't really delved into yet, but I'd be willing to try out a game if someone is interested.

[Bacchus]

What an amazingly inventive money sink, and death to secondary market by design.

That said, I still can't help getting excited.

Even after getting so badly burned by Conquest due to FFG losing their GW rights.

[yuris125]

Heard good things about it from Magic friends, mildly interested myself, but haven't had time to try it thus far

[RFS-81]

What an amazingly inventive money sink, and death to secondary market by design.

How so? You can still sell full decks, you just can't buy or sell single cards. Or am I missing something?

[Bacchus]

Yes, you can sell decks, but the market will be much thinner for that, if you want to sell you need to find a buyer who wants that exact thing. Also, more abstractly, I think the prices in the secondary market for a deck will settle around the power level, so that there is nothing to be gained monetarily between paying NX for a deck at a particular point on the power curve or just buying N decks from the publisher, the best of which would land you at around the same point.

And yeah, you can get stuff which is just sick with double/triple copies of the good stuff: https://www.keyforgegame.com/deck-detail...8bf358b37f

[Bacchus]

So I'm playing some sealed on Crucible to get a sense of the game, and just played Library Access into Reverse Time. For a two card combo, this is far, far too powerful: even with all the stuff that I played getting immediately wiped through mass removal, I now have a large chunk of my deck in hand filtered down to two houses.

[T-hawk]

Heard good things about it from Magic friends, mildly interested myself, but haven't had time to try it thus far

The interesting part I've seen is the hostile reactions from Magic players, at least when it was originally announced. On the somewhat neutral ground of r/boardgames, most threads about Keyforge had Magic players ranging from "why would you gimp your Magic without trading and deckbuilding" to "you're a loser idiot who wants the game without the work." There absolutely is a large audience both intimidated by Magic deckbuilding and turned off by the secondary market. Glad to hear Keyforge seems to be doing well.

[BRickAstley]

So I'm playing some sealed on Crucible to get a sense of the game, and just played Library Access into Reverse Time. For a two card combo, this is far, far too powerful: even with all the stuff that I played getting immediately wiped through mass removal, I now have a large chunk of my deck in hand filtered down to two houses.

Yes, there are a lot of really powerful decks that can trump less powerful ones, see the first deck in my AAR of my KeyForge event. Which is why they add the Chains mechanic in.

Chains affect the number of cards you can draw when refilling your hand (your first hand at the start of the game, and your draw step at the end of every turn).

During your draw step, for every 1-6 chains that you have, you: draw 1 less card when refilling your hand; and reduce your number of chains by 1.

You only reduce your chains if you would normally draw 1 or more cards. If you have 6 cards in hand then you would not draw a card under normal circumstances, so you would not reduce your number of chains. If you have 3 cards in hand, then you would normally draw 3 more (for a full hand of 6) but the chain reduces that by 1, so you draw 2 cards instead (for a hand of 5 cards) and reduce your chains by 1 (if you had 5 chains before, you reduce it to 4).

The number of cards that you are prevented from drawing goes up for every 6 chains that you have. So for 1-6 chains, you draw 1 less card. For 7-12 chains, you draw 2 less cards, etc.

Chains can be used to handicap a strong deck ("That deck is way too good! How about you start the next game with 4 chains?") or there are cards that can give you chains during play.

http://aembertree.com/card/core/059

And you can apply that both competitively and casually. When you play competitive events, based on your record you gain, lose, or stay at your current level of chains. Every time you play competitive you have to take that into account, so decks that are massively better than others will be at an initial card disadvantage to even the playing field. Casually, you can just decide to start a game with chains as you see fit, to have room for experimenting.

[Bacchus]

Yeah, I read about chains. Cool.that they thought about it, but especially in organized play this seems to be a recipe for some unpleasantness. Namely, that winning a tournament in no small part can rely on finding a 'cold', unplayed deck that has all the combo pieces in it.

[Bacchus]

Settled on this deck when playing 'normal' online: https://keyforge-compendium.com/decks/5f...24373ce746

Really wipes so far. Crucible Online meta seems to be very control heavy, people love bears, and snufflegators, sanctum, positron bolts and relentless whispers. This deck just presents no real targets. Masterplan a Key Charge, let them do whatever they want, then spike amber and double forge for the win.

Prefer playing sealed though.