Hello and welcome to Browa’s Budget Bazaar!

This article series is designed to provide quick and simple deck ideas in general, as well as for specific themes, that won’t be hard on your wallet! There will also be suggestions for those with more available funds on how to spruce up the deck.

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Today’s Topic: Upgrading our Ruth/Judges deck from the very first article.

Today we’ll be using the I/J and G/H starter decks found in the 4^th edition and 10^th anniversary boxes respectively as well as Faith of our Fathers tin 2 and Rock of Ages tins 18 and 23.

Hearkening all the way back to the very first article in the Bazaar, which you can look at here, today we’re going to update our white/gold deck with some tins. As mentioned in the upgrade section for that deck, there isn’t much Ruth support outside the I/J decks so we’re going to remove the white part of our deck and make it a solid Judges offense. We’ll lose the recurring utility of the Ruth cards but we’ll gain access to several powerful cards including an awesome Fortress!

Starting with the Heroes, we’ll remove the 4 white Ruth heroes since we aren’t using white anymore. I also chose to remove Women as Israel because there are better Heroes from the tins. We’ll go ahead and add both angels, they provide exceptional utility with their ability to exchange for your judges so that you can pick one that best suites the situation you’re in. Angel Under the Oak is especially good in this deck since we have Gideon!

As far as the actual judge Heroes, Samuel and Jair should be automatic adds, both for general utility and for Jair’s synergy with the Fortress we’ll be talking about later. Ehud is an excellent add as well due to his powerful choose the blocker ability. I also decided to swap out Shamgar from our original deck and put in Ibzan since he allows your Judges Enhancements to not be negated. You can include more judges if you want, the remaining ones have their uses but I feel are not as strong as the ones we already have.

As far as Enhancements, we actually lose 6 Enhancements total (since When Judges Governed is far less effective without a Ruth Hero to activate the first half of the ability). There are 6 good Enhancements in the tins, and I feel all of them (especially Samuel’s Edict and Deborah’s Directive) are good adds except for “Shibboleth”. This leaves us with 1 less Enhancement than last time, but allows us a slot to add the good Fortress.

That good Fortress happens to be Judge’s Seat from tin 18. This Fortress gives us a powerful territory destruction every turn. As mentioned before, it has great synergy with Jair who can search your deck or discard pile for it AND if you put him in the Fortress then you can discard a vast majority of Evil Characters since Jair’s strength is so low (2). There are only a handful of Evil Characters with 2 or less toughness so Jair in Judge’s Seat will allow you to hamper most defensive strategies (if you can get around protection).

I chose not to include the Evil Fortress from the tin, Satan’s Seat, or the Site, Pergamum, simply because we still don’t really have the deck setup for having effective Sites. While you certainly could include those cards plus the Sites from the G/H decks, I don’t think it’s as effective as the deck we’ll have built by the end of this article.

You can easily include the Lost Soul from tin 18, though, and I have added it to the sample list below.

Moving on to Evil Characters, we already had a black defense and these tins actually give us some good black support. For the sample deck below, I chose to remove the Philistine cards (except Delilah since her band can target any male human Evil Character) and Locust from the Pit to add all 4 black Evil Characters from the tins. Alexander and High Priest’s Maid go well with the Sadducees we already had in our defense, and Abimelech synergizes somewhat with our judges offense and with Gibeonite Delegates to have a mini-Canaanite theme going on.

The orange cards in the tins don’t really support our defense so I’ve chosen not to include them this time.

The black Enhancements in the tins are few and far between unfortunately. There are only 3 and Doctrine Like Leaven isn’t exceptionally useful in this deck since we have so few Sadducees. Gibeonite Trickery and Just a Hireling are both excellent choices and I chose to remove Ishbibenob’s Sword and Ishbibenob’s Spear to add them in. I chose to keep Wickedness of Delilah because it is an exceptional territory-class Enhancement that we can still play on Delilah in battle for name-on-name bonus if needed, as well as Lahmi’s Spear because it can be placed on Abimelech as a weapon or simply discarded to discard a Hero. The remaining evil Enhancements remained the same.

Sample Deck List

Cards in Deck: 50

Lost Souls: 7

-3 Generic
-4 Lost Souls with special abilities (“Rejoice with Me“, “Resurrection“, “Female Only” and “Same Book” – all the ones from the 4 decks except the Site-related one)

Dominants: 7

–Son of God
–Angel of the Lord
–New Jerusalem (if you purchased the Gift Set)
–Christian Martyr
–Burial
–Vain Philosophy
–Strife

Fortresses: 1

–Judge’s Seat

Heroes: 10

–Angel Under the Oak
–Angel with the Secret Name
–Samuel
–Jair
–Samson
–Jephthah
–Gideon
–Ibzan
–Moses
–Ehud

Good Enhancements: 9

–Shamgar’s Oxgoad
–The Sword of Gideon
–Trumpets and Torches
–Gideon’s Call
–Samuel’s Edict
–Ehud’s Dagger
–Deborah’s Directive
–Capturing Canaan
–Samson’s Sacrifice

Evil Characters: 8

–Delilah
–Abimelech
–Alexander
–Gibeonite Delegates
–High Priest’s Maid
–Temple Guard
–Strong Demon
–Sadducees

Evil Enhancements: 8

–Gibeonite Trickery
–Wickedness of Delilah
–Just a Hireling
–Lahmi’s Spear
–Denying Blame
–Pride of Simon
–False Witnesses
–Lying Unto God

Deck Change Suggestions

If you’re tight on funds and don’t want to buy all 3 tins used today, I would say that RoA tin 2 is probably the weakest of the 3. Tin 23 provides the amazing angels (plus Samuel and Samuel’s Edict) and tin 18 gives Judge’s Seat so both of those are very useful. If you can only afford 1 tin I think tin 23 would be the best choice just for the flexibility of the angels and Samuel.

If you’re looking to upgrade further, Rock of Ages tin 25 provides exceptional support for Canaanites. Other than that you’d have to go to older sets or pack sets in general for further support. Lot’s Wife from the Women expansion would be an excellent replacement for Delilah since she can band with ANY Evil Character (not just males) AND is considered a Canaanite.

Thanks for reading!

The deck list above is just a general suggestion/guideline for building the deck, and Redemption caters to and encourages creative alternatives and testing with different card combinations or setups. Try throwing a mix you like in there and see how it goes!

Thanks very much for reading! Next time we’ll be building another custom deck just from tin cards, but this time with a different theme (i.e., not prophets again).

To buy singles, sealed product, and other gaming supplies mentioned, please visit Three Lions Gaming!

By Scott

Scott was a bit of a latecomer to the Redemption scene, starting after the Angel Wars expansion released. Having a passion for games of all kinds, but especially card games, Redemption has been of special interest to him. While Genesis and Prophets are his favorite themes, his most enjoyed aspect of Redemption is theoretical card design. Coming up with new card ideas and mechanics has always been exciting for him (having thought up ideas for other TCGs as well)