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.
NOTE: As a general rule, Dominants are the most powerful cards in the game and some of the best Dominants are available in the Starter Decks. Also, all decks must contain at least 7 Lost Soul cards. It is recommended that the first purchase you make in Redemption be one of the starter decks. The 4th edition I/J decks are recommended (because of the Son of God reprint contained within), but the 10th anniversary G/H decks and the 3rd edition E/F decks are also entirely valid (though the E/F decks are out of print and can be pricier to acquire) and all have plentiful Lost Souls to start your collection. If a specific deck caters well to a deck/theme topic, it’ll be mentioned in the article.
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Today’s Topic: Building another custom deck with just the starter decks.
Today we’ll be using the I/J and G/H starter decks found in the 4th edition and 10th Anniversary boxes respectively.
*If you’re just starting out in the game, or want to start expanding your collection to accommodate multiple concurrent decks, I would highly recommend purchasing the 10th Anniversary Gift Set. You get the G/H starter decks, 3 Unlimited packs, 3 Prophets packs, and the New Jerusalem promo. The 6 packs may yield a few useful cards, but most important is the New Jerusalem card as it’s one of the best Dominants in the game and is found in most decks. Plus, you get a nice tin in which to hold your deck!
We’re going to switch around and use the other available offenses and defenses to build today’s deck and ignore the gold/O.T. white and black from last week. The N.T. white and purple have a lot of synergy in these decks and while the silver also supports the offense I decided to keep it simple with just 2 brigades this time.
The first thing we have to consider when building our offense is that both sets of decks have disciples in the purple cards. We have 2 copies of both James (I deck James and H deck James, son of Zebedee) and John (I deck John and H deck John). Type 1 decks can only have 1 copy of Heroes with a special ability per 50 cards in the deck. Since our deck is only 50 cards we can’t have both copies of the Heroes. This leaves us with a choice. The James cards are exactly the same game play wise (same stats and ability) so either is acceptable. The Johns differ both in stats and in special ability, with the G/H John only preventing abilities and not preventing banding. For this reason, I believe the I/J John to be a better choice overall. You sacrifice a few points of strength and toughness to have the more powerful complete blanket negate of Evil Character (EC) abilities. We’ll use this one for the deck list below.
The good Enhancement selection is actually quite large since the O.T. white Enhancements from the I/J deck are very good even without the Ruth recursion from the Heroes. You can see the breakdown I chose below but I highly recommend including at least Devotion of Ruth, if not also Loyalty of Ruth. Reach of Desperation is also an amazing card and should definitely be included. Great Faith can be a great card since it lets you fish out an Enhancement that fits your current situation however I left it out of this version, putting Loaves and Fishes in the list instead for some draw power.
For the defense, the EC choice is pretty easy; just combine all 7 characters from the decks that are brown. Enhancement-wise, there are a few that underperform and can be left out (like Aaron and Miriam’s Dissent, since it’s ability is so specific), but otherwise most of them are included. I chose to include Ashtaroth Worship as well because, although the multi-brigade aspect doesn’t matter since our ECs are the same brigade, the ability is very good. You can see the Enhancements I settled on below, but feel free to experiment with others.
As with the last deck we built, the Sites in G/H aren’t very useful for this deck. I don’t know if we’ll ever cover a Site deck in these articles (because it would require buying a lot of single cards or a lot of packs as none of the starters or tins really feature sites that much, just one or two here and there) but maybe in the future, you never know!
Unlike the last deck, this one DOES have Artifacts. There are only 7 brown Evil Characters and 9 usable white/purple Heroes between the decks so I’ve added Artifacts into the spots the extra characters would have taken. Golden Calf actually has a use in this deck since all your Heroes are N.T. and won’t be affected. King’s Sword can be useful as well so that’s what I’ve used for the sample deck list below. Tables of the Law is definitely a valid replacement for either, though. If you prefer, you can also swap out the Artifacts for additional Enhancements.
Sample Deck List
Cards in Deck: 50
Lost Souls: 7
-4 Generic
-3 Lost Souls with special abilities (“Rejoice with Me“, “Resurrection” and “Female Only” – 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
Artifacts: 2
Heroes: 9
–James (I)
–John (I)
–Peter
–Andrew
–Parmenas
–Jairus’ Daughter
–Priscilla
–Lydia
–Timothy
Good Enhancements: 10
–Authority of Peter
–You Are the Christ
–Fishers of Men
–The Word Spreads
–Reach of Desperation
–Bravery of Priscilla
–Devotion of Ruth
–Loyalty of Ruth
–Gentle Resolution
–Loaves and Fishes
Evil Characters: 7
–Dathan
–Idolaters
–Abiram
–Selfish Kinsman
–Shaphat
–Achan
–Nabal
Evil Enhancements: 8
–Zelophehad’s Sin
–Self-Doubt
–Israelite Rebellion
–Bad Dealings
–Achan’s Sin
–Sin in the Camp
–To Each His Own
–Ashtaroth Worship
Deck Upgrade Suggestions
I’m not going to provide any specific upgrade suggestions for this deck today because the next article will be entirely about that! We’re going to expand the white of the deck with a powerful offense from Rock of Ages.
Thanks for reading!
As always, 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 article, as mentioned above, we’ll be taking a look at building up a theme not specifically present in the starter decks (though with at least a small basis there) by taking a tin or two and adding those into the deck we built today.
To buy singles, sealed product, and other gaming supplies mentioned, please visit Three Lions Gaming!
