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.

~||~

Today’s Topic: Creating a deck with only tin cards (and generic Souls)

Today we’ll be using 6 tins from the Faith of Our Fathers and Rock of Ages sets.

-Faith of our Fathers tins 3, 20, and 21

-Rock of Ages tins 11, 13, and 17

While this isn’t necessarily the usual way to build a deck, I wanted to take one article to show how you could potentially build a deck from just sets of tin cards. Usually you’ll want to pick a few tins that have the offense and/or defense you’re looking for and add those to a deck you already have (at least partially) built, but you can also use the tins as a basis for starting a brand new deck.

We do have one caveat, though. Not all of the tins have Lost Soul cards in them (mostly just the Rock of Ages tins do) so to try and get 7 Lost Souls for our deck from just tins would have required using 7 tins that don’t have a lot in common. Instead of that, I’ve chosen 6 tins that share a few themes and we’ll assume that you have access to generic Souls (either from a starter deck or from a helpful playgroup leader).

Looking at all the cards from the 6 chosen tins, you’ll notice there are a fair number of brigades spread amongst the 60 cards: Green, Red, Silver, Crimson, Gold, Pale Green, and Gray. You should also notice at least the offensive theme I chose to pursue for this deck: Prophets. The tins provide a large number of excellent cards for prophet decks and the ones we have include some of the best ones. We’re going to use Green with Silver support for our offense and Crimson/Pale Green for our defense so you can set aside the Red, Gray, and Gold cards (except The Amalekites’ Slave, more on him later) as they are not needed.

Some of our angels, Cherubim and Seraph specifically, are excellent here because they can band to any of our prophets. Seraph with a Live Coal can band to, and supports, Isaiah and his sub-theme we have in the offense (and Seraph is also an Isaiah angel, further supporting that theme). Angel of the Harvest is probably the weakest of the angels, however he’s one of the rare potential draw cards we have in this deck.

The prophets all have varying uses. Ezekiel and Isaiah both have their sub-themes from their tins that fit well with the other prophets and can recur (bring back from the discard pile) cards from their themes/books (which include a handful of our good Enhancements). Micah is a general recurring Hero and can bring back a lot of our other cards, so in the long run this deck should be pretty well set on good Enhancements, especially considering we have a potential for 14 of them (10 good Enhancements and 4 dual-alignment Enhancements (DAEs) that can be used for good or evil).

As far as the good Enhancements are concerned, we’ll pretty much be using all of them. Since this deck doesn’t have Dominants we have more room for additional characters and Enhancements. The best thing about our Enhancements is that we have 4 that are green AND silver which means they can be played on any of our Heroes! We also have the 4 DAEs that can be used by any of our prophets (though are more effective if Isaiah or Ezekiel are in play) or used on defense depending on the situation. Overall, we’ve got a lot of utility with our cards.

The defense of this deck doesn’t mesh quite as well as the offense. Babylonians and Assyrians don’t have much in common and our Evil Characters are just the combination of the 4 characters from each of those themes that were in our tins plus The Amalekites’ Slave (TAS). We are including TAS because he is an awesome character. He captures himself to the opponent’s Land of Bondage, giving us a potential Soul to rescue, AND trades into our deck for any of our human Evil Characters (which all of ours are) meaning you can pull out the best character for the situation (if you have crimson Enhancements in hand, trade him for a Babylonian, etc.).

Evil Enhancements, much like the good ones, are just the smattering of ones from the tins. The default evil Enhancement number is a lot lower than the good Enhancements (half, to be exact) because the Isaiah and Ezekiel tins didn’t provide any actual evil Enhancements, just the DAEs, but we do have said DAEs that can be used as needed on defense, which still gives us a good range of options for blocking. Invoking Terror, being crimson and pale green, can be used by any of our Babylonians or Assyrians which provides further support.

Unlike our previous decks in this article series, today’s deck is actually going to include a Site! Banks of the Nile/Pharaoh’s Court isn’t super spectacular in and of itself, however 2 of our Lost Souls (deck discard, and site guard) both trigger abilities if placed in a Site so we’re including one to give them the potential to activate.

We’re going to include all 3 Artifacts that our tin cards provide. Hidden Treasures can be a great way to hinder the opponent (by discarding the evil Enhancement) or to get one of your good Enhancements off before the opponent can even block. Covenant with Death provides a very powerful negation of all characters and restricts things like Territory-Class Enhancements from being played outside battle. Be careful you aren’t negating you characters when you need them, though. Iron Pan provides a more limited negation than CwD, but can target all types of cards rather than just characters. Like CwD you’ll want to judge when to use this, and the nice thing is it can be activated on Ezekiel if you have him in play so it doesn’t necessarily take up your Artifact slot!

Last but not least, there are 2 Fortresses available to us. Stronghold in the Desert doesn’t fit with any of our themes so we won’t be using it, however Obadiah’s Caves is great for its capture and remove from game fizzling. As a secondary bonus, Protection of Jerusalem protects our Obadiah’s Caves from opponents!

Sample Deck List

Cards in Deck: 52

Lost Souls: 7

-4 Generic
-3 Lost Souls with special abilities (deck discard, CBP, site guard)

Sites: 1

–Banks of the Nile/Pharaoh’s Court

Artifacts: 3

–Hidden Treasures
–Iron Pan
–Covenant with Death

Fortresses: 1

–Obadiah’s Caves

Dual-Alignment Cards: 4

–Drawn Sword
–Forest Fire
–Razor
–Siegeworks

Heroes: 12

–Cherubim
–Seraph with a Live Coal
–Seraph
–Angel of the Harvest
–Joel
–Obadiah
–Nahum
–Isaiah
–Hosea
–Ezekiel
–Zechariah
–Micah

Good Enhancements: 10

–Protection of Jerusalem
–Striking Herod
–Live Coal
–Isaiah’s Call
–Wheel within a Wheel
–Wickedness Removed
–Two Bears
–Search
–Visions
–Swords into Plowshares

Evil Characters: 9

–Ashpenaz
–Arioch
–King Belshazzar
–Babylonian Soldiers
–Assyrian Siege Army
–Assyrian Survivor
–The Rabsaris
–The Assyrian Spoilers
–The Amalekites’ Slave

Evil Enhancements: 5

–Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream
–Head of Gold
–Invoking Terror
–Assyria Conquers Israel
–The Rabsaris Attacks

Deck Trimming

We again find ourselves with a slightly oversized deck (if you’re going for exactly 50 cards). Like last time, it isn’t the worst thing to be over 50, but if you’re wanting to cut it down to 50 you could probably cut the Site and perhaps one of the Heroes. I’d recommend playing with the deck a few times, see which cards you don’t find yourself using often, and cut a couple of those.

Deck Upgrade Suggestions

There are many places to get upgrades for the themes in our decks. Faith of our Fathers tins 5 and 12 provide Babylonian support while tin 7 provides additional Assyrians. Nebuchadnezzar from the Thesaurus set is also an excellent addition to our Babylonians.

There isn’t much other support for our prophets in the tins, however the Disciples set has some N.T. prophet cards that can spice things up and there are some cards from older packs (like Provisions, Spiritual Warfare, and Angel of His Presence) that can improve the offense as well.

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 we’ll be taking our other starter decks deck (the white/gold one) and improving it with tin cards.

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)