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: Customizing our deck from last time with a tin.
Today we’ll be using the I/J and G/H starter decks found in the 4th edition and 10th anniversary boxes respectively as well as Rock of Ages tin 19.
Today we’re going to go in a bit of a different direction and take the purple/white/brown deck we built last time and spruce it up with some tin cards to show how easy it can be to upgrade your deck with just a few cards. The tins provide specialized sets of cards associated generally with a specific brigade/theme, one offense and one defense per tin. The offense and defense don’t necessarily fit with each other (at least with the older tins) but today we’re using Rock of Ages tin 19 (XIX) which happens to have amazing white and decent brown support to augment both the offense and defense of our deck!
The best part of tin 19 is the fortress: The Garden Tomb (TGT). This is an incredibly powerful card that allows certain Heroes to ignore some Evil Characters before they can even block! The tin also provides 2 Heroes that work with TGT, Salome and Mary the Mother of James, and awesomely enough our deck already has 2 more TGT Heroes in it, John and Peter. These cards will give our offense a big boost.
We’re going to try and keep our deck close to 50 cards. That means we’ll have to take some things out to put in the tin cards. The Lost Soul from the tin can easily be swapped in for one of the generic souls, but the rest isn’t quite as easy. Since our Artifacts from last time don’t specifically support our offense or defense we’ll be removing those to add other cards. The first card we’ll be adding in to replace those is TGT itself. The other spot will be for a Hero and we’ll talk about that in the next section.
Last time we only had 9 Heroes because that’s all we could use due to duplicates. This time, since we’re taking out the Artifacts, we can add in that 10th Hero to keep our Hero and Enhancement numbers even. Since the tin has 2 Heroes we’ll still need to take out a Hero, however. Since both of the tin 19 Enhancements (discussed below) synergize with N.T. female human Heroes we’re going to take out Timothy (as he’s male) to swap in Mary the Mother of James and Salome. This keeps us at 5 white and 5 purple Heroes. Since Lydia is still a powerhouse and able to use purple Enhancements you could keep Timothy and swap out Parmenas as well, however I feel that Parmenas’ ability is generally more useful than Timothy’s.
Tin 19 includes 2 very good white Enhancements, “He Is Risen” and No Need for Spices, and we’re going to put both in our deck. Bravery of Priscilla is not actually a battle-winning Enhancement, and it doesn’t generate Lost Souls or draw either, so I feel like it’s currently the weakest of our Enhancements. I decided to take that one out. In order to keep the white/purple balance of our offense I also chose to remove Gentle Resolution as it’s the weakest of our white Enhancements. You can choose differently, there are plenty of different ways to do this, but those are the ones I took out for the sample deck list below. The Word Spreads could also be taken out if you want to have more strictly white Enhancements (since Loaves and Fishes synergizes best with Andrew on the purple side).
Tin 19 includes 2 brown Evil Characters and they are both pretty good so we’re going to add them in. Since it’s always necessary to have characters to participate in battle we’re going to change our breakdown from last time to 8 characters instead of 7. This immediately gives us a slot to put The Bear in. As for Persian Presidents, they are pretty much a straight upgrade over Achan currently in our deck. Both characters have the same stats and while Achan is warrior-class that doesn’t really have much impact in our deck as it is now. As such, Persian Presidents having a special ability that may come in handy makes him a better choice for the slot in my opinion. The rest of the Evil Characters will remain as is. This pushes our deck up to 51 cards, which is abnormal but not uncommon. More on this later.
The brown Enhancements in tin 19 are not quite as obviously useful as the rest of the cards. Demonic Blockade is best in a Site-oriented defense and since we aren’t running Sites it’s not as useful for us. Zeresh Advises Haman gives you a powerful discard but requires sequestering either The Bear or Persian Presidents for 3 turns in set aside which leaves them very vulnerable and hurts your ability to block. I chose not to put either in the deck; however, you could potentially swap one or the other into the deck for Ashtaroth Worship if you like.
Sample Deck List
Cards in Deck: 51
Lost Souls: 7
-3 Generic
-4 Lost Souls with special abilities (“Rejoice with Me“, “Resurrection“, “Female Only” and “Human” – (all the ones from the 4 decks except the Site-related one + the tin 19 soul)
Dominants: 7
–Son of God
–Angel of the Lord
–New Jerusalem (if you purchased the Gift Set)
–Christian Martyr
–Burial
–Vain Philosophy
–Strife
Fortress: 1
Heroes: 10
–James (I)
–John (I)
–Peter
–Andrew
–Parmenas
–Jairus’ Daughter
–Priscilla
–Lydia
–Mary the Mother of James
–Salome
Good Enhancements: 10
–Authority of Peter
–You Are the Christ
–Fishers of Men
–The Word Spreads
–Reach of Desperation
–“He Is Risen”
–Devotion of Ruth
–Loyalty of Ruth
–No Need for Spices
–Loaves and Fishes
Evil Characters: 8
–Dathan
–Idolaters
–Abiram
–Selfish Kinsman
–Shaphat
–Persian Presidents
–Nabal
–The Bear
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 Trimming
The deck currently resides at 51 cards (because we added 9 cards but only took out 8). This is not the worst deck size to have, though some players prefer to have exactly 50 cards. If you so desire you could also go up to 52 cards by adding back in one of the cards we cut, or you could cut a card currently in the deck to get it down to 50. I think Zelophehad’s Sin is probably the weakest evil Enhancement and The Word Spreads the weakest good Enhancement.
Deck Upgrade Suggestions
The Disciples expansion set contains quite a bit of support for our offensive theme in the form of more purple disciples as well as white versions of Mary Magdalene and Joanna (both of whom are TGT Heroes and can be banded in by Mary the Mother of James) and various enhancement support.
Disciples also contains some Persian and general brown support that can be added to the defense as well. If you can attend a State tournament, the Haman promo card is an excellent Evil Character to add to the defense, and he’s also Persian! If you are unable to attend a tournament, Three Lions Gaming currently has Haman available for: $7.50.
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 a stab at building a deck entirely from tin cards. While pricier than using the starter decks as a base, it should be an interesting endeavor!
To buy singles, sealed product, and other gaming supplies mentioned, please visit Three Lions Gaming!
