These are the decklists for the top 3 placing teams that competed in the Teams event of Nationals 2024
1st Place: Shon and Brandon
Shon’s Clay/Thieves
Brandon’s Clay/Babylonians
Writeup from Shon:
Early in the 2024 tournament season, I got Brandon Wade, my best friend from high school, to try Redemption. Somehow I got him so interested that he agreed to be my teams partner for the entire season. We started brewing our deck builds early in the year while also balancing college life and part time jobs. Brandon started his Redemption career with blue, and we decided that patriarchs could be something we could play as a team and with cards that are familiar to him as a new player.
We found Blue to be fun, but not impactful enough against more meta match-ups. Brandon as a player started dabbling in green and soon found a love for crimson babylonians. So in teams, we began trying new strategies that were built around control with Jonah and Babylonians, using strong solo rescues like Jeremiah and Iddo for consistent pressure.
These seasonal games gave us time to experiment with card synergies that are more potent in teams. By the time Nationals came around, I began getting worried about where we were going to land on our deck build. Brandon was pretty open on what we should play by now, except he had one line he drew in the sand. He was going to play Babylonians.
With his decision to run Babylonians, I wanted to build a set of teams decks that addressed the teams meta, but also allowed my teammate to run Babylonians. Having only two or three rounds per game, we felt that the strongest strategies involved having the most effects that hinder your opponents from generating card advantage.
Our favorite effects that accomplished that task ended up being Guardian of your Souls, Jonah, Zaccheus, Babylonian Merchants, and most importantly, our Lost Souls. Using Souls like Salty, Complacent, Punisher, Crowds, and Color Guard, we would create this sand trap of effects for our opponents to make misplays in.
We built our offenses to draw a burst of cards in the first round with Matthew, Justin Matyr, generous Giving, and blood of the Lamb. This burst of card draw gets us to cards like Harvest time (pulling our important souls), Guardian, Jonah, and Merchants. We built a Tabernacle priest offensive in the clay shell so we had access to a consistent turn 2 and beyond draw 4 engine through Abiathar + Phinehas’s spear with Ahimelech down.
We had an old card called scroll of Isaiah in the build which gave a symmetrical CBN modifier to all good convert Enhancements, which provides our Abiathar engine the needed punch power. Babylonian Merchants becomes the MVP of the deck, providing offensive support, capturing opponents defensive characters in battle when using characters that have search abilities.
Since I ran Son of God and Second Coming, I felt it was necessary to build the deck to speed through and find those guaranteed points as quickly as possible. So most cards, including the defense was aiming to give me more card advantage.
With that, we decided to lend Brandon more on the side of defense. Running his List at 54, his Babylonian package ran full unity, but had several sneaky plays built in. Having a defense very few people have experienced creates interesting opportunities to create new lines of play that our opponents weren’t prepared to break through.
Some fun cards that proved to be substantially stronger in teams than normal type 1 play included Kingdoms of the World, Guardian of your Souls, and Babylonian Merchants. Kingdoms provided a reliable way to snag Evil Characters, (including Merchants) and held opponents’ Heroes hostage if they attempted to play a dominant.
Kingdoms’ effect to underdeck a hero when the opponent plays a dominant works on rescuing heroes, and since we as a team share the fortress, it allows us to underdeck up to two of them. Guardians stopped common offenses that relied on converting in the tracks. (As well as making soul hide tremendously more difficult.)
Having one player with a larger defense and several defensive dominants for when and if Complacent disappears, allows the other player to take blocks that require less resources and focus on gaining their own.
Using cards that were less seen by the player base and using oppressive effects allowed us to catch the competition off guard. We were surprised by the outcome of the tournament and had amazing games every round. Playing consistently throughout the season allowed us to take first in Teams R.N.R.S and show up on the day to claw out our first National Title!
2nd Place: Chad Frantz and Aaron Reisenbigler
Chad’s Turbo Moses / Soul Hide
Aarons Clay / Soul Hide
A write up from Chad:
The strategy of these lists is to abuse choose the blocker abilities which are quite strong in teams not allowing the opponents to collectively choose who blocks.
Part of the reasons it can be tough to make headway in TEAMS is the opponents get to choose which of them who blocks a rescue attempt. These decks seek to avoid that.
The first list is a modified version of the Money Tree deck list I have posted on Land of Redemption. It seeks to utilize FBTN rescues with Moses (Cow), Noah (LoC), and Jairus. Additionally it has Elijah (PoC) and Zaccheus as CtB options.
The second list seeks to use Simon/Jospeh of Arimathea for CtB rescues and Mary the Restored for FBTN.
The defense is of course Soul Hide based on the premise that Sheol triggers twice in teams. Neither deck seeks to draw much at all and therefore seeks to keep souls off the board. Moses (CoW) in both decks is to deal with ability souls and to slow down the opponent. The decks performed better than expected.
I originally built these for Daniel Mazzucchi/Timothy Sarnecky from my playgroup who tied for 3rd last year in TEAMS and just updated the lists for the modern meta going into Nats this year since I felt both lists were still relevant for the most part.
3rd Place: BaboonyTim and Jake Antonetz
Jake’s Nativity / Herods
Tim’s Clay / Herods
Tim’s Writeup
I felt very good about the Nativity / Herod’s deck I had prepared for the T1 two player tournament. I wanted to see if it could also do well in teams.
Originally, we wanted to try and run 2 Nativity decks but since you can only run 1 Star of Bethlehem, we figured we’d be better off having only one Nativity offense and pairing it with the other best offense around (Josh Potratz’s Clay).
I advocated that we run Herods as our defense for both decks, but in hindsight Jake thinks that a Black / Gray defense would have diversified our blocking options.
Our deckbuilding decisions for teams were highly influenced/biased by our experiences playing Type 1 two player. As a result, we were unprepared for the amount of soul-hide strategies we saw during teams. It was very difficult to close out games with these decks despite their power level because each of us only got to play 2 turns of Redemption before time was called.
I learned that soul generation is very important in teams and don’t assume you’ll do well by just jamming the two best decks together! However it was nice to have redundant Herod’s Temples if one got shipwrecked. But if Temple got Three Woes’ed, then it would severely affect both of our blocking options.
At the last second, we decided to pivot off of Sheol and onto Denarius/Claudius because of how well Claudius had performed during the previous day of our tournament. Sheol is strong in teams, but I think the decision is justified b/c of how much speed and power Denarius brings to the table.
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