In this week’s article three time Redemption National Champion Keith Bartram turns back the clock and shares with us his experience winning T1-2P at Nationals three times in a four year span (1999, 2001, and 2002)!
Editor’s Note/Introduction:
Last week Luke Marshall shared with us an excellent summary of the dominant decks across the various eras of Redemption from 2003 forward. This weeks article will summarize the experience of one player who dominated T1-2P in Redemption from 1999-2002.
Keith Bartram is one of the greatest Redemption champions of all time winning T1-2P at Nationals three times in a four year span including winning T1-2P at Nationals back to back in 2001 and 2002. He kindly has shared his experience at these three National tournaments and the decks he ran to win T1-2P a whopping three times in four years at Nationals. Enjoy!
First Nationals T1-2P Win (1999):
My cousin, Aaron Williams, was really trying to get me to play this new card game, “Redemption.” I wasn’t really much of a gamer at the time, but for HIS birthday he gave me an “A-starter” deck and I was hooked. I started attending Doug Gray’s weekly Redemption night. I would save up all my money for packs. I was so excited when Warriors came out. I worked all summer long to buy a box. Doug announced that he won the bid for the National tournament. The race was on with me and my friends. There was constant testing. We were playing Redemption multiple nights a week. I had every card memorized and by extension every combination of “good lines of play.” One day, my friend Ben Mapes was playing and we noticed how oppressive Job’s Wife (W) was. We started looking at the new characters from Warriors and it became obvious that some combination of “Negation” characters was the sweet spot. It just shut people down. We experimented with all kinds of deck combinations. In our play group you didn’t want to play more than one or two color brigades on offense, but before the tournament I realized that if you were negating abilities, all you care about is numbers. So, the approach became to put in rainbow and smash in all the characters. What really took it up a notch was a bunch of set-aside cards that pumped your characters during soul drought, AND it was quite depressing for the opponent working so hard to kill a hero just to watch another come out of the set aside zone stronger than the first. I also ran Gabriel (Warriors) for battle challenges to strip my opponents of good enhancements, because the defense was weaker than the offense. It seemed just as good to stop them from winning souls with Gabriel as anything else. Throw in SoG and NJ and you had a Nationals winning deck!
Second Nationals T1-2P Win (2001):
The need for “anti-negation” in the meta was obvious as few cards stopped it dead in its tracks. I would still play a few fight by the numbers characters to keep people’s anti-negation honest, but in 2001 the real power house was a combo in Good Gold. You would attack with a low power hero (Eunice for example was pretty good to get that priority), then use Furnace of God’s Wrath and kill their territory EC to prevent them from gaining priority. Then your Highway gets everything back. Next turn: you play Battle Prayer and get Highway from your discard pile – it was a near infinite loop. It was a little bit of a longer game because you basically had to wait out their evil characters, kill them off with Furnace, then when you attack in, you use furnace for their last EC. That tournament had a few site decks, but I splashed in the rainbow access sites (Dragon raid and NJ). The EC package was just “good blockers”. I ran the “big 3″ Sapphira, Job’s Wife, and King of Tyrus. Then a bunch of immune blockers: Nero, Red Dragon for example. Then you wrap it up with solid banding characters like Lot’s Wife. I did also run some black support Goliath and Goliath’s Spear. Foolish Advice usually smashed face too. Double-Lost Soul shenanigans were definitely more powerful and utilized. NJ and double Lost Soul rulings were rocking back and forth so much that I may have this year and next mixed up, but I believe that you could let your opponent half rescue the double LS, then shuffle it by letting them rescue the shuffle lost soul (or you used SoG and NJ to rescue your own), let them rescue it a second time (hope they have a shuffle to do it again). When you could no longer shuffle, you buried it which meant they got zero credit. (fun factoid: Doug Gray was working for cactus by now, and I was started to get into other CCGs, I told Doug about the idea of making weapons that would “equip” to characters. He seemed to like the idea. It’s still in the game today!)
Third Nationals T1-2P Win (2002):
By now, all of my friends quite playing Redemption and my college friends were more interested in Magic the Gathering and Lord of the Rings. But Doug pressured me into going again to Nationals. There were some old forums discussing Haman’s Plot and how it was used in a tournament to replace itself. I read all of the arguments back and forth. Both sides had a point, but I thought it was an odd rule that if you ripped it you could not replace it. Major CCGs had rules to allow people to replace cards in their deck. But I wanted to play the most powerful card. So my defense was brown. Centering around Haman’s Plot, capture, and other territory destruction. Splashed in the stand-alone blockers. The real weakness the deck had was chariot of fire. So, I ran artifact hate. But often, I would use Haman’s Plot to kill EC’s that were problematic. So, it was very versatile – either choke their heroes, or remove EC’s and be aggressive. This was the problem the finesse of the deck: knowing when to be aggressive and when to be patient. The biggest problem I had, when I build my decks (oh because of the ruling you could not replace Haman’s plot after it was torn, if your deck was illegal, you were DQ, BUT there was no limit to the number of decks you could run. So, I built 10 identical decks – one for each round) was finding enough of Destruction of Nehushtan. It had just came out and it was HOT! Most people didn’t know this but all 10 decks were identical but the last one did not have a DoN in it. Round 1: I won without needing Hamman’s Plot. I was so tempted to use it, but waited as long as I could. So didn’t end up needing all 10 decks.
My offense was a play on my first two decks. I had the Gold Combo, but white had a similar combo. So, it was White-Gold. The nice thing about this offense is it mirrored the defense. I could be aggressive or patient depending on my opponent. The great kicker was Transfiguration. It would allow me to Play Moses (Warriors). Interrupt, negate, and prevent have been the most problem for Redemption – and I usually capitalized on however they teetered. At the time, the ruling was that if I played Lost Coin Found to get Transfiguration and band in Moses, they would all stay out because Moses couldn’t undo the chain (simple answer, it was much more involved than that). And by now, there was a lot more anti-negate hate – which means people weren’t playing those heroes – which means they were playing the anti-hate – which means Moses was a bomb. I also played David’s Harp and Chariot of Fire to make sure my heroes stuck around, because I would often have to kamikaze to play Battle Prayer and Lost Coin found. I did loose 1 match in round 7 (I think), but I was pretty sure my opponent cheated. I called a judge and was discreet about it. He and I were both undefeated going into that round. I lost. The judge followed this guy the rest of the matches, and he lost rounds 8-10. Maybe he lost fair and square, but I have often wondered if no one had caught his cheating before me, and the player was nervous with the judge hovering. Not sure, but I won 9-1. Also I think i splashed pale green for Confusion, and would rip people’s chartiot of fire (which was funny to watch their expressions, because it wasn’t SoG.
Conclusion/Editor’s Note:
So here we have an incredible summary of the experience of one of the greatest Redemption champions ever. Hopefully this was enjoyable for you to read and it shows how much the game has changed over time. If you are having trouble how Keith managed to win using a good gold combo that did not win souls but just got rid of one of their evil characters each turn and was able to be recurred perhaps this note from him will help, “So, the defense of stand alone characters were pretty good. They really stopped offenses dead in their tracks. In ’99 anyone could build a defense. it was the same 7 or so characters and a splash of a few more. So, I would attack, they would block with Nero – no problem! Sure Nero is immune to my hero, but that red dragon sitting in the back isn’t. I would turn up a Holy of Holies to stop them from blocking with a Negate EC, then Furnace the negate EC for 3 turns. Now, Holy of Holies goes away because I have negate and they don’t. So, you just had to snipe their territory until they had 1 EC left in their deck. Then you AotL before you attack. Good game. Another defense strategy was Site Oppression. It was very easy to site lock people back then too. So the Gold combo allowed me to kill the defense until i could get through sites or the EC that was insta-blocking. You ran Holy Grail to turn your EC into whatever you needed to get through the site blockade.” Wow pretty different! Keith was not worried about rescuing souls early on. He would just rescue with Eunice or someone like that over and over and snipe an EC in their territory until they only had one left in their deck. Meanwhile they were not rescuing his souls because he blocked over and over again. So then he would get rid of their last EC with AotL and start cruising through for free rescues after that. Absolutely incredible!
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