The article says this is the first set. How will future sets work? Will decks from the second set be totally self-contained, but still play well with the first set, without giving in to power creep? Or will cards from the first set be mixed in somehow?

This is something I'd like a bit more detail on before I buy in.

Well they will be self-contained for what is in the decks. But they will likely reprint cards from older sets into newer ones.

I'm thinking any of the following could happen:

• Decks composed entirly of new houses
• Decks composed of 2 new houses and one old house.
• Decks composed of two old houses and 1 new house
• Decks composed of old houses with new cards
• Decks composed of new houses with a few old cards mavericked in.

why are they calling these factions, "houses" anyway? This ain't Harry Potter!

Ooooh Harry Potter themed keyforge- Wandforge! I would buy that!

I can see old houses mixed with new houses, but they will be part of the new set. They aren't going to mix sets. It is like how Magic reprints cards like Llanowar Elves to death. They can reprint them in the new set. We will probably get a mix of old and new houses.

I'm guessing it's trying to emulate Dune, which was also a struggle between several houses over a limited and extremely valuable resource. I'm not sure the art style and theme are 100% winning me over, which is the number one thing that's stopping me from getting too excited about this game, but for 10 bucks and some proxy tokens you can play the game. Why not give it a try I guess. That's exactly the type of entrance all card games need to get you hooks. FFG needs to find a way to make all their competitive card games like that in the future (and still make them profitable).

Just looking at the math for adding a new house and I'm not sure it'd be great for the game. There's currently 35 house combinations for the 7 houses and adding just a single house creates 21 more combinations. Each house after that adds more and more, to a point where it's just not feasible really quickly.

I'm thinking new sets will keep the same 7 factions but simply add new cards for each faction. It almost seems like each new set would have to be a new pool of roughly 350 cards, possibly with reprints from previous sets, possibly all new cards. Using reprints saves them on design time and helps keep decks balanced between sets.

It's also possible they just keep adding new cards with each set, and keep all old cards in the card pool as well, and then guarantee you'll get some # of the new cards? Or maybe not guarantee and just let the chips fall where they may? There's a lot of options and none so far have really satisfying answers.

One of the burning questions is: How do they incentivize players to buy the new decks with the new set? How many new cards do they need to make and how many need to be in each deck for players to get excited? What's better or different about these new cards?

Since there’ll be an app for tracking games, I could see them maybe removing a faction that either has the highest or lowest win percentage and subbing in a new faction for it. Then it can come back in a later set.

They can do new factions, but only bring back some of the old factions. So take 4 of the old set factions and 3 new ones. The old ones get a few reperints, but also some new stuff.