Hi All,

i picked up four KeyForge decks last week and have spent a few hours with the game. Overall I really enjoy it and I am pretty comfortable with the randomizes deck concept. But there are some challenges.

One of my four decks, the “please pronounce this carefully” titled ‘Childsen of Ponderdrik’ is a Dis, Mars, Shadows deck. As it happens, the Dis rare card Sacrificial Altar is in this deck. (Sweet!). This card lets you purge a friendly human to play a card out of your discard pile. You can already probably see the punchline here. Although there are some humans in Shadows, this deck doesn’t have any. So there are zero friendly humans in the deck.

So this rare card has no value at all in the deck. That’s kind of a bummer. Have they made any official statement about this type of situation?

All four of my decks went 50/50 in our playtesting so I wouldn’t say poor Childsen is a bad deck because of it. But it is an obvious and somewhat frustrating flaw in the system.

It happens. Current best guess is that the algorithm considers 'has an aember on it' to be the minimum inclusion criterion. Or that there's a mistake with this card specifically.

Its not bad though, it gets an aember and prunes itself out of your deck.

It still feels bad to get this and no humans, even with the amber. I actually do think its an error.

Yikes. Not ideal at all...

At least the game is made in a way to reduce the disadvantage from that situation. You could always discard that card and refill your hand. The concept of card advantage from other games, most notably MTG, is completely changed by the way Garfield designed Keyforge. No mana system and hands always full will allow players to get more aggresive with mulligans for opening hands and also discard card more often.

I think a "key" feature to this game is understanding what your deck can do and don't hold cards that will not help you. Most games go through big chunks if not all cards of the deck, so you'll need to be smart about your resources. Can't wait for my order to arive D:

Sacrificial Altar does not have no value at all, it still gives you an Æmber on playing it. It is a subpar, not useless card that unlike other subpar cards has the courtesy of removing itself from your deck for possible reshuffles.

Do you have the Dis card that takes control of an opponent’s creature? I could see it doing a combo with that, but even then it would be situational.

We need an official "I have a deck with Sacrificial Altar and no humans" thread. There have been so many complaints about this....

6 minutes ago, twinstarbmc said:

We need an official "I have a deck with Sacrificial Altar and no humans" thread. There have been so many complaints about this....

It is the most prevalent algorithm screw-up, but not really an issue. It is dissapointing, but doesn't make the deck worse than any other subpar card does, in fact thanks to it being an Æmber-generating card, it is on the higher end of the subpar-card-spectrum.

Uh, Dude, you have Snudge. " Fight/Reap: Return an artifact or flank creature to its owner's hand." I know that the other options there are sexier, but you have a way to Reap (gaining 1), return it (Sacrificial Alter) to your hand, play Sacrificial Alter and gain an additional aember.

It's not guaranteed, and again there are almost always better options with Snudge, but that loop is there.

Same thing with those 2 Vezyma Thinkdrones " Reap: You may archive a friendly creature or artifact from play."

I have this deck

Sage Ricardo Fleecelash[Dis/Logos/Untamed]

# ofLogos creatures 5, #of them scientist 4.

Untamed card

Curiosity

Play : Destroy each Scientist creature.

1 hour ago, 10Ten said:

I have this deck

Sage Ricardo Fleecelash[Dis/Logos/Untamed]

# ofLogos creatures 5, #of them scientist 4.

Untamed card

Curiosity

Play : Destroy each Scientist creature.

Does your Dis card pool have Soul Snatcher (Dis Artifact-Each time a creature is destroyed, its owners gains 1[aember]) in it?

nah.

Just got a deck with the useless Altar.

Arnaldr Bustok from the Prince's Gateway

The rest seems decent. Too bad this wasn't almost anything else.

46 minutes ago, AlphaMonolith said:

Just got a deck with the useless Altar.

Arnaldr Bustok from the Prince's Gateway

The rest seems decent. Too bad this wasn't almost anything else.

Yeah

Library of the Damned

or

Life Ward

in that deck would be Aces

Thanks @Duciris , I will look out for the opportunity to use the Snudge combo.

I rescind my statement that the card is “useless.” The card text is useless.

As I said in the original post, it’s not terribly deleterious for the deck. But it does kind of feel bad that you can’t use the text. For reasons that are not rational it’s kind of worse that it’s a rare and potentially very useful card if you do have lots of humans. Intellectually I know that this kind of thing is unavoidable with a semi random faction and semi random card distribution game. But this is just so immediately obvious that it stands out.

I think this is the most obvious and common outright algorithm fail. We were promised this wouldn't happen as the algorithm was designed to reject decks if a card needed another card that wasn't there. There was a video from prereleased decks about the alter complaining about it. The developer said it was a mistake on discord when told about it, said they knew about it and were going to fix it. And here it is, still in released decks. I assume the printing machinery was too far along to stop it, but hopefully it goes away in any future printings.

Definitely feels bad. Though I am willing to bet that most decks have at least one card that is rarely used or doesn't provide much value across most games that is at least as bad as a dead altar, if less noticeable. Even with a single human in the deck it wouldn't be useful in every game.

I have the deck “Wilton of Tillycube” that has epic quest. I have 4 creatures in sanctum... which isn’t good, but ok... to get it to work though, I can’t put down any of my 3 Hallowed Blasters or it’s near impossible to pull of. Also in that deck I have troop call with only one Niffle...

My personal guess is that the algorithm doesn't take Traits into the equation

I'm pretty sure there are some forced Keywords

Bear Flute decks should always have an Ancient Bear
Troop Call decks should always have at least 1 Niffle Creature

but I guess they figured Human is such a common keyword, that there was no way it wouldn't appear at least once

If it has secondary uses, maybe they figured it’s still a usable card

6 minutes ago, Talamare said:

My personal guess is that the algorithm doesn't take Traits into the equation

I'm pretty sure there are some forced Keywords

Bear Flute decks should always have an Ancient Bear
Troop Call decks should always have at least 1 Niffle Creature

but I guess they figured Human is such a common keyword, that there was no way it wouldn't appear at least once

Or it was simply a mistake that made it to print. Even the best development teams drop the ball on occasion.

3 hours ago, WonderWAAAGH said:

Or it was simply a mistake that made it to print. Even the best development teams drop the ball on occasion.

I mean, you're implying that they are individually making every deck... It makes more sense that they have a deck making algorithm, and the algorithm isn't taking Traits in the equation for that card.

9 hours ago, Talamare said:

I mean, you're implying that they are individually making every deck... It makes more sense that they have a deck making algorithm, and the algorithm isn't taking Traits in the equation for that card.

No no, I just meant the inclusion of the human tribe in Altar's text. I'm assuming it was put there for thematic reasons, development didn't catch how problematic it is, and it made it into print when it really shouldn't have. Sometimes theme has to concede to playability, and this is very much one of those times.

On 11/27/2018 at 1:08 PM, BigBadAndy said:

Hi All,

i picked up four KeyForge decks last week and have spent a few hours with the game. Overall I really enjoy it and I am pretty comfortable with the randomizes deck concept. But there are some challenges.

One of my four decks, the “please pronounce this carefully” titled ‘Childsen of Ponderdrik’ is a Dis, Mars, Shadows deck. As it happens, the Dis rare card Sacrificial Altar is in this deck. (Sweet!). This card lets you purge a friendly human to play a card out of your discard pile. You can already probably see the punchline here. Although there are some humans in Shadows, this deck doesn’t have any. So there are zero friendly humans in the deck.

So this rare card has no value at all in the deck. That’s kind of a bummer. Have they made any official statement about this type of situation?

All four of my decks went 50/50 in our playtesting so I wouldn’t say poor Childsen is a bad deck because of it. But it is an obvious and somewhat frustrating flaw in the system.

Why dont you contact FFG support and maybe they will replace it ?
(and fix the mistake, if there is one?!)

I actually found myself in an interesting situation last week due to Sacrificial Altar and Pocket Universe.

So I tend to put Silent Dagger on my Nexus for the powerful reap combo when I can. Last week one of my opponents countered this trick with Pocket Universe, which forced me to pay 1 Aember to Pocket Universe anytime I wanted to use Nexus to reap, because the reap ability isn't optional and forced me to use an opponent's artifact. Pocket Universe was the only enemy artifact in play.

Likewise, another opponent, who saw this, used Sacrificial Altar to counter Nexus from reaping, otherwise I would have to purge my Bad Penny and not be able to Needle combo anymore, or worse, my human scientists.

I am constantly amazed at the toolbox this game offers.

You know, that is actually a rather valid point. If the altar is the only artifact on the board, then opposing decks can fall into a trap of not being able to reap with some creatures or use certain cards just for amber because of the collateral damage the alter can cause. That is a fascinating 'use' of the card.