• June 1st, 2009
  • March of the Lieutenants

Hello again Chaotic fans, and welcome to another week of Forged Unity previews!  It’s been great to see the excitement on the forums about the upcoming set, as well as all of the speculation about what’s going to be in it.  Only a few more weeks until the pre-releases where you’ll be able to get your hands on the new cards for the first time!

Last week I showed you Tangath Toborn and Gorram, two of the four Generals who are leading the fight of a united Perim against the M’arrilian invaders.  The Generals either gain or give out abilities based on the specific tribes within your army.  As the leaders of the united Perim forces, they draw on the particular strengths of each tribe to fight against the M’arrilians.  This week, we’re going to take a look at another rank in the leadership of the multi-tribe effort – the Lieutenants, as well as some of the rank and file soldiers.  

     

As I mentioned last week, we had a lot of ideas about the different ways we could reward multi-tribe decks.  With the Generals we chose to call out each tribe and give abilities based on which ones the player included in his army.  The Lieutenants, on the other hand, don’t care about the specific tribes you play with – they just care about how many.  Let’s look at each of these cards individually.

Nivenna was an obvious choice for one of the Lieutenants.  After all, her twin Aivenna is a member of the OverWorld!  Just like her previous version, Lieutenant Nivenna is a powerful Muge, coming with three MC.  Her direct damage ability is certainly nothing to sneeze at, hitting for 5 damage for each tribe you control.  Unlike the Generals, the Lieutenants get a boost from having a M’arrilian in your army, so all of their abilities max out at counting five tribes.  That means in a fully multi tribe deck, Nivenna can deal twenty-five damage for 2 MC!  If you get more MC on her with something like a  Mipedian Balladeer’s Flute or Mugician’s Lyre, she can use the ability twice for fifty damage!  We weren’t kidding around when we said we were looking to encourage multi-tribe armies in this set.

The Danian Lieutenant, Kepiaan, is a lot more straightforward in his use, but no less powerful or exciting.  Kepiaan is of the Nimmei school of Danians, getting an additional 10 Energy and 10 to all Disciplines for each tribe in your army.  With an all dryland army you can get him up to 80 Energy, and if you fit a devious M’arrillian in there, he’s 90 across the board!  There aren’t many creatures in the game that can compare to those numbers.  While your opponents can take him down a peg with every creature they defeat in your army, he’s certainly a force to be reckoned with, and definitely a strong incentive to play multi-tribe.

What are the best ways to put these Lieutenants to work?  Well, that’s up to you to find out.  I assure you that we’ve had some very cool, very powerful armies that have included one or more Lieutenants.  One of my favorite decks during Forged Unity development was actually built around abusing Nivenna’s power teamed up with her twin – who you’ll have to wait for the pre-release to see!  And before you start wondering how an ability that counts tribes can be worth building a deck around if you only have two creatures in play, just remember that there’s a whole lot of cards you haven’t seen yet.  What kind of set designed around multi-tribe decks wouldn’t have ways to mess with the tribes of your creatures?

The last kind of multi-tribe matters creatures I’m going to show you from Forged Unity is what I like to call the “plays well with others” cycle.  These creatures, like the Generals, care about whether you control a creature of a specific other tribe rather than the number of tribes you have.  One of the reasons we decided to do this particular cycle is because we didn’t want all of the multi tribe decks to always be 4 or 5 tribes.  There are a lot more potential combinations out there if we encourage not only decks with as many tribes as possible, but also OverWorld/Underworld or Danian/Mipedian decks. 

What we did for the “plays well with others” cycle is look at each of the tribes and figure out what mechanics they have in common with each other.  For instance, both OverWorld and Mipedians care about the first attack in combat, as we see in Lomma’s defensive ability and the ever-present Strike ability in Mipedians.  Similarly, both Danians and UnderWorlders have mechanics that look at unequipped creatures, because of the Danians’ brawler theme and the UnderWorlders’ battlegear destruction.  Put these themes together and you get these preview cards:

     

There’s one of these kind of creatures for each dryland tribe that pairs with each other dryland tribe.  I’ll leave it to you to figure out how best to use these and to speculate what the rest of them might be!

That’s as many secrets as I’m allowed to tell in one week.  Come back next week for a look at two creatures we have in store for players who want to stay loyal to their tribes.  I assure you that preview will be one that no Chaotic fan will want to miss!

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