And when I say castle, I mean castle. It has Walls (resistance, swords, shields, spears, caltrops), built higher with parapets, fortified areas (and castle). It has sky knights, white knights, lietbur knights, valour knights, capeshan knights, foot infantry, benalish infantry, standing troops, deavenant archers and ballistas; it's a holy monastery, with abbey matrons, monks, and defenders of the faith, as well as abbey gargoyles and a couple of angels.
For the civilians, there's missionaries, harpists, healers, bureaucrats and moneychangers. There's also a king, his bodyguard, and a couple of guys leading the troops.
To stop unstoppable monsters, there's Runes of Protection, Gossamer Chains, Righteous Aura, and all kinds of magics. The holy folk of course have command of all kinds of enhancements for the troops, with holy armour, kithkin armour, holy strength, to name only a few.
All in all, the sucker comes to 540 cards. People don't believe it exists, and on top of that, they don't believe it actually wins.
Well, not all the time, of course, but its reasonable fair share, as long as it's in a suitable environment. It's slow, and doesn't do well at all in 1 on 1. Its strategy is to be too difficult to attack at any particular time, particularly when there's other people around threatening you and being a softer target. By the time enough others are disposed of to make it necessary to attack me, my walls are hopefully built, reinforced, enhanced, and I can stop just about anything you can throw at me; my troops will sally out to hit you, and then retreat to shelter behind the strong walls and eldritch protections.
Of course, with that many cards, you can't be sure of getting anything in particular, so there's a lot of repetition. I don't bother shuffling between games, I just toss aside the used section and use the rest. Shuffling it before games is an exercise.
It has a couple of interesting quirks. It's well-nigh immune to being mill-stoned, obviously, and in fact I even have cards whose use cost is to discard cards from my deck which I use with gay abandon. But also, it's got a soft protection from any card where someone searches through my deck to eliminate a card. Firstly, there's no individual card in my deck that is that critical. Nothing can be, because it's very unlikely I'll ever get it. But secondly, and this is a bit cruel, all those cards I've seen have as part of the requirement "reshuffle the deck afterwards". Go ahead. You reshuffle it.
No-ones ever used one of those cards on me, and I've never used any "Search my deck" cards myself (for the same reason).It's fun, no game with it is ever like the last, and it's far, far larger than needed or is even sane. So why did I do it?
Because it amused me.
