R&D Journal
What Happens in Ohio…
by Nate French
Welcome back to the Clash of Arms spoiler series. This is an interesting article for me to write, as I'll be visiting my family in Cleveland Ohio, next week, when the time for Luke to post it on the website arrives. So it will be a bit of a throwback experience as I log on to the internet every morning, hoping for the latest bit of news on the game, and then get together with the old meta in the evening to talk about the latest "Card of the Week" and play some multiplayer Thrones.
With that in mind, I need to carefully decide on which card I want to show you, as it will be the card I get to read about from the cozy comforts of my hometown. Will I be in the mood for a Pyromancer's Cache? Or will I be having a Longship Foamdrinker kind of day? Or perhaps I'll want to appease my aggressive tendencies by reading about the Maester of War? They're all intriguing possibilities, but at the end of the day (it's 5:02 as I type this sentence) I can't resist showing you one of the new "mega-armies." Two if you're lucky.
Why the mega-armies? Well, for one, A Clash of Arms is after all the follow-up expansion to the Five Kings Edition base set, and I wanted to select a card that directly tied into one of the thematic mechanics of that set. The new mega-armies all have positive synergy with the King and Queen traits, which received a pretty high profile in the base set. Secondly, the name of the set is A Clash of Arms, and its focus is war, and what kind of war would we have without any armies to fight it?
The History of the Mega-Army
The Host of the Isles. The Great Khalasar. The Great Host. The idea of a "mega-army" first entered the game in the Ice & Fire base set, and with it came an impact we immediately felt. In the Westeros block, armies were for the most part big, clunky, expensive, inefficient monstrosities that no player worth the gold on a Lannisport Moneylender would play in a tournament deck. The Ice & Fire Mega-Armies changed this perception forever.
Here were cards that forced a reaction from your opponent when they hit the table, cards that every player had to take into account, cards that could easily become the focal point of an entire game, and maybe even the focal point of an entire area's metagame! Sure, they were still an investment in how you played the game (it took some effort to establish them in a relatively secure environment) and in deck-building (their cost demanded that you play higher gold plots, and more resource cards), but these were finally investments worth making. Mega-armies won challenges, they won games, and sometimes they even won tournaments. Why bother with the chisel, when a sledgehammer has this kind of potential?
Since the Ice and Fire mega-armies, there have been a number of cycles of impressive, table-thumping armies. We had the trait-based self-cost reducers in the Valyrian edition base set, and the double threat of the 7 STR for 7 gold and the cost efficient doomed cycles in the Song of Night expansion. The Five King's Edition base set took the Warhost of the North-like notion that "once you reach a certain value, it doesn't make any significant practical difference what a card's STR is" to an all new level of cost efficiency with its own 10 STR and a big ability for 6 gold cycle.
With no disrespect to all the other army cycles, it is the original template, with its smooth 8 gold for 8 STR identity, that will hold the sweet spot as the point from which all things mega-army originated. Therefore, it was the natural choice as a starting point for a cycle of armies in the set that is all about armies. From there, we kept an eye on the current mega-army identity (the hordes and hosts and such of the Fike Kings Edition), and came up with the cross-cycle mechanic of having their cost cut in half if you control a King or Queen character. And so the Clash of Arms mega-armies are something of a hybrid that takes the best of the old, and brings it up to date with a nod towards the new. As you can see, they have some pretty impressive abilities as well, especially if you can get away with only paying 4 gold!
King Robb's Host is a rather straightforward card that lends an appreciative nod to its (overpowered?) ancestor, The Great Host. Without going quite so over the top, the card should still compete for deck space in any Stark deck that wants to take advantage of the House's natural military strenght and the "Kings and Queens" synergy of the 5KE base set.
Where King Robb's Host is straightforward, King Balon's Host is forward-looking. Once the Kings of control, the mighty Greyjoys have watched in silent fury as their tricks were pilfered and appropriated by the land-dwelling thieves. Not being content to merely take back what is theirs, the Kings of Salt and Rock and Denial have been rather busy in their attempts to come up with new means of preventing their enemies from pursuing their goals. Keyword denial is just the beginning of the House's renewed interest in one of their oldest tactics.
With that, I think I'm going to break out my Greyjoy deck, and slide in a couple proxies of King Balon's Host for the hometown mutliplayer session that will follow my reading of this article. I'd come back later and tell you all about it, but you know what they say: "What happens in Ohio, stays in Ohio."
Till then, happy shuffling!
