Everyone in the Keyforge community was rightfully ecstatic this past month when it was revealed that Ghost Galaxy was purchasing the Keyforge IP from Asmodee. However, while I am undoubtedly excited about what the purchase means for Keyforge’s future, that is not what I am going to focus on in this article. Instead, I want to take a look at the new spoilers that Ghost Galaxy dropped. It should be noted that there are major spoilers ahead, so please don’t read this article if you don’t want to see spoilers. Many thanks to Archon Arcana for making the spoiler images available so quickly!
Mk. 2 Generator
Before we talk about the Generator, or for that matter many of the spoiled cards, let’s make sure that everyone knows what a token is. To quote Aurore: “Every deck will have a token creature reference card, and every token the deck creates will be a copy of that creature. When you create a token creature you put the top card of your deck face down into play. It is yet unknown what happens to the card representing the token creature when it dies. There are two options: either it will return to the deck, or the much more likely one, it will be put into your discard. Assuming the latter, token creatures cycle your deck.”
Any artifact that gives you a free creature is a good artifact, even if the creature is just a token. How good this artifact is will largely depend on how good the tokens in your deck are. If you’re generating Merchants, this is pretty amazing. If you’re generating Politicians, Half Power Snufflegators, or Crappy Ardent Heroes, probably not as good. Also, how good did Poison Wave and Dark Wave just become?
Space Invaders
This card reminds me a lot of Martians Make Bad Allies. It seems like its main purpose is to cycle your hand, while creating a side benefit of putting tokens into play. Remember, in Keyforge you usually draw up to six cards at the end of your turn, so getting more cards out of your hand moves you through your deck faster and allows you to cycle to your more important cards. For a more thorough discussion of cycling in WoE, I encourage you to check out Aurore’s article on the topic.
Blorb Hive
This feels like a novelty card to me. It reminds me a lot of Epic Quest. It might sometimes go off, and people are sure going to try, but it’s not going to work very often. Unless you have some crazy token generation, it’s going to be very hard to have ten Blorbs survive. Also, the Hive is basically unusable against a deck with Kerwollop in it. I think it will have two major benefits if it sees play. The first is that it could force your opponent to fight to keep your Blorbs under control. The second is that it could force players to bring adequate mass removal to deal with it (or Reclaimed by Nature or “Borrow”, I suppose).
Echo Reflector
I really like this upgrade. It’s like a much better Quadracorder, except with fixed rules text. I suppose you could also look at it as a slightly better Jammer Pack. How good it is will really depend on how hard it is for your opponent to remove the creature it’s on. It obviously has more value on Yxilx Dominator type creatures that are very hard to remove from the board. That said, having Lieutenant Valmart’s ability always active is pretty darn good no matter what creature it’s on, especially since it can force a sudden Lash effect on an opponent, either making them pay a premium for a key or stopping them from forging entirely.
The Old Tinker
Between the Merchant token and The Old Tinker, it’s looking like the Compacts of Ekwidon may have absorbed some of the functions of Logos and Shadows. If that is the case, they are going to be a very powerful house, as efficiency and steal are two of the better effects in the game. The Old Tinker is essentially a slightly better Techno-Thief. He is slightly better because he doesn’t have the “If you do” text that Techno-Thief does. Otherwise, he is identical. With Auto-Encoder not in the set, this effect won’t necessarily be as good as it was in MM. However, hand cycling is always good, so The Old Tinker will be a card you will be happy to see in most decks.
Broken Axe Outpost
So far, so good for Brobnar being better than their last iteration in Worlds Collide. Being able to put a friendly creature with a good play effect back into your deck so it can be used again later is a good effect, and removing an enemy creature is a good effect, so this card fires on all cylinders. We don’t yet know the full rules on how tokens will work, but it’s possible that this effect will allow you to stick a token back in your deck if you didn’t want to lose the original card. I was also going to comment on how good the art was on this card, and then I realized that it was a BalanceSheet piece, so I was like, “Of course it’s good.”
Summary
I am not going to cover the tokens themselves until we know more about what other tokens will be available, but Aurore has some thoughts about tokens in general. All the cards that have been spoiled so far look good, though obviously they are going to need a lot more context before we can say how they will work within the entirety of WoE. As always, if you have any questions or comments, or just want to talk Keyforge, I can be reached on most Keyforge Discords or on TCO as SecondAct.
