GenCon 2020 just got started yesterday, and like everything else, it’s all online. Fantasy Flight Games held their livestream event with employees all masked but no less excited to share what they would have revealed had GenCon actually been a thing that people could attend in person.
One of their more exciting announcements was a brand new set to arrive for KeyForge, the very much not-Magic card game that has you purchase pre-made decks to play rather than randomized packs of individual cards.
As a quick refresher, KeyForge is yet another game made by Magic: The Gathering designer Richard Garfield, but Garfield came at KeyForge with the intent of solving one of Magic’s failings. Since Magic sells individual cards, there’s a secondary market for Magic where certain cards are prohibitively expensive and this excludes players that just can’t afford those cards. In KeyForge, you don’t buy individual cards. Instead, you buy pre-made decks that cannot be changed after purchase. This means there’s no deck construction and no way to sell individual cards on a secondary market.
Although there are a limited number of cards in KeyForge, each deck is premade by Fantasy Flight Games according to an algorithm. No two decks are exactly the same, and each deck is uniquely marked so that you can’t mix and match cards to make your own deck. There are billions of possible deck combinations out there, and Fantasy Flight is about to make billions more with the upcoming Dark Tidings expansion to KeyForge.
Dark Tidings introduces 250 new cards, a brand new house, and several new mechanics to KeyForge. Unfathomable is replacing Dis as the house of discard and forcing unfortunate choices on your opponent, gaining control of the board through evil tricks. They’ll be one of the three random houses that can make up a deck in Dark Tidings.
The new tide mechanic will also change the way cards are played depending on whether or not it’s “high” or “low tide.” Cards that use the tide mechanic will have two forms that you swap between depending on the tide, and players will be incentivized to keep the tide where they want it for certain abilities.
And finally, Evil Twin decks will be identical to already existing decks, but with new backings and card names. Said to be “dark reflections of other decks,” they’ll also have “evil twin” versions of specific cards that are more powerful but at a price.
Dark Tidings arrives February of 2021 with a new two-player starter set, deluxe decks, and archon decks.
Source: Fantasy Flight Games
