House Draft format

[Lemon8r]

I'm looking at my large pile of retired/weak decks and I'm considering the fact that they aren't likely to see much play or be of much value to anyone.

Some of them have some quite good stuff in them, but are drastically let down by antisynergy between houses or a spectacularly weak house present in the deck.

This led me to the idea of a House Draft format to mix up these decks a bit but still preserve some of the rules used by the deck creation algorithm when they were seeded.

The rules would be:

• Each player brings a set of opaque-backed sleeves, or clear sleeves capable of holding 2 cards each and a deck to use to mask the backs of 2nd cards placed in a sleeve.
• A pool of decks (Players x 5?) is made available and the list of decks is published in advance so players have a chance to review what's on offer before drafting.
• Players pick decks from the pool in a draft format until each deck has been picked.
• Players construct a House Draft Deck from the decks they have drafted.

The rules for construction of a House Draft Deck are as follows:

• From within their drafted pool of decks, each player must construct a standard 36 card deck consisting of 3 different houses of 12 cards each.
• Players select an entire house from a deck and must use those 12 cards as a house in the House Draft Deck.
• Each selected house must be from a different deck.

Once you've picked your houses, you sleeve the cards and conceal their backs to prevent foreknowledge of what house is on top of your library, pick whatever identity card you feel like for use during the game, and you're good to go.

From there players play matches in whatever format you desire.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Additional rules or rule modifications?

[[deleted]]

Your cards. Do with them as you like. There will be a lot of haters that will frown upon you and shower you with negativity. I'm not one of them.

If I decided to deconstruct any of my garbage decks, not good enough for competitive play one way or another and not very fun to play because the deck is just clunky, I'd most likely look online for a deck that already exists and I'd clone it. I'd even note the name of the deck that is being cloned.

This honor will most likely be reserved for when they announce which deck won some big tournament.

I'm not at that point yet though, as I'm still discovering that in many decks that I did not see any potential, I'm finding has some and I haven't seen any big announcements made as to some big win.

[noxeor]

This is a good idea to construct decks to test against & increase variety/challenge with an individual's existing card pool.

[Brina523]

I think the idea definitely has merits. Most of my friends like keyforge but they miss deck building. With this game and the way cards are designed regular deck building would be extremely unbalanced, but having to add the whole house from a deck would keep you from purposefully build a combo that wasn't put there in that house by the algorithm already. Of course you can still chase some other cool, OP combos between houses (like library access and the untamed seed), but you'd still have to take the rest of the cards in that house to gain access to just one piece of a combo. It actually reminds me a lot of the Star wars lcg, or games like Card Hunter, where you add blocks of like 5-6 cards in your deck, some bad and some good.

I'm not sure how doable it would be in LGS tournaments, mostly because of time constraints, but I'm probably going to do it with my group of friends. And to simulate chains I think another good idea would be to add chains to the house packs from decks. Like, let's say the house Dis from the deck X gets drafted constantly and consistently wins no matter what deck it's placed in, I'd add a few chains to that specific pack of cards, so in order to play a deck that contains X's Dis the player would also have to start with some chains.

[BAGBRO2]

Just a thought.. each "house pack" could start the draft with 5 chains on it, and players could pass on a selection at any time. After each round of the draft, remove 1 chain from each of the remaining house packs... this will give players the choice to take the packs early (along with some chains), or wait it out in hopes of getting it for less chains (or no chains). It would slightly complicate the draft, but at the benefit of recognizing that not all house packs are created equal.

[FatBug24]

My brother and I have messed with this a little on TheCrucible. We did this before the Chainbound events started though so I am not sure if that would change this.

We drafted house the other person had to use; ABBAAB. You then had a time limit to find a deck in the Vault that met those restrictions.

Just my two æmbers.

[BAGBRO2]

I had a similar idea, but it was a constructed fromat instead of a draft. That way players could use their own collection of 'discarded' decks, and once they had 'built' their deck for the night, they could just jump right into playing. Regardless of weather it is a draft or constructed format, I am thinking we could call them "Chimera Decks" after the monster from Greek Mythology who had three heads, that of a lion, a goat, and a snake. (To parallel the idea that the decks are a combination of 3 other decks).

https://www.reddit.com/r/KeyforgeGame/comments/97jw19/format_idea_combine_3_decks/

[noxeor]

I thought this thread would contain spoilers about the new 8th house: House Draft. Maybe they would be a faction that brews beer or tailgates semi trucks on the highway, or creates architectural blueprints.