Peering into the Void with Return of the Fallen
By Brian Kibler
One of the best things about designing cards for an expansion to a game is that you have a whole lot more information than you had when making the original game. Making Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer was a task that involved a lot of people, but not nearly as many as have played the game since. I may have played hundreds of games myself, but even that many games doesn’t give me nearly as much insight into what players enjoy as watching those players actually, you know, playing the game. Once the game is out in the wild, you get to see which cards are fan favorites, what strategies people lean toward, and generally what parts of the game people enjoy the most.
Unsurprisingly, people seem to have the most fun playing Ascension when they’re doing Cool Things ™. I’ve heard my share of Ascension war stories and been tagged in my share of Ascension pictures on Facebook, and they invariably involve things like one player with nearly every Mechana construct in play or copying Master Dhartha with Twofold Askara. Ascension is a deckbuilding game, and people love to build powerful decks.
These are only good stories, however, because they don’t happen every game. If assembling The Grand Design, Hedron Link Device, Hedron Cannon, and a half dozen other Mechana constructs was commonplace, it wouldn’t be nearly as exciting when it happened. If someone banished every starting card they had and drew through their deck every turn of every game, it would get real old real quick.
One of the tools we included in the first set to help break up these combos was banishing. Cards that allow players to banish cards from the center row, like Seer of the Forked Path, or the rewards on Mephit and Mistake of Creation, help give players control over what cards their opponents have available to buy. Center row control is one of the finer points of Ascension strategy, and we felt the inclusion of a lot of banishing effects was an important element for the initial release of the game.
One side effect of having so many banish effects, especially on low cost heroes and monsters, is that games in which a lot of them come up can be very frustrating for the players who don’t have access to them. If one player is pursuing a power heavy strategy and is able to buy Seer of the Forked path and keep killing Mephits and Mistakes, his opponents are unlikely to get many shots at the cards they really want for their own decks. There’s few things sadder than watching Master Dhartha and Muramasa get banished right before your turn when you have seven runes in hand!
Enter Return of the Fallen. The story of the set involves Samael’s return from the brink of nothingness to wreck havoc on the realm once again. The barriers between this world and the Void have grown thin – and Samael is not the only one who can take advantage of that. You can too!
If you’ve been paying attention to our previews, you’ve already seen Reclamax. The Mechana’s newest dimension-breaching toy, Reclamax allows you to acquire constructs that have been sent to the Void. Hedron Link Device came up early and fell victim to an angry Mephit? No worries – you can get it back online and operational in a matter of moments!
The Mechana aren’t the only ones who have managed to find a way to pierce the veil between worlds. The Lifebound honor their heroes – even those who have taken an untimely trip to the Void. Serpentcall is a new Lifebound construct that not only provides two runes each turn, but lets you bring those heroes back from the Void to fight for you!
While both Serpentcall and Reclamax are most often used to reclaim heroes and constructs that your opponents have sent to the Void, they have an amusing synergy with banish effects themselves. If you have Serpentcall and you’re afraid of someone else buying a hero that you want, you can banish it yourself and leave it in the void. “Putting it away for safe keeping”, as we called it in playtesting.
Last, but certainly not least, is the Void’s faction’s contribution. It should come as no surprise that the masters of banishing can manipulate their home territory with the best of them, and Sadranis, Dark Emissary is an absolute beast of a hero. Normally your opponents can rest easy if they banish Xeron, Duke of Lies, but no one is safe when Sadranis, Dark Emissary is around. Kill Avatar of the Fallen…and then kill him again? Don’t mind if I do!
Return of the Fallen was a ton of fun to make, and I’m looking forward to seeing the world get a chance to play with it. Remember…the Void is no one’s final resting place anymore!
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