MTG Salvation

This is my 4th Horde I've built now. Over my time playing with hordes I've noticed that the standard horde of 100 is was way too easy. Decks would land stabilize and there was nothing anyone could do. So I've upped the hordes intensity and difficulty as this isn't intended for newer players but rather for my playgroup, a group of players who have been playing together for 3 years. This horde has some odd ways of playing and I will cover what we use as rules for each mode.

Mode 1: Standard Horde
This mode has normal horde rules:
Some ways we handle things for the horde:
- The players always have 40 life each to start, and get 3 turns to set up with no draw on the first turn.
- The horde deck always uses all 300 cards.
- If the horde takes damage, it mills that many cards.
- If the horde gains life, it gains a mill shield until beginning of the turn. The life shield maxes out at 20 life/cards.
- If the horde loses life, it can lower the health shield but will not mill cards.
- If the horde has to make a choice, and there is no determined way to handle that choice, it is chosen at random. (cards like browbeat for instance).

Mode 2:
Will edit later (10/5)




I waiting to test it a bit more to decide on numbers completely but I am currently content with how it plays. I'd love any feedback.

What does Exploration do in Horde? Allow an additional flip?

Also, Intimidation might be useful.

Cheers!

Exploration is actually to help the players. One extra land a turn helps without being too powerful for the players.

exploration is gonna be a HUGE step up for the players id imagine, and so is rest in piece. do you feel like the horde needs a neutering like that? i'd rather have the players pack the gy hate instead of the horde losing a card drawn. rip also neuters the horde's living death and zombie apocalypse. i think you should take rip out at least.

also, you might wanna add Patriarch's Bidding and have the horde always name zombie, and Tombstone Stairwell is gonna be pretty epic, more so if you take the rip out of the horde.

ive experimented with having identity crisis in my high-powered horde, and its been pretty good. we made it so it'd always hit the player with the juiciest graveyard.

How does exploration work? Does it go under a player's control or something? It doesn't help opponents normally, does it?

collective voyage seems like potential auto-lose for the horde deck. Dumping even something like 2 or 3 mana into it makes all the players so much farther ahead. It's also just such a big swingy effect. If it happens early in the game, the players can probably establish some pretty broken stuff (jumping to 7 or 8 mana from 4 or 5) and it does a lot less later in the game. If it is necessary to survive, I imagine it will be impossible to survive the games it doesn't flip over. If it isn't, then it might be too easy in the games where it flips over.

How do the emblems work? Is there any way to interact with them? A low-creature deck against an early narset emblem is not just going to be disrupted, it's going to not be fun at all. Hexproof from domri rade's emblem practically deletes the use of spot removal for creatures. Just rendering these cards dead without any possible kind of response (no remove target emblem afaik) just seems less fun. I'd rather run other, similar cards that aren't emblems - asceticism or boneknitter make the zombies regenerate indefinitely until those cards are removed. Rage reflection gives all the zombies double strike. Decree of silence locks opponents out unless they can run in a bunch of weaker spells.

Maybe you want the horde deck to be crazy like that, but it just seems like a few random flips could end the game immediately.

oh man I haven't updated this in forever. I will have an update tonight on the list and the Boss mode as Ive made many big changes to that.


Emblems are just considered permanents in the hordes aspect so they can be hit by any permanent removal such as Oblivion ring, Vindicate, beast within ect

if you're still interested in building up your horde, and have problems with scaling with the game, i came up with a pretty awesome tweak that really helped my horde.

Basically, you have some cards that are dedicated "amping up" cards (i used endless ranks of the dead). Whenever these cards are revealed/milled/however they are taken out of the library for the first time, you take ALL the zombie tokens that are sitting in the GY, and shuffle them back into the horde library. This means that instead of revealing say 2-3 tokens for your horde, it'd go up to say 5-6 tokens per turn. And then your next amping up card shifts it up to like 9-12 tokens a turn, and so on. it REALLY helped my horde ramp well with the players!
Also, consider that when the players try mill-killing the horde, they're becoming LESS effective with time, as they're milling more tokens than 'cards', which is i think thematic for a zombie apocalypse.

so you know, for my hardcore playgroup, i use 7 endless ranks for a 220-ish card horde, and for my seriously newbie playgroup, i think 3-4 endless ranks.