I recently heard about the Horde format from a link on Facebook, and it has been on my thoughts the majority of the time since I heard about it last night.
One of the first things I started thinking about was how to increase the difficulty of the format. I was thinking of four difficulty levels: Easy, Normal, Hard, and Apocalypse.
The first method to distinguish them was to increase the quantity of more powerful cards, replacing the weaker cards for more copies of the stronger ones as difficulty increased. This method can be a bit complicated, though.
The second method is a "global enchantment" sort of approach, where, for instance the Horde could have some enchantment effect where creatures opponents' control that are put into the graveyard are exiled instead, and a 2/2 Zombie token is given to the Horde. This is more simple than the first approach.
If anyone has any input on this or anything else, please pipe up!
I'll report back here once I've actually gotten a Horde deck put together, and have played it some.
I've been play testing for a little over 2 weeks with 1-4 players and find it quite enjoyable. There are of course scaling issues as players increase. but the cards you put in the horde deck can scale for powerlevel as well.
Right now we have a few solution:
(1) lower turns to prepare: normal is 3 turns. reduce to 2 turns for 3 players. 1 turn for 4 players.
(2) For larger groups 3-4 players we added an archenemy set (1 of each) to the pair making the horde the archenemy of course and any "choosing" it does is as random as possible. that works alright, but we can still stabilize pretty easily. also loses some flavor.
(3) A more effective route we've been testing (Again for larger 3-4 player groups) is we split the horde deck into two 50 card decks and use them simultainiously. So you get 2 non-token cards flipped per horde turn. that also works pretty well. and we're trying more of this sort of thing since it's more effective than archenemy. victory is still kill both decks, and kill the zombies in play to win. with multiple decks we also use multiple finishing bosses. 1 boss being phage the untouchable, the other being Sutured Ghoul so when a deck depletes we put one of these onto the field. If you choose to attack the horde you need to pick a deck to mill from. This adds a bit more strategy to attacking as your probably don't want both bosses out at the same time.
My goal is to not make modifications to the cards in the deck. but instead how many cards are used, and preptime before they start attacking. The final result should be simple changes so that reguardless of the number of players there is roughly a 50/50 chance of victory or defeat.
current testing model for playsize:
1 player - 40 cards total. 1 deck (1 boss). 3 prep turns
2 player - 60 cards total. 1 deck (1 boss). 3 prep turns.
3 player - 80 cards total. 2 decks (2 bosses). 2 prep turns.
4 player - 100 cards total. 2 decks (2 bosses). 1 prep turn.
I have some questions for you:
Are you using the list provided by Mr. Knudson, or did you make up your own?
What is the average power level of the Survivors' decks?
About how many times have the Survivors won/lost?
Are you using the list provided by Mr. Knudson, or did you make up your own?
• I'm using a modified list simular to Knudson's. There is a link in my tag if your interested.
What is the average power level of the Survivors' decks?
• I'm not sure how to answer this question. I'd say moderately high. The horde deck can be changed depending on your groups power level, if your worried.
About how many times have the Survivors won/lost?
•I haven't been keeping tally but this is my estimate. We've done alot more 1-2 player games than 3-4 players. Cards like Army of the Damned are hard to overcome unless well prepared in a small set of survivors.
1 player - 30-40% win
2 player - 50% win
3 player - 75% win
4 player - 80% win
What is the average power level of the Survivors' decks?
• I'm not sure how to answer this question. I'd say moderately high. The horde deck can be changed depending on your groups power level, if your worried.
What decks specifically have been used?
For instance my casual group's power level would be:
1-2 x modified precon level
1-2 x Standard level (Mono-Red, UW Control)
1-2 x Legacy level (Goblins, Dredge, Survival)
We're all legecy level I guess you would consider. custom made decks with very valuable cards. We're all older gents with large collections, we've been playing for 10+ years now.
My Horde deck is currently pretty powerful due to this. The Issue with power level we're hitting is that if We increase the power of the Horde deck too much it makes 1-2 player horde challenging. But balances 3-4 player horde.
I feel like the starting life for survivors need to be modified a little. The rule 20 life per player seems off. 20 life is good for solo, but 80 life for 4 players seems a bit much. I'm testing out 10 life per player + 10 extra life this weekend with my playgroup.
1 player - 20 life
2 player - 30 life
3 player - 40 life
4 player - 50 life
I love the idea of this format, so I'm working on an Elemental Horde deck in 5 colour (primarily red). The base token is the 3/1 Elemental from Morningtide. There's a smattering of the 7/1 haste trample guy from Zendikar, the 7/7 trample token from Elves vs Goblins, and the 5/5 flyer from Eventide. The support cards are based around taking advantage of their high power and low toughness - i.e. Furnace of Rath, In the Web of War (I don't give everyone in the Horde haste), Wildfire, Shared Animosity and their ultimate kill card, Anthem of Rakdos (a 3/1 swings for 10 with this out, at the cost of one card milled from the Horde deck).
I'm ok with making the horde deck really strong. I'm considering building a dedicated antihorde deck with Wall of Razors, Cunning Sparkmage and Basilisk Collar. I think 20 + 10 per player seems like a fair deal.
I've been messing around with Horde for a few days now, running a Tooth and Flame deck (just a name to compensate for the lack of proper theme really - for the large part it's just huge vanilla beatsticks). It seems that for more than three players, it becomes really hard for the Horde to keep up, especially with things like battle cry and other beatdown decks.
I've tweaked the rules a bit to allow for things like flashback and certain abilities, but these I've generally found useful:
Magma Phoenix - being able to get this back every turn and devastating when killed, they've proven very dangerous in many games. I wouldn't recommend more than two of these, especially if you use things like Wildfire and Gale Force.
Spider Spawning/Scourge Devil - This is something that can make reckless attacking into the horde extremely dangerous.
Rolling Tremblor - Similar to the previous ones, not something you want to mill. Forces weenie/token decks to play more carefully.
Boneyard Wurm/Scourge of Geier Reach - the game will usually reach a point where any new creatures can immediately be taken out. Absurdly large creatures can sometimes help this stalemate.
Coalhauler Swine - Hitting something like this in a big multiplayer can quickly swing things in the Horde's favor.
Garruk's Packleader - I wouldn't recommend this unless you use a lot of small tokens (Goblins, Wolves etc.), but it can provide the horde with huge momentum. Lead the Stampede is a more lightweight version of this.
*/* tokens - these are actually really great for changing the difficulty level. For one player, we use a D6 to determine its p/t; a D10 for two, D12 for three, and D20 for four or more players.
Oh, and 2/2 Mitotic Ooze tokens. Lots and lots of splitting Ooze tokens
I've found all these cards to add really interesting to the Horde. I'll be interested to see what other ideas people find (I really like the idea of having two hordes, or a split horde, for larger games).
DOUBLE TAP:
in larger multiplayer games wrath effects are too common and make the game to easy. So we modified it. the FIRST wrath effects are still normal to players, however the Horde only loses 50% of their creature base. So to completely wipe the Horde's board in a single turn 2 wrath effects will need to be played. This was cleaverly called the DOUBLE TAP.
STARTING LIFE:
we used 20 + 10 per player. 20 wasn't enough for single player, and 80 was too much for 4 players.
1 player = 30
2 player = 40
3 player = 50
4 player = 60
HOW WE MODIFIED FLASHBACK:
after much testing flashback seems to be easiest determined when the flashback happens the turn after it was originally cast. I guess it essentially work more like rebound from the Rise of the eldrazi. When a flashback carded is milled it is cast the next turn.
LIFELINK AND LIFE GAIN:
some cards like soul warden or putting lifelink on a huge beater tend to break the game a little in the survivor's favor. We're having debates if it really maters. your thoughts?
11 match results:
all these matches had all 100 horde cards to help determin how easy it was to win. current horde deck is posted in my tag.
-----
(1) 1 player: LOST: -8/100 total : Plague Wind = last flipped
(2) 1 player: LOST: -25/100 total: Fleshbag Maurader = last flipped
(3) 1 player: WON: -100/100 total:
(4) 2 Player: LOST: -100/100 total: Phage (final boss) + cover of darkness
(5) 2 player: WON: -100/100 total:
(6) 2 player: LOST: -16/100 total: Army of the damned = last flipped
(7) 2 player: WON: -100/100 total:
(8) 3 player: LOST: -16/100 total: Twilights call = last flipped
(9) 3 player: WON: -100/100 total:
(10) 3 player: WON: -100/100 total:
(11) 3 player: LOST: -25/100 total: Fleshbag marauder = last flipped
A bit of proof evidencing the Horde format spike in popularity: Death Baron's price on magiccards.info being at ~8 USD.
Wasn't Death Baron at most 2-3 USD before?
I imagine foil Horde staples are going to go the way of foil EDH staples and cost an arm and a leg (how fitting, no?).
Death Baron's rise seemed to coincide with Zombies' popularity as a tribe and the welt of new Zombies in INN. He's being looked at in Modern too if I understand correctly.
Horde isn't a big enough format to affect prices yet - EDH was pretty huge before the prices of staples began to get to where they are now.
---
I like your rules, Caprinicus - but I am thinking that it might be fairer for a high total to be assigned to less survivors, rather than more? Merely increasing the Horde deck size does not increase the challenge significantly for many players.
Something like:
One player: 100 life
Two players: 70 life
Three players: 50 life
Four players: 40 life
Might well be a reasonable scaling factor against a strong Horde deck. It would reduce the need to remove part of the Horde deck depending on the number of players and make things a bit fairer.
One player: 100 life
Two players: 70 life
Three players: 50 life
Four players: 40 life
Might well be a reasonable scaling factor against a strong Horde deck. It would reduce the need to remove part of the Horde deck depending on the number of players and make things a bit fairer.
That might work, I'll have to try it out.
The thing I've found with Horde is that it's an incredibly quick format (for multiplayer formats at least - I don't have much experience with anything else). The life total usually just puts a clock on how fast you need to set up a defense by, after which it becomes pretty easy to win. I think the life total may not present as much of an issue as the constitution of the deck itself - I've started playing Burning Sands in my horde, and am pleased at how it still poses difficult combats later in the game.
The thing I've found with Horde is that it's an incredibly quick format (for multiplayer formats at least - I don't have much experience with anything else).
I've been working on this. The one thing that speeds the game up too much in my opinion is combat damage that mills from the stack. Currently it is 1 damage = 1 card milled. We've modified it to be every 2 damage = 1 card milled from the stack.
With zombies horde at least it adds a bit of flavor since zombies are at 2/2 and makes some sense my 2 damage only mills 1 card. Anyways with this we found it lasts a bit longer and we don't attack the horde deck as often.
Game 1 with Standard Rules but non-Standard Horde deck: Survivor's Win (infinite Squirrel's with Earthcraft ...)
Game 2 with 50 Life/2 Turn Setup: Horde Win (Plague Wind >> infinite Squirrel's)
Game 3+4 with modified setup: Survivor's Win (the guy playing Squirrels keeps going off turn 3, fairly certain he's cheating, but I won't go into a spiel on that...)
Game 5 ditto: Horde Wins
Game 6 ditto: Survivor's Win (we stabilize then win)
Game 7 ditto: Pending... and laptop died at this point. Didn't bother to plug it back in and resume recording.
We played 5-6 more games after this. More than half of the time we stabilized easily and won. At least one of the games I purposely did nothing, and we survived quite easily, but eventually they overcame us because of my idleness. If I had even cast a single spell we would have won.
Oh, I might mention that we started cutting the Squirrel deck after game 4, because I'm almost positive that that guy was stacking his deck. 4 times comboing off when he only had 2 Earthcraft and nothing to increase card quality (read: blue 1 mana spells) on turn 3-4 is awfully dubious.
At any rate, some possible changes:
1. It really stinks when the Horde straight up flips over a non-token card for its turn. Really underwhelming. So someone proposed the idea that if the Horde ever flips over a non-token card for the turn, it gets to do another flip, flipping until it reaches the next non-token.
2. I proposed this: that the Horde gets to double flip (do two normal flips, where each flip you flip until you reach the first non-token card) after any of its turns where it fails to deal any damage to the Horde. This is flavorful, in that humans always take some damage in zombie movies, and coincides with the idea that zombies need to feed (so periods where it gets no feed - or deals no damage - just foments an increased frenzy. This measure was born from the fact that after we stabilized the Horde had a tiny chance of winning.
3. Possibly increasing the density of tokens in the deck. Needs heavy testing.
4. This is a definite change: replacing some noticeably weak cards in the deck. Endless Ranks of the Dead and Necromancer's Convenant, though flavorful, are getting the ax. Also going to add in Death Baron; I feel real dumb now for not including it in my first draft, because I could definitely see that card doing work =PP
I really like the idea of splitting the Horde deck in two for really big groups, and lowering the life total to 10+10/player, much kudos!
I feel it's really important that people only use EDH decks against the Horde. The lack of consistency (generally) in 100 card-singleton decks mirrors the same in the Horde's deck and creates more overall 'fun'.
That said, an optional rules I'm testing is that Zombie 'lords' (Death Baron, Undead Warchief, etc...) don't attack or block unless the Horde deck is out of cards or they are otherwise forced to (Alluring Siren or similar). Mainly because they'd die very soon after being flipped in combat, not making them very effective. Also, this rewards players using spot removal.
Hope this helps!
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Currently Playing (Legacy): W Send Forth My Endless Army W BU Singularity BU UBR Mishra's Machines UBR
Hey guys, I figured it was time I weighed in. My play group loves varients of magic (we just got started with Calprinicus'es modification of that artifact thing when I heard about horde. now we like to make things our own (we had this weird version of risk and each battle was on a plane and it got interesting) so when we saw horde we knew we had to do it, but do it crazysaucetastically. I will include our horde decklist and then explain how we play it.
So, the first modification to the rules was life totals, instead of 20 per player we did 40 life each, you may think OMG HE AM THE CRAZY but i assure you I am not. we still play FFA when we do hord, so its last one standing wins. the hord attacks each player with a quater of its army (tokens split evenly, then nontokens shuffled and dealt to players till none remain).
secondly, we decided to let it turn over till it got a non-token once per player. this makes the swarm far more dangerous as it can get scary big scary fast.
We have not yet defeated the horde, so we are thinking of making it a bit weeker, but I think you can get the idea of crazy-sauce we are going for.
Horde seems cool... I just wish more people around here were more open-minded with new formats.
My friends refused to play Edh till I made them all a deck and stole their real decks. Similar things happened with arch enemy and hord.
Some people don't like change ):
Hello all, been lurking for years thought I would chime in here.
I had heard about this format a month ago or so and on Monday someone brought a horde deck to the store and we had a lot of fun. The guy who made the deck was kind of testing things as we went along, and so we tried lots of different modes.
So what we came up with.
Deck Size: Always 100, because you have to be hardcore.
Life for players: It doesn't seem fair that with more people you get more life. I mean with more people you have more answers, more chance that your random things won't get spot removed, having more people is easier, so why reward that? We instead went with 60 for 2 people, and we reduced it according to if we had more people. We did 45 for 3 people, and that seemed fair. Especially since we had some lifegain.
Starting turns: We did that standard 3, but then we saw that some decks like affinity and slivers have way too easy a time building up an army so we reduced it based of that players. We actually did with 1 turn for 3 people if you weren't using an EDH deck. We did legendary mode with our legacy decks and had no head start.
Damaging the horde: Since the Horde isn't a player, you can only do damage in combat damage. For every 2 points of damage the horde takes it mills 1 card from the deck.
Drawing cards for the Horde: If the horde would draw a card because of an ability or say, howling mine, it puts that many cards aside and casts it on it's next turn.
Planeswalkers: We have done it pretty much the way everyone says, we give it a 50/50 shot of attacking a planeswalker at all, if yes, then it tries to kill it, and moves on.
Boardwipe: We were letting them be straight 100%, but this was causing issues and we decided next time we were going to start doing the 50% thing.
Hordes Turn: Now this is where I personally am I bit hazy. We had it to where the horde first casts all cards set aside from flash, or from drawing, then it does the flip. On the flip it never actually came up whether or not tokens come first or the non-token card comes in first. I read somewhere now that the tokens hit the field, and then the non-token card comes in. So I guess I will try that out and see how it goes. We had decided that you can counter the horde's spells, being the tokens or non-token card. And that actually was never broken at all, because the horde was flipping over 3-6 tokens a turn so... it still sucked for us...
Now the Horde deck in question was a zombie deck, and he had things like plague windso it was a tough fight. I don't know all the deck's content since it wasn't my own.
So...
Game One: 2 EDH decks (mine was sliver) and we won pretty hard because slivers ramp up. Didn't use infinite combo, but didn't need to once I had essence sliver and brood sliver on the field.
Game Two: Switched to my rainbow EDH deck and we just got wiped. My partner was using a slow Kresh deck.
Game Three: Try using red, discover I can't deal damage to it directly because it's not a player. We lose again.
Game Four: Switch to legacy, get an extra player, win very hard because our ally has affinity and cranial plating.
Game Five: Win again because of cranial plating.
Game Six: I run a casual group hug deck, and cranial plating guy switches to standard token deck. We win, barely.
Currently working on a deck for the store I work at. Gonna make a beast deck, so far it play testing it is mean, will post up more later.
Food for thought so far: What if the horde deck had planeswalkers, how could that work? Can the horde gain life from lifelink?
How bout Horde Zoo? Instead of just zombie based, which can be pretty weak at time, if we have any token it puts a lot more pressure. For large multiplayer game, i had Horde just start with 7 card hand that Horde gets to dump out on its turn 1, instead of flipping till u hit a spell card.
I recently heard about the Horde format from a link on Facebook, and it has been on my thoughts the majority of the time since I heard about it last night.
One of the first things I started thinking about was how to increase the difficulty of the format. I was thinking of four difficulty levels: Easy, Normal, Hard, and Apocalypse.
The first method to distinguish them was to increase the quantity of more powerful cards, replacing the weaker cards for more copies of the stronger ones as difficulty increased. This method can be a bit complicated, though.
The second method is a "global enchantment" sort of approach, where, for instance the Horde could have some enchantment effect where creatures opponents' control that are put into the graveyard are exiled instead, and a 2/2 Zombie token is given to the Horde. This is more simple than the first approach.
If anyone has any input on this or anything else, please pipe up!
I'll report back here once I've actually gotten a Horde deck put together, and have played it some.
So for those not familiar with Horde here is the rules and format.
HORDE
I've been play testing for a little over 2 weeks with 1-4 players and find it quite enjoyable. There are of course scaling issues as players increase. but the cards you put in the horde deck can scale for powerlevel as well.
Right now we have a few solution:
(1) lower turns to prepare: normal is 3 turns. reduce to 2 turns for 3 players. 1 turn for 4 players.
(2) For larger groups 3-4 players we added an archenemy set (1 of each) to the pair making the horde the archenemy of course and any "choosing" it does is as random as possible. that works alright, but we can still stabilize pretty easily. also loses some flavor.
(3) A more effective route we've been testing (Again for larger 3-4 player groups) is we split the horde deck into two 50 card decks and use them simultainiously. So you get 2 non-token cards flipped per horde turn. that also works pretty well. and we're trying more of this sort of thing since it's more effective than archenemy. victory is still kill both decks, and kill the zombies in play to win. with multiple decks we also use multiple finishing bosses. 1 boss being phage the untouchable, the other being Sutured Ghoul so when a deck depletes we put one of these onto the field. If you choose to attack the horde you need to pick a deck to mill from. This adds a bit more strategy to attacking as your probably don't want both bosses out at the same time.
My goal is to not make modifications to the cards in the deck. but instead how many cards are used, and preptime before they start attacking. The final result should be simple changes so that reguardless of the number of players there is roughly a 50/50 chance of victory or defeat.
current testing model for playsize:
1 player - 40 cards total. 1 deck (1 boss). 3 prep turns
2 player - 60 cards total. 1 deck (1 boss). 3 prep turns.
3 player - 80 cards total. 2 decks (2 bosses). 2 prep turns.
4 player - 100 cards total. 2 decks (2 bosses). 1 prep turn.
R Grenzo, Havoc Raiser
BG Varolz, the scar-striped
I have some questions for you:
Are you using the list provided by Mr. Knudson, or did you make up your own?
What is the average power level of the Survivors' decks?
About how many times have the Survivors won/lost?
• I'm using a modified list simular to Knudson's. There is a link in my tag if your interested.
What is the average power level of the Survivors' decks?
• I'm not sure how to answer this question. I'd say moderately high. The horde deck can be changed depending on your groups power level, if your worried.
About how many times have the Survivors won/lost?
•I haven't been keeping tally but this is my estimate. We've done alot more 1-2 player games than 3-4 players. Cards like Army of the Damned are hard to overcome unless well prepared in a small set of survivors.
1 player - 30-40% win
2 player - 50% win
3 player - 75% win
4 player - 80% win
R Grenzo, Havoc Raiser
BG Varolz, the scar-striped
What decks specifically have been used?
For instance my casual group's power level would be:
1-2 x modified precon level
1-2 x Standard level (Mono-Red, UW Control)
1-2 x Legacy level (Goblins, Dredge, Survival)
My Horde deck is currently pretty powerful due to this. The Issue with power level we're hitting is that if We increase the power of the Horde deck too much it makes 1-2 player horde challenging. But balances 3-4 player horde.
I feel like the starting life for survivors need to be modified a little. The rule 20 life per player seems off. 20 life is good for solo, but 80 life for 4 players seems a bit much. I'm testing out 10 life per player + 10 extra life this weekend with my playgroup.
1 player - 20 life
2 player - 30 life
3 player - 40 life
4 player - 50 life
idk if that will do anything but worth a try.
R Grenzo, Havoc Raiser
BG Varolz, the scar-striped
Add some lesser elementals like Lightning Elemental, Ball Lightning, Scoria Elemental, Nova Chaser, Supreme Exemplar, Rockshard Elemental, Flame-kin Zealot.
I'm ok with making the horde deck really strong. I'm considering building a dedicated antihorde deck with Wall of Razors, Cunning Sparkmage and Basilisk Collar. I think 20 + 10 per player seems like a fair deal.
On spoiled card wishlisting and 'should-have-had'-isms:
I've tweaked the rules a bit to allow for things like flashback and certain abilities, but these I've generally found useful:
Magma Phoenix - being able to get this back every turn and devastating when killed, they've proven very dangerous in many games. I wouldn't recommend more than two of these, especially if you use things like Wildfire and Gale Force.
Spider Spawning/Scourge Devil - This is something that can make reckless attacking into the horde extremely dangerous.
Rolling Tremblor - Similar to the previous ones, not something you want to mill. Forces weenie/token decks to play more carefully.
Boneyard Wurm/Scourge of Geier Reach - the game will usually reach a point where any new creatures can immediately be taken out. Absurdly large creatures can sometimes help this stalemate.
Coalhauler Swine - Hitting something like this in a big multiplayer can quickly swing things in the Horde's favor.
Garruk's Packleader - I wouldn't recommend this unless you use a lot of small tokens (Goblins, Wolves etc.), but it can provide the horde with huge momentum. Lead the Stampede is a more lightweight version of this.
*/* tokens - these are actually really great for changing the difficulty level. For one player, we use a D6 to determine its p/t; a D10 for two, D12 for three, and D20 for four or more players.
Oh, and 2/2 Mitotic Ooze tokens. Lots and lots of splitting Ooze tokens
I've found all these cards to add really interesting to the Horde. I'll be interested to see what other ideas people find (I really like the idea of having two hordes, or a split horde, for larger games).
[Clan Flamingo] Tier Archivist
[15:21] <@CC> Remember, if you argue, you are an idiot.
Untrophied Wins:
Perfect MCC Scores: 2
---------------------------------------------------------------
Wasn't Death Baron at most 2-3 USD before?
I imagine foil Horde staples are going to go the way of foil EDH staples and cost an arm and a leg (how fitting, no?).
DOUBLE TAP:
in larger multiplayer games wrath effects are too common and make the game to easy. So we modified it. the FIRST wrath effects are still normal to players, however the Horde only loses 50% of their creature base. So to completely wipe the Horde's board in a single turn 2 wrath effects will need to be played. This was cleaverly called the DOUBLE TAP.
STARTING LIFE:
we used 20 + 10 per player. 20 wasn't enough for single player, and 80 was too much for 4 players.
1 player = 30
2 player = 40
3 player = 50
4 player = 60
HOW WE MODIFIED FLASHBACK:
after much testing flashback seems to be easiest determined when the flashback happens the turn after it was originally cast. I guess it essentially work more like rebound from the Rise of the eldrazi. When a flashback carded is milled it is cast the next turn.
LIFELINK AND LIFE GAIN:
some cards like soul warden or putting lifelink on a huge beater tend to break the game a little in the survivor's favor. We're having debates if it really maters. your thoughts?
11 match results:
all these matches had all 100 horde cards to help determin how easy it was to win. current horde deck is posted in my tag.
-----
(1) 1 player: LOST: -8/100 total : Plague Wind = last flipped
(2) 1 player: LOST: -25/100 total: Fleshbag Maurader = last flipped
(3) 1 player: WON: -100/100 total:
(4) 2 Player: LOST: -100/100 total: Phage (final boss) + cover of darkness
(5) 2 player: WON: -100/100 total:
(6) 2 player: LOST: -16/100 total: Army of the damned = last flipped
(7) 2 player: WON: -100/100 total:
(8) 3 player: LOST: -16/100 total: Twilights call = last flipped
(9) 3 player: WON: -100/100 total:
(10) 3 player: WON: -100/100 total:
(11) 3 player: LOST: -25/100 total: Fleshbag marauder = last flipped
R Grenzo, Havoc Raiser
BG Varolz, the scar-striped
Death Baron's rise seemed to coincide with Zombies' popularity as a tribe and the welt of new Zombies in INN. He's being looked at in Modern too if I understand correctly.
Horde isn't a big enough format to affect prices yet - EDH was pretty huge before the prices of staples began to get to where they are now.
---
I like your rules, Caprinicus - but I am thinking that it might be fairer for a high total to be assigned to less survivors, rather than more? Merely increasing the Horde deck size does not increase the challenge significantly for many players.
Something like:
One player: 100 life
Two players: 70 life
Three players: 50 life
Four players: 40 life
Might well be a reasonable scaling factor against a strong Horde deck. It would reduce the need to remove part of the Horde deck depending on the number of players and make things a bit fairer.
On spoiled card wishlisting and 'should-have-had'-isms:
That might work, I'll have to try it out.
The thing I've found with Horde is that it's an incredibly quick format (for multiplayer formats at least - I don't have much experience with anything else). The life total usually just puts a clock on how fast you need to set up a defense by, after which it becomes pretty easy to win. I think the life total may not present as much of an issue as the constitution of the deck itself - I've started playing Burning Sands in my horde, and am pleased at how it still poses difficult combats later in the game.
[Clan Flamingo] Tier Archivist
[15:21] <@CC> Remember, if you argue, you are an idiot.
Untrophied Wins:
Perfect MCC Scores: 2
---------------------------------------------------------------
I've been working on this. The one thing that speeds the game up too much in my opinion is combat damage that mills from the stack. Currently it is 1 damage = 1 card milled. We've modified it to be every 2 damage = 1 card milled from the stack.
With zombies horde at least it adds a bit of flavor since zombies are at 2/2 and makes some sense my 2 damage only mills 1 card. Anyways with this we found it lasts a bit longer and we don't attack the horde deck as often.
...Thoughts...
R Grenzo, Havoc Raiser
BG Varolz, the scar-striped
Game 1 with Standard Rules but non-Standard Horde deck: Survivor's Win (infinite Squirrel's with Earthcraft ...)
Game 2 with 50 Life/2 Turn Setup: Horde Win (Plague Wind >> infinite Squirrel's)
Game 3+4 with modified setup: Survivor's Win (the guy playing Squirrels keeps going off turn 3, fairly certain he's cheating, but I won't go into a spiel on that...)
Game 5 ditto: Horde Wins
Game 6 ditto: Survivor's Win (we stabilize then win)
Game 7 ditto: Pending... and laptop died at this point. Didn't bother to plug it back in and resume recording.
We played 5-6 more games after this. More than half of the time we stabilized easily and won. At least one of the games I purposely did nothing, and we survived quite easily, but eventually they overcame us because of my idleness. If I had even cast a single spell we would have won.
Oh, I might mention that we started cutting the Squirrel deck after game 4, because I'm almost positive that that guy was stacking his deck. 4 times comboing off when he only had 2 Earthcraft and nothing to increase card quality (read: blue 1 mana spells) on turn 3-4 is awfully dubious.
At any rate, some possible changes:
1. It really stinks when the Horde straight up flips over a non-token card for its turn. Really underwhelming. So someone proposed the idea that if the Horde ever flips over a non-token card for the turn, it gets to do another flip, flipping until it reaches the next non-token.
2. I proposed this: that the Horde gets to double flip (do two normal flips, where each flip you flip until you reach the first non-token card) after any of its turns where it fails to deal any damage to the Horde. This is flavorful, in that humans always take some damage in zombie movies, and coincides with the idea that zombies need to feed (so periods where it gets no feed - or deals no damage - just foments an increased frenzy. This measure was born from the fact that after we stabilized the Horde had a tiny chance of winning.
3. Possibly increasing the density of tokens in the deck. Needs heavy testing.
4. This is a definite change: replacing some noticeably weak cards in the deck. Endless Ranks of the Dead and Necromancer's Convenant, though flavorful, are getting the ax. Also going to add in Death Baron; I feel real dumb now for not including it in my first draft, because I could definitely see that card doing work =PP
I will test this further on Friday.
I feel it's really important that people only use EDH decks against the Horde. The lack of consistency (generally) in 100 card-singleton decks mirrors the same in the Horde's deck and creates more overall 'fun'.
That said, an optional rules I'm testing is that Zombie 'lords' (Death Baron, Undead Warchief, etc...) don't attack or block unless the Horde deck is out of cards or they are otherwise forced to (Alluring Siren or similar). Mainly because they'd die very soon after being flipped in combat, not making them very effective. Also, this rewards players using spot removal.
Hope this helps!
W Send Forth My Endless Army W
BU Singularity BU
UBR Mishra's Machines UBR
Testing (Legacy):
BGW Sisay's Control BGW
25x giant zombie token
15x zombie wizard token
2x sutured ghoul
1x phage, the untouchable
2x syphon flesh
1x wound reflection
1x cover of darkness
1x necrogen mists
2x moan of the unhallowed
2x plague wind
2x grave titan
2x noxious ghoul
2x unbreathing horde
2x vengefuldead
1x army of the damned
1x vulturous zombie
1x thraximundar
1x vengeful pharoh
1x patriarch's bidding
1x grave pact
2x bad moon
2x call to the grave
4x souless one
2x anthem of rakdos
2x undead alchemist
2x deathpits of rath
2x endless ranks of the dead
2x living end
2x null champion
1x fog
2x fleshbag marauder
2x lord of the undead
2x rotting rats
2x twisted abomination
2x death barron
2x cemetery reaper
4x smallpox
4x undead warcheif
1x lord of the pit
1x dred cacodeamon
1x midnight banshee
2x nefashu
1x decree of annihilation
2x curse of the cabal
1x damnation
So, the first modification to the rules was life totals, instead of 20 per player we did 40 life each, you may think OMG HE AM THE CRAZY but i assure you I am not. we still play FFA when we do hord, so its last one standing wins. the hord attacks each player with a quater of its army (tokens split evenly, then nontokens shuffled and dealt to players till none remain).
secondly, we decided to let it turn over till it got a non-token once per player. this makes the swarm far more dangerous as it can get scary big scary fast.
We have not yet defeated the horde, so we are thinking of making it a bit weeker, but I think you can get the idea of crazy-sauce we are going for.
My friends refused to play Edh till I made them all a deck and stole their real decks. Similar things happened with arch enemy and hord.
Some people don't like change ):
I had heard about this format a month ago or so and on Monday someone brought a horde deck to the store and we had a lot of fun. The guy who made the deck was kind of testing things as we went along, and so we tried lots of different modes.
So what we came up with.
Deck Size: Always 100, because you have to be hardcore.
Life for players: It doesn't seem fair that with more people you get more life. I mean with more people you have more answers, more chance that your random things won't get spot removed, having more people is easier, so why reward that? We instead went with 60 for 2 people, and we reduced it according to if we had more people. We did 45 for 3 people, and that seemed fair. Especially since we had some lifegain.
Starting turns: We did that standard 3, but then we saw that some decks like affinity and slivers have way too easy a time building up an army so we reduced it based of that players. We actually did with 1 turn for 3 people if you weren't using an EDH deck. We did legendary mode with our legacy decks and had no head start.
Damaging the horde: Since the Horde isn't a player, you can only do damage in combat damage. For every 2 points of damage the horde takes it mills 1 card from the deck.
Drawing cards for the Horde: If the horde would draw a card because of an ability or say, howling mine, it puts that many cards aside and casts it on it's next turn.
Planeswalkers: We have done it pretty much the way everyone says, we give it a 50/50 shot of attacking a planeswalker at all, if yes, then it tries to kill it, and moves on.
Boardwipe: We were letting them be straight 100%, but this was causing issues and we decided next time we were going to start doing the 50% thing.
Hordes Turn: Now this is where I personally am I bit hazy. We had it to where the horde first casts all cards set aside from flash, or from drawing, then it does the flip. On the flip it never actually came up whether or not tokens come first or the non-token card comes in first. I read somewhere now that the tokens hit the field, and then the non-token card comes in. So I guess I will try that out and see how it goes. We had decided that you can counter the horde's spells, being the tokens or non-token card. And that actually was never broken at all, because the horde was flipping over 3-6 tokens a turn so... it still sucked for us...
Now the Horde deck in question was a zombie deck, and he had things like plague windso it was a tough fight. I don't know all the deck's content since it wasn't my own.
So...
Game One: 2 EDH decks (mine was sliver) and we won pretty hard because slivers ramp up. Didn't use infinite combo, but didn't need to once I had essence sliver and brood sliver on the field.
Game Two: Switched to my rainbow EDH deck and we just got wiped. My partner was using a slow Kresh deck.
Game Three: Try using red, discover I can't deal damage to it directly because it's not a player. We lose again.
Game Four: Switch to legacy, get an extra player, win very hard because our ally has affinity and cranial plating.
Game Five: Win again because of cranial plating.
Game Six: I run a casual group hug deck, and cranial plating guy switches to standard token deck. We win, barely.
Currently working on a deck for the store I work at. Gonna make a beast deck, so far it play testing it is mean, will post up more later.
Food for thought so far: What if the horde deck had planeswalkers, how could that work? Can the horde gain life from lifelink?