It's not extremely relevant, but i built a skyrim (an open-ended rpg pc game) horde full of wolves, bears among other critters, and dragons. The way how i scaled the game up is that for each dragon or goat or plant is killed by any player (so board wipes and targeted removal doesn't count), they draw 1 card from another 'loot deck'. And for every 3 loot card total among all players, roll 1d6, and then flip over that many more cards in the horde's pre-combat main phase.
And the loot deck has a lot of random things within the theme of skyrim (apologies for those not knowing what skyrim is). Things like howling mine, mana flare, icy manipulator, and a lot of things from the ice age block. Most of the loot is equipment though, some of them good, some not as good.
But the loot deck helps protect the players a little, but as they get more loot, the horde gets crazier too. And most the time, the horde gets crazier in a way which the loot doesn't really offset - flipping 5 dragon tokens, 3 giants and a thundermaw hellkite is quite a beast of a turn!
WOOH! Got to play with some new rules with some friends (3 players vs the horde).
We only tried one rule set and didn't modify it, but I am certain it was too diffictult (although it was really awesome).
We did:
Every 10 player turns, the horde gets an emblem that makes them wave an additional time (stacking indefinitely).
Set up turns are not counted.
We played 4 games and only won the last one (we basically played until we won) and the horde didn't get much that game and since the other 2 decks in play were once-standard decks, we sideboarded them to be as strong as possible for the last 2 games.
I have to say - it was extremely epic. We were pumping out super powerful boards, but the horde was still overwhelming us. The games were all very close and it was a lot more intense. My friend kept getting out a huge army of guys with an eldrazi monument to back it up, but the horde kept getting through with creeping corrosion or noxious ghoul.
It was really fun, but I think it is too hard. The most waves we got to per turn was 4, and we died immediately on that turn (double smallpox, zombie apocalypse, and creeping corrosion with around 20 zombie tokens and another 15 zombies in the graveyard which got reanimated).
I think that either my horde deck needs to be toned down (extra turns from temporal extortion are too brutal with something like 3 waves) or the rules need to change.
Some quick ideas we threw around after the first game
- increase the horde threshold (probably to 15 instead of 10).
- increase the horde threshold and change the incrementing rules - probably something like threshold = 20 and increment = 2+player count - so that it doesn't scale so much with extra players.
- big overhaul and simply do something else
I want to try the first one for sure because it is simple and will get the change we want (make it a little less brutal).
honestly though dude, i think co-op games have to be ridiculously tough otherwise it wouldn't be a fun challenge anymore. Is temporal extortion brilliant in the horde? I have in things likebrowbeat and choice of damnations (and cast as if it has been radiated as well) and that is usually a HUGE headache whenever its cast.
Haha cheers! Zombie horde is one of the main things in our playgroup here. It is one of those formats that reduces the amount of vindictiveness some people can get up to and so on.
In regards to the tombstone though, it becomes this new facet of the game that doesn't exist otherwise. In other words, it MIGHT blow itself up, so us the survivors might want to save that krosan grip for something else that might come up, but then again, it depends how insane the horde's graveyard looks (by midway through the game, we'd be up to about 100+ tokens popped into play).
Oh and i completely forgot. because i used to draft unglued, we had access to the famed 99/99 the-Biggest-Baddest-Nastiest-Scariest-Creature-You'll-Ever-See B.F.M. (Big Furry Monster) (i have NO idea how to link both sides properly) in the 200 or so horde. Our house rule is that if the zombie horde draws either half, it is kept on the horde's "hand" until the other half is found, then its cast.
Not sure if other horde players out there do weird stuff like that.
Plus UR likes to cast things at instant speed and this makes doing that impossible. I could imagine this being Blue/White
Yea thats true actually.. I suppose if its tweaked to be a little easier to deal with too (since this can be pretty crippling to aggro types) 1WU
creature - human
Whenever any player casts a spell, instead suspend that spell with 1 time counter. If it doesn't have suspend, it gains suspend.
1/3
Just thought i'd chime in here and say a quick hello. Been playing since 1997 ish, and I'm mostly a casual, EDH, horde (as in co-op zombie horde) player. Though i also dabble a bit in modern and legacy too.
In my horde house-rules, we have a rule that stops all zombie lords from attacking, but they have to block (randomly) if possible. This means that the survivors have a much bigger pressure to attack into the horde, and the lord's effects last longer.
In my horde though, we run 4 army of the damned, 3 tombstone stairwell and 10 endless ranks of the dead.
It really heightens the need for enchantment removal though. We made tombstone stairwell work as if all tokens counts as creature cards in the graveyard, and that for each cumulative upkeep, the horde rolls a d10, and if the roll is lower than the number of age counters, then the tombstone is sacced.
And the loot deck has a lot of random things within the theme of skyrim (apologies for those not knowing what skyrim is). Things like howling mine, mana flare, icy manipulator, and a lot of things from the ice age block. Most of the loot is equipment though, some of them good, some not as good.
But the loot deck helps protect the players a little, but as they get more loot, the horde gets crazier too. And most the time, the horde gets crazier in a way which the loot doesn't really offset - flipping 5 dragon tokens, 3 giants and a thundermaw hellkite is quite a beast of a turn!
honestly though dude, i think co-op games have to be ridiculously tough otherwise it wouldn't be a fun challenge anymore. Is temporal extortion brilliant in the horde? I have in things likebrowbeat and choice of damnations (and cast as if it has been radiated as well) and that is usually a HUGE headache whenever its cast.
In regards to the tombstone though, it becomes this new facet of the game that doesn't exist otherwise. In other words, it MIGHT blow itself up, so us the survivors might want to save that krosan grip for something else that might come up, but then again, it depends how insane the horde's graveyard looks (by midway through the game, we'd be up to about 100+ tokens popped into play).
Oh and i completely forgot. because i used to draft unglued, we had access to the famed 99/99 the-Biggest-Baddest-Nastiest-Scariest-Creature-You'll-Ever-See B.F.M. (Big Furry Monster) (i have NO idea how to link both sides properly) in the 200 or so horde. Our house rule is that if the zombie horde draws either half, it is kept on the horde's "hand" until the other half is found, then its cast.
Not sure if other horde players out there do weird stuff like that.
Yea thats true actually.. I suppose if its tweaked to be a little easier to deal with too (since this can be pretty crippling to aggro types)
1WU
creature - human
Whenever any player casts a spell, instead suspend that spell with 1 time counter. If it doesn't have suspend, it gains suspend.
1/3
Time Slow
3UR
Enchantment
Whenever any player casts any spell, that player instead suspends it with 1 time counter on it. If it doesn't have suspend, it gains suspend.
Just thought i'd chime in here and say a quick hello. Been playing since 1997 ish, and I'm mostly a casual, EDH, horde (as in co-op zombie horde) player. Though i also dabble a bit in modern and legacy too.
aloha!
In my horde though, we run 4 army of the damned, 3 tombstone stairwell and 10 endless ranks of the dead.
It really heightens the need for enchantment removal though. We made tombstone stairwell work as if all tokens counts as creature cards in the graveyard, and that for each cumulative upkeep, the horde rolls a d10, and if the roll is lower than the number of age counters, then the tombstone is sacced.