Current drafts
(See "About this project" section below for context.)
I am currently working on completing the core decks (can't start on secondary ones until I know approximately which cards are off-limits).
- Captain Cato Sicarius: 1st draft
- Colonel Straken: unstarted
- Nazdreg: unstarted
- Zarathur, High Sorcerer: unstarted
- Packmaster Kith: unstarted
- Eldorath Starbane: unstarted
- Commander Shadowsun: unstarted
- "Old One Eye": 1st draft
- Anraykyr the Traveller: unstarted
About this project
I got sick of my Conquest collection gathering dust, so I decided to convert it into a board game by constructing a large number of decks and stashing them in a single Conquest core box.
This is not a new idea, but I didn't love any of the prior art:
- 28 50-card decks: lopsidedly high cost curves across the board means the command phase is barely going to matter (and will encourage snowballing at planet one with an elite train)
- 27 40-card decks: I don't want to sacrifice the core rules of Conquest just to make a ludicrous number of decks
So I'm working on my own approach! My plan is to have 18 decks built simultaneously:
- 9 "core" decks (7 core set warlords + Old One Eye + Anraykyr): these will always be built, so cards in them are not available for any other decks, and will represent a pretty "standard" Conquest experience for each faction that can compete very evenly across the board (preferably no rock-paper-scissors matchups against other core decks)
- 9 "secondary" decks (1 per faction, selected from any preferred non-core warlord): I'd like to make a deck for every warlord, but they can share cards within the faction because only one will ever be built at once. Because the non-core warlords are often focused on specific things (traits, keywords, etc.) these will tend to be more specialized within their faction, and rock-paper-scissors matchups are acceptable (e.g. any event-heavy deck vs. Jain Zar is pretty inescapable)
My priorities for decks are:
- High consistency: all decks should consistently draw into the cards they need to accomplish their core strategy, which means there won't be much card overlap between core and secondary decks
- Mediocre efficiency: enough command-focused units to make the command phase matter, but not enough to cause some decks to rocket ahead of others due to their efficiency (no tournament-quality Kith, please). This means using cards that would never see tournament play due to their poor efficiency; intentionally spreading out, not using, or placing in struggling decks the really powerful cards like Klaivex; and trending towards higher cost curves.
- Mono-faction: wherever possible, decks need to use only in-faction and neutral cards (warlords like Nahumekh, Gorzod, and Command Starblaze will be very difficult to construct because they'll ideally need to be able to co-exist with any of the other secondary decks)
- Include neutrals (where necessary): use neutrals sparingly, but include where they'll do the most good. Both prior approaches above avoid Rogue Trader, Void Pirate, and Promotion like the plague, which doesn't make sense to me. These are central Conquest cards, and while they necessarily must be used sparingly (only 6x each available) I'm fully interested in seeing them used where they'll even out the overall balance
- No Death World by default: all decks will require 3x cores and 1x all expansions except Death World. I own a full collection, but a lot of people do not own Death World and I would love to allow them to benefit from this project. I fully encourage Death World variants of decks, though! I'll be listing substitutions for Death World owners in the description below the decklist (and obviously Death World warlords can pull from the full pool). Maybe this will restrict the card pool too much to be able to make decent decks for all warlords; but we'll see!
I need your help! I am currently plugging away at "core" warlord decks, but would love to have other folks contribute (both decks from scratch or criticism/suggested changes for my decks)! Otherwise I'm going to be at this for a long while...