After missing last week (I suck and forgot), I’ve got an extra special update for you this week. Instead of opening new packs from the current set, I’m listing 10 new Arbiter decks (https://www.kingwoodhobbies.com/product-category/solforge-fusion/deck-market/?pofily-tag=arbiter) that have come into my possession. If you’re unfamiliar with Arbiter decks, these are standard SolForge Fusion decks with a twist. They have a unique card back that identifies them as special promotional decks from Stone Blade. You can see the unique card back here (https://solforgefusion.com/organized-play-hobby-kits)
In addition to these Arbiter decks, I still have a couple of foil decks looking for a home. If you have some time, take a look at www.kingwoodhobbies.com/deckmarket and see if there’s something that fits what you need.
Without further ado, here are some highlights from the new Arbiter decks.
Division of Wasting and Flattening (https://www.kingwoodhobbies.com/product/division-of-wasting-and-flattening/) Uterradon Mauler Regenerating Decayasaur Vine Lash
Samples of Steam and Cyrus (https://www.kingwoodhobbies.com/product/samples-of-steam-and-cyrus/) Lots of removal Cercee’s Call + 3 other spells Omnomnom Spiritleash Vyric’s Embrace Cutthroat Fiend
The Abducting Demons and Vampires (https://www.kingwoodhobbies.com/product/the-abducting-demons-vampires/) Giant Beaters Dreadbolt Epidemic
The Alphas of the Sprite (https://www.kingwoodhobbies.com/product/the-alphas-of-the-sprite/) 5 Spells Betrayer – Roaring Skeleton Spring Dryad with Multiple Minion Generators Venerable Basher
The Brighttusk Grovekeeper Grooms (https://www.kingwoodhobbies.com/product/the-brighttusk-grovekeeper-grooms/) 2 Armored creatures Botanimate Lysian Rain 2 Creatures with Activate abilities
The Detail of Editing and Testifying (https://www.kingwoodhobbies.com/product/the-detail-of-editing-and-testifying/) Forcefield with 3 Warriors Sonic Burst Charge Plated Reinforcements Stabilizing Warcharger Brightsteel Sentinel with 3 more Robots
The Experts of the Rift and Gestures (https://www.kingwoodhobbies.com/product/the-experts-of-the-rift-gestures/) Thundersaur Turnabout Volcanic Spellknight
The Ultimate Sitting Preachers (https://www.kingwoodhobbies.com/product/the-ultimate-sitting-preachers/) Everflame Phoenix Thundersaur Scorchmane Dragon
Behext is a magical combat deck-building game, where your hand of spells is both your only defense and your only currency. To that end, you must sacrifice cards from your hand, and even your own willpower, to custom-build your arcane arsenal.
Begin as one of 6 unique Battlemages specialized in their own magical discipline. Then, tailor your deck to your strategic tastes and in reaction to emerging opportunities. Curse and counter-curse your opponents into submission. . . without being Hexed yourself by the wild magics that have since passed beyond your control.
An unconventional deck-builder that is highly interactive as you constantly deflect Hexes around the table. You are not building a resource engine so much as constructing your deck to deliver the types of interactions you want to have with other players. Will you specialize in forcing discards to deprive them, focus on negation magic, attack their Willpower with direct damage – or take on chaotic and possibly dangerous spells to build Victory points into your deck at great risk to yourself?
Plus, newly conjured spells are not put into your discard pile, rather than forcing you to wait for their return, but are placed directly into your hand. You can play them immediately – right when you need them most.
It’s been a long time coming, but Errata Packs are now ready to ship. If you’re unsure what that is, keep reading. If you’re ready to get yours, click the link below.
Sometimes, in every card game ever, cards are printed that make you look like this when you read them.
There have been a variety of ways companies address these imperfections when they crop up. From changing the number you’re allowed to use in your deck to simply rewriting what the cards do, there are competing philosophies on how to handle it. Each of these has its strengths and weaknesses. Do you risk the feel bad of your players getting cards they’re not allowed to play? Is it better to piss people off when their cards don’t work the way they expect them to? Either way, players aren’t happy with this bad, but necessary, part of managing Organized Play for these games.
Destiny, in both eras, has chosen to go with the errata format. Before ARH took over, changing the text of cards was an incredibly ponderous process that sometimes took so long that the changes didn’t make sense when they finally arrived. One bonus of being out from under the shackles of The Mouse is that ARH can be much more nimble in responding to imbalances in play. As a digital-only product, it’s a relatively quick process to change points on a character or remove some piece of text that looked good during design but proved oppressive once players really sank their teeth into it.
As a professional printer of the ARH releases, I want to make sure folks have an opportunity to have physical cards that represent what our ARH OP Overlords say the cards mean now. To that end, Kingwood Hobbies is proud to present our Errata Packs! This version is current as of July 4, 2022, and includes full playsets of all 31 currently errata’d cards, a total of 52 new cards to replace what you have in your collection.
If you are a previous customer of our complete playsets, these errata packs are completely free for one year following your most recent set printing purchase through our Errata Insurance Program. Simply pick this up at the regular price and include a note with your order that you’ve picked up a complete playset from us in the last year and we will refund the full price of the set (not including shipping).
First thing to note. All KeyForge Adventures, so far, are available for free from Fantasy Flight Games. Our offer is for a high-quality printing service for these free cards. To find the free versions, please see the official KeyForge product page.
As a KeyForge family ourselves, we definitely had to try out this KF Adventures thing as soon as they arrive in-house, so we broke out the oversized KeyForge playmat, shuffled up the three Dark Tidings decks we’d opened, and got to playing.
First, some lessons learned from the Dismukes family about playing Rise of the KeyRacken.
The game says it supports up to three players, but I see no mechanics reason you couldn’t do more. The only difficulty we had was with space. KeyForge takes up quite a bit of table space, and with the three of us playing alongside the KeyRacken, I’m not sure how we would have fit my other daughter in.
You’re going to need tokens, and I mean a lot of tokens. You’re going to want to keep the tide high most of the time, meaning 18+ aember are on the KeyRacken before it rises. That, coupled with 90 health in a three-person game mean bits are floating around everywhere. I’d highly suggest getting a big supply of pennies for aember and maybe a scoresheet for KeyRacken damage.
It’s a little awkward at first as you fumble your way through how the KeyRacken plays, and that’s ok. Press through, however, and you should get the hang of it before long. Don’t be afraid to take a break for dinner or something. When you come back things will run more smoothly.
The rest of my family suggested that there should be a player who sits at the table only to run the KeyRacken rather than each person flipping up KR cards themselves. I’m not sure I agree with that one because it seems like that would be boring, but we did find it easier to have one person flip all of the KeyRacken cards instead of each player.
We found it useful to apply our creatures, ‘Opponents’ keys cost X more’ cards towards the KeyRacken’s advances so that these cards contributed to the game in a meaningful way. I could not find anything referring to this in the rules for this adventure, so this may just be a house rule that we keep.
If you make a mistake, just keep going. There’s a lot of action going on, and it’s easy to forget a step here or there. Since your opponent doesn’t have an intelligence to get offended by an accidental cheat, it makes much more sense to keep the game flowing smoothly than to back up and try to iron out a mistake that happened a couple of turns ago. Our family members are all game players, but some are less interested in getting all the fiddly bits perfect than others. Smooth gameplay goes a long way towards helping everyone have a good time.
Our Game
Our first time into the Rise of the KeyRacken gave us a bit of a pause as we tried to figure out exactly what on earth we were trying to do. We all know how to play the game, but what is our strategy? Are we assaulting the KeyRacken directly? Do we need to try and build a battle line? Are we going to try and forge any keys or just go straight through the armor? This, coupled with the confusion of learning how to run the KeyRacken’s turns, made the first several turns of our game a bit of a mess. Cards and tokens everywhere. No one really understanding what’s going on. It wasn’t great.
The KeyRacken, on the other hand, had no such qualms about its strategy and hit the ground running. Some of its first actions were to tack on upgrades that give it extra cards on each of its turns. Since the KeyRacken’s power is directly tied to playing cards, doubling the number of cards played every turn means things are going to get out of hand VERY quickly. I blame Tori’s shuffling skills. I let her shuffle the KeyRacken’s deck, and it let this guy rip out of the gate swinging. I really need to spend more time teaching her the finer points of messing up an opponent’s game with a good shuffle (note: this is a joke. It’s like when I tell Destiny people they should subscribe to my Patreon where I will teach them to roll dice better).
Despite the mess of the early game, we were able to get a grip when Melissa and I combined to thoroughly house one of the KeyRacken’s advancements. She managed to stick a Bombyx on the table while I helped it capture something like 20 aember just before the KR advanced. This six-armored up egg sat there like a giant turtle hoarding all that aember while we got our feet under us.
The mid-game saw us start to land some big shots on the KeyRacken’s body itself, mostly through Melissa’s Saurian monsters (who, incidentally, also let her start spending all that Bombyx aember forging her own keys). Tori’s Shadow cards and my triple Ritual of Balance worked to slow the KeyRacken’s advance, but there was only so much we could do before our opponent began advancing.
We went round and round the table doing work but weren’t quite able to prevent this horror from creeping ever closer towards laying waste to the Crucible. Things were looking pretty grim as we started our last trip around the table. Tori went first and had to do something, anything, to get the KeyRacken below 18 aember. With a bit of desperation in her plays, she was able to just barely accomplish that and punt to me. Now, with defeat looming even closer, I was able to once again just barely hang on to prolong the game one more round.
The final turn came around, and my wife was despondent. Tori and I had scrabbled and clawed and held off the KeyRacken’s last advance as best we could, but Melissa couldn’t keep the game up any longer. The KeyRacken had amassed an insane amount of aember and had a battle line that was multiple rows deep (this game can take up a lot of space). In frustration, she was about to toss her hand down and concede when I looked at her and said, “Honey, just play out your turn.” I didn’t know what was in her hand, but I knew the deck I’d given her. In exasperation, she called Star Alliance and proceeded to lay down her deck’s copy of Selective Preservation.
Turns out she’d completely forgotten about that little line on the bottom of the KeyRacken’s creatures that says, “When this card is destroyed, deal 3 damage to the KeyRacken”. After choosing a creature at each power level, I dramatically picked up each of the KeyRacken’s dudes, slapped them down in his bin, and said “3 damage to the KeyRacken. 3 damage to the KeyRacken. 3 damage to the KeyRacken…” With this one play, the KeyRacken from eight remaining health as it crashed over the world to us obliterating it with well over 100 damage.
It was an amazing victory! Melissa was the hero of the tale and saved all of the Crucible from destruction at the hands of the KeyRacken. Tori and I looked on as pleased sidekicks while all the denizens of the Crucible celebrated my lady’s victory.
In what is either the final hurrah for Fantasy Flight’s stewardship of X-Wing or Atomic Mass Games’ inaugural release, three new expansions are hitting the shelves soon. None of these are new ships, but they’re new pilots and some amazing new paint schemes for existing ships.
While Asmodee is asking for an MSRP of $49.95, that seemed a touch high for me. Get these bad boys through Kingwood Hobbies, and they’re only $39.95.
Featuring exciting options for some of the most iconic ships of the Star Wars saga, these Squadron Packs for the Rebel Alliance, Galactic Empire and Scum and Villainy factions offer new, thematic pilots and upgrades for both standard and Epic play! Each Squadron Pack is the perfect starting point for collecting a faction and is packed with new pilots and upgrades designed to work together to form the tactical core of a squadron. In addition to unique new paint schemes for these ships, each of these releases feature a strong theme to help tell a narrative on the tabletop. As featured in Star Wars: Rebels, The Phoenix Cell Squadron Pack contains the celebrated Rebel heroes of Phoenix Squadron, while the Skystrike Academy Squadron Pack features the expert Imperial pilots seen on the other side of the conflict. For the Scum and Villainy faction, the Fugitives and Collaborators Squadron Pack introduces interesting new options, new pilots, and a few surprises. Read on for more information on what to expect in these expansions!
We already have multiple B-Wing paint jobs, but that orange is fire. Flappy wings, too!
Under the leadership of Commander Jun Sato, Phoenix Squadron is an elite group of pilots who often assist the Ghost team on their missions. At the helm of Phoenix Squadron is Phoenix Leader, Hera Syndulla . The infamously skilled pilot of the Ghost takes the controls of a more-nimble craft in this expansion and is the first RZ-1 A-wing pilot to boast an Initiative value of 6! Her pilot ability represents her guidance and leadership and is flexible enough to help her fit into any squad. Players willing to take on a little stress to more readily keep their armaments trained on the enemy will be interested upgrading their A-wings with some Vectored Cannons . This interesting new upgrade opens up new tactics with your RZ-1 A-wings and presents opportunities to keep your attack dice rolling while performing daring fly-by maneuvers.
Phoenix Squadron is often forced to be resourceful to get the better of the Imperials, and the B-wing included in this expansion is no exception. Painted in the distinct color scheme of the B6 Blade Wing Prototype, this miniature represents the experimental craft created as part of the Shantipole Project. The design of the prototype was so effective that it would later serve as the blueprint for the ubiquitous A/SF-01 B-wing. The experimental weaponry of the B6 Blade Wing Prototype sets it apart from its progeny by combining the power of four lasers together into a single, potent beam. While this upgrade is intended for Epic play, the expansion also includes a version of the title designed for standard play we will show off along with much more in a future preview.
A bit of a muted take on these Imperial ships after that B-Wing, these ships offer some nuance to your table.
The hardened recruits of Skystrike Academy are the elite test pilots of the Galactic Empire. These promising individuals undergo ruthless training, testing some of the Empire’s most potent and experimental starfighters. At the head of Skystrike Academy is Commander Vult Skerris , a notorious pilot known for his skill and cunning. His pilot ability allows you to delay his action until after all ships have moved, giving you perfect information to select the most effective action before engaging.
As leader of Admiral Thrawn’s TIE Defender initiative, Vult Skerris is entrusted with the testing and development of the experimental TIE/D Defender Elite prototype. This new variant boasts increased maneuverability and advanced fire control systems for what is an already effective platform. Expanding their research, the Skystrike Academy employs a number of modifications in their testing that extend to other starfighter chassis as well. One example being the modification of TIE/in Interceptors with more Sensitive Controls to further test the limits of both their pilot’s abilities and the craft itself. Regardless of the implementation, the testing of new technology by the Skystrike Academy presents a very real threat that the Rebel Alliance cannot leave unanswered.
HOLY FORKING SHIRTBALLS! LOOK AT THAT HWK-290!
As the Rebel Alliance and Galactic Empire vie for position in a sweeping war across the stars, the opportunists, criminals, and smugglers of the galaxy operate effectively from the shadows, playing sides against one another to increase their profit. Cutthroat tactics are the norm in the Outer Rim, and sometimes the demise of a wingman just makes for a bigger cut for the survivors. Flying under the sensors is a known tactic for smugglers and outlaws and is perfectly utilized in times of war through a maneuver known as the Tierfon Belly Run , which brings pilots like Padric perilously close to asteroids to shield their approach. As this is a tactic first made famous by Y-wing pilots of the Rebel Alliance you will be pleased to know this upgrade is also included in the Phoenix Cell Squadron Pack.
Not all of the unaffiliated have such an unscrupulous outlook, and some are simply trying to find a place in a tumultuous time of war. Such is the case of Kanan Jarrus , a Jedi padawan seeking refuge after the events of Order 66. This depiction of Kanan represents his time in hiding before his introduction to Hera Syndulla and becoming a crew member of the Ghost. Being on the run, Kanan uses the Force to predict and distract the enemy, increasing the survivability of himself and his wing mates. It should be noted this version of Kanan introduces a new light-side Force user to the limited options available in the Scum and Villainy faction, opening up a number of new tactics and synergies.
The second set from A Renewed Hope is due out exactly one month from today, so it’s time to start thinking about our next set of physical cards. This set is packed with amazing goodness, so get in line as quickly as you can to get your cards and dice printed. Sets will be fulfilled in first come, first served order.
The spreadsheet for the Build-Your-Own-Team characters has been down for awhile. In doing some work to incorporate the new ARH sets into my master spreadsheet, I broke the script that keeps that page fresh. It’s been on my list for a while to fix, and I finally got to it today. Now, the script does a bit more to figure out things on its own so that me changing bits around in the master spreadsheet won’t confuse it.
Click above to check out the BYOT deck option and have a look at the available characters.
While I was at it, I applied the same fix to my buy list script, so that’s back up and available as well. If you’ve got a handful of cards you want to trade it, take a look and see what I can give you for them.
Get you some cash, homie.
Finally, I eliminated the Standard option of the BYOT decks since Standard has rotated and moved to partially A Renewed Hope cards. I’m considering using those in premade decks, but I haven’t pulled the trigger yet.
Also, I’m toying with the idea of putting Legendaries up for the BYOT decks. Those would be a little more expensive, but I’ve got an increasing stock of Legendaries that would love to find home.
While I normally carry these, I’m not allowed to advertise them or even show you the price unless we’re in a very specified window as defined by Asmodee. We just happen to be in that time right now! So, check it out!
I carry packs of newer Destiny cards that are $1 each. These packs are GUARANTEED to not have any Legendaries*, but they will be chock full of valuable rares, uncommons, and commons. (yes, there are valuable commons).
Right now I have a veritable barn full of packs from Convergence and Covert Missions just waiting to be cracked and added to collections (or used to insulate your house, once they’re yours I don’t care what you do with them).
Click on the packs below to scoop up yours!
A300 Blaster
Ahsoka Tano – Brash Prodigy
Conscript Squad
Fickle Mercenaries
Wat Tambor – Techno Union Foreman
Watto – Stubborn Gambler
Bacta Therapy
Enticing Reward
Forsaken
It Binds All Things
Riot Shield
A Sinister Peace
Disciplined Mind
Measure for Measure
Near Miss
Boba Fett’s Wrist Laser
Imperial Death Trooper
Jedi Knight
Kanan Jarrus – Jedi Exile
Kanan Jarrus’ Lightsaber
Kashyyyk Warrior
Kragan Gorr – Pirate Captain
Luke Skywalker – Red Five
Pirate Ship
Snoke’s Praetorian Guard
Trandoshan Hunter
Vibro-Arbir Blades
Death Star Plans
Destroy the Death Star
Eject
Face the Enemy
Legacy of the Sith
Rule of Two
Spectre Cell
Viper Probe Droid
Fluid Riposte
Jawa Junk Dealer
Merchant Freighter
Run to Safety
*These packs are ones leftover from boxes I’ve opened after pulling six Legendaries from that box.
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