HOLDER'S HEROES

We’ve had several months now to explore Faith of Our Fathers (FoOF) and the impact it will have on Redemption. Players have found all kinds of fun ways to use and abuse the cards from this new set. With the big, season end tournaments right around the corner, I’d like to take time to go over the Faith of Our Fathers tins to share some of my favorite uses for FoOF cards. I’ll inevitably miss many great uses, so please feel free to comment and add your own favorites.

Follow up:

Tin I

Lost Soul Psalms 119:150 (discarder) – I’ll have to admit I wasn’t impressed when I first saw this card. My first impression was that it would be great against a Heroless deck. They don’t have a lot of good cards to spare. You could even get lucky and rob them of their Son of God.

One of the best uses I’ve seen for this card is to discard an evil Enhancement your opponent has placed in your territory (like Set Fire, Sin in the Camp, etc.).

If your opponent hasn’t given you any Enhancements to discard, the next best choice is one of your own cards that you can discard for a benefit. If you discard a human evil Character you can place Hormah under your deck. You could discard Rome and then get it back with Emperor Galba. No doubt people have probably found other neat things to discard too.

Men of Judah – They band to Army of Simeonites to make a 23/23 army! OK, enough of the obvious. A 12/12 Hero essentially gives red the ability to fight by the numbers, despite the fact that this card doesn’t negate all special abilities. The Men of Judah can win a battle based on size alone!

Your opponent is almost always going to have initiative against this Hero so be certain to pack plenty of negates. Red has a nice variety of negates to choose from, such as The Battle is the Lord’s, Holy Ground, Council of Abigail and The Might of Faith. In case that wasn’t enough, you can add Covenant of Noah to your artifact pile to stop cards like Death of Unrighteous, Failed Objective, etc.

Army of Simeonites – Most of what was said about Men of Judah applies here too. With numbers of 11/11 this Hero is no small threat.

Caleb – His most obvious use is part of the “big red banding chain”. Caleb banded to Men of Judah banded to Army of Simeonites gives you 33/30 numbers in battle. There are plenty of other characters you can add to that banding chain to make it even bigger. My favorite is the Kings version of Abishai because he can band to any of the three “big red” Heroes.

This reprint of Caleb no longer ignores giants; instead he removes them from the game! Giants like Goliath, Saph, Lahmi and Ishbibenob make an appearance from time to time in constructed decks. They show up even more frequently in drafts. Caleb’s most common target is probably the Twelve-Fingered Giant. He is one of the few FoOF evil Characters that can be considered a “stand alone” card. He get’s splashed into decks sometimes simply for his ability to shut down banding.

I find a lot of people overlook the usefulness of Caleb’s ability to “borrow” an opponent’s Site. You can use him to gain access, but he also works to eliminate an opponent’s New Jerusalem (site) or Promised Land. Caleb can take up both uses, therefore discarding the site, to keep your opponent from using their Sites to gain access to yours.

Caleb's Sword – Red has a large number of warrior class Heroes that can hold this prized weapon. There’s the obvious use on Caleb, which makes him16/11 after name on name bonus.

Naharai gives you another reason to include Caleb’s Sword in your red warrior deck, since needs a weapon in play to survive after the battle.

It’s also a good answer to popular weapons like Two-Thousand Horses, Naaman’s Chariot’s and Horses and Swift Horses.

Standing in the Gap –This is a good counter to some of the strategies FoOF has made popular, namely hand discard, Site lockout and deck discard. Hand discard has become popular thanks to the gray emperors and blue Genesis Heroes. FoOF has given Site decks a nice boost so protecting your access Sites is more important than ever. Thanks to the power of Zerubbabel’s Temple, many people are using Fortress discard if they can find a way to fit it into their deck. Standing in the Gap also stops deck discard like Confusion and some of the evil Egyptians.

Huge Egyptian – The biggest risk with using deck discard in the past was that you could discard your opponent’s Lost Souls instead of their important cards. Huge Egyptian changes that because he puts the Lost Soul in play. A few key discards from the top of a person’s deck can make a huge difference in a game. Combined with a few other deck discarders you can build an effective theme deck that will whittle away your opponent’s draw pile one card at a time.

Since Huge Egyptian puts the Lost Soul in play, he can be used like Seeker of the Lost or the “Revealer” Lost Soul when your opponent isn’t drawing Lost Souls for you to rescue. The best part is that he discards the card if it’s not a Lost Soul, instead of putting it on the bottom of their deck.

Huge Egyptian also fits nicely in any Egyptian theme deck, even if it’s not based on deck discard. He’s large enough to hang with a fight by the numbers Hero and he’s not royalty so he can block King David.

Egyptian Warden – The most obvious use for this card is with an Egyptian defense. It’s such a powerful card that it should almost always be included. Like King Zimri, he often enters battle and wins instantly. Unlike King Zimri, he can be used over and over again.

Raider’s Camp is a great card to use with Egyptian Warden. In a deck full of evil gold Enhancements you’ll have an ample supply to capture several of your opponent’s Heroes. This combo will make it very difficult for them to ever rescue a Lost Soul from you.

The Warden is one of a hand full of evil Characters from FoOF that could be considered “stand alone”. A true stand alone character doesn’t need Enhancements to be effective, however most stand alone defenses will include some number of multi-color Enhancements (such as Lying Unto God, Torment, Dance of Death, etc.) to use on their fight by the number characters. Since all evil multi-color Enhancements qualify as being an evil gold Enhancement, this makes the Warden an easy inclusion in this type of defense.

Ruthless – Let me start by saying, a Negate that cannot be negated is really nice. It works best when used on an Egyptian so that you get the bonus. It even has nice numbers to use on your gold King of Tyrus, although you don’t get to use the negate effect.

Egyptian Spear – This was given the same great special ability as the Huge Egyptian. Rather than repeat myself I’ll just refer you to my comments for that card. One additional bonus is that Egyptian Spear has the same scripture verse as Huge Egyptian so he gets name on name bonus when holding his spear.

That concludes the assessment for Tin I. I hope you’ve found a few nuggets of wisdom that inspire you to try something new. What a great bunch of cards Faith of Our Fathers has added to Redemption!