Review of Dark Legion MegaDeck

Blurb from the publisher: 'The Warzone Resurrection Dark Legion Faction Card Pack contains all Strategy, Tactical and Gear cards for the Dark Legion!'

What you get: Your EUR 26,99 or USD 31,98 or GBP 19,99 will buy you the Dark Legion MegaDeck for you to start battling in the Mutant Chronicles Warzone Resurrection universe under the Imperial flag. By now we have seen all the Starter Boxes of the Universe, Dark Legion included. It is reminded that all the rules contained in this rulebook can be found free of charge on the Prodos Games website, even though the free pdfs do not contain the tens of pages of extensive fluff that make the game what it is and breathe life into its history and its armies. Hell, even the actual cards can be found on the Downloads section of the company's site, in order to better peruse before purchasing.

The MegaDecks are a change in production that came up since my initial review of the Imperial Starter Box. Namely, each Starter Box now contains the miniatures, the dice, as well as the squad reference cards and the resource cards. It no longer contains the Strategy, Tactics and Gear Cards, making the MegaDecks a must-have if one intends to play a particular faction in the advanced game that uses cards in addition to miniatures. MegaDecks are all-inclusive; they contain all the cards relevant to the faction, irrespective of whether the miniatures are included in the Starter Box or in other packs. In other words, one does not need to hunt for cards here and there. One single purchase and he is done.

The Dark Legion MegaDeck contains 222 standard-sized laminated cards with rounded corners at 87,5 x 62 cm. If you have heard of that little game called Magic: the Gathering, that's the size. All the rules are to be found in the rulebook; the box contains nothing else but the cards. That's 32 cards more than the Mishima MegaDeck that we also saw together.

Out of these cards 125 are Tactical, 45 Strategy and 45 Gear, while 12 Resources close the deal. Compare it to the 110 Tactical, and 39 each of Strategy and Gear of Mishima (as well as the standard 12 Reources, of course) and one thing becomes apparent: the Dark Legion is designed to be more unpredictable. Its standard troops do not boast exceptional powers, its cards however make up for it.

Unless something changes drastically in the marketing of Warzone: Resurrection, each MegaDeck contains each card the maximum number of times it can be used in a game. As per the rulebook, that would be an absolute maximum of 3 copies of each Strategy card, 5 copies of each Tactical card and 3 copies of each Gear card. Practically speaking, Dark Legion has at its disposal 24 unique Tactical, 15 unique Strategy and 15 unique Gear cards. A player's deck cannot contain less than 35 cards excluding Resources, while the Resources a player wields depend on his Warlord type. As an example, the Close Combat Warlord brings in the most resources (8), while the Ranged Warlord the least (6).

The big change from the cards included in the Starter Box is that the MegaDeck also includes the cards related to all the other units of the Dark Legion faction that were not contained in the Starter Box. That would be 33 unique cards (12 Tactical, 10 Strategy and 11 Gear), with one per type referring to a single unit: the Necromutants, the Nasca Razides, Golgotha, Alakhai the Cunning, Valpurgius, the Nepharite of Algeroth, the Praetorian Behemoth, the Necrobeast Rider and the Black Widow. Seeing how there are Close Combat and Ranged Preatorian Stalkers, 5 unique cards are actually dedicated to them: a common Strategy, 2 Gear and 3 Tactical. That is a total of 123 cards right there. From these additional 33 unique cards one can immediately use with his Starter Box army 8 unique cards (or 34 overall): from the Strangulation of Algeroth (a Strategy) to Terror and Dark Blessing (two Gear), there is plenty of choice around. Even more so for Tactics: Mind Rot, Mist of Corruption, Into the Void are only some of the surprises that you might mix even in the most basic of armies. To calculate this number I excluded Bonded cards which require that the unit they are bonded to participates in the army for the card to be included in the deck, as well as those which, while not bonded, cannot put their effects in place due to requirements relating to the existence of the unit itself.

When it comes to the cards that were included in the Starter Box under the old, awkward format, it appears that a few things have changed in content in addition to the changes in their number. Out of the four Gear cards three have changed. Heightened Senses now refers to all models in the squad, while Gaze of Algeroth has been clarified and is now bonded to Razides. Finally the Black Liquid Grenade has been clarified for ease of play.

Strategy cards on the other hand have not been particularly touched. Out of the five initial cards, only the Unnatural Advance clarifies that it takes place upon the unit's activation and not immediately. The other four remain the same.

Three out of the twelve tactical cards remain the same, namely Necromutation, Thermo Instability and Plague Ridden. Insalubrious Detonation is now Bonded to Necromutant Squad Commanders, while Induce Clarity has been rephrased for clarity. Moment of Clarity explicitly refers to activation (and is not an instant effect), while The Void's Vacuum no longer refers to Heroes but to Lords and Warlords. Corrosion now has a penalty of 3 Resource cards, it applies however only to one member of a squad, and can thus be considered nerfed, just like Dark Reversal whose Plasma Autohit falls from St 15 to St 10. The Dark Technology Warp on the other hand gains considerably, since it now refers to every vehicle and not just one in a squad. Blood Lust now applies to friendlies only and not enemies. Finally, the repercussions of Ripped From Reality is dropped from a St 15 Plasma AVV10 Autohit to a St 8 (!), the cards that it removes from the game however can belong to either you or your opponent. Don't celebrate just yet; it's always your units that incur the penalyt.

The strong points: I cannot but loudly applaud Prodos' policy when it comes to rules and content. Everything, absolutely everything, is free on their website, these cards included. For the number-crunchers out there there will be no blind purchases, no impulse-buying and no dissapointment about a unit not working as you wanted it to. You can sit down and take all the time in the world persusing the free documentation, both rulebook and cards, before deciding whether you want to invest on the actual game, what faction you might find most entertaining and what individual units you would like to see in your army. For hardcore players, you can even see your enemies' capbilities and try to devise ways to counter them, again without spending a single cent.

Marketing all the cards of a faction together as MegaDecks was a clever move. It allowed the present holistic approach and eliminated the need to buy multiple packages of unneeded miniatures just to have each card in adequate copies. It's all here; buy it and be done with it for ever.

When it comes to aesthetics and usability, the cards are of a standard, uniform size and not the awkward and practically unsleevable 94 x 68 cm of the Starter Box. The paper is thick and of high quality. Laminated as they might be, I still prefer them sleeved in order for them to last forever. Having round instead of sharp edges helps a lot. The art is identical to the old version and the text is easily readable. It has nothing to do with the insanely small text that can be found on the unit cards which accompany the miniatures and are not included in this product.

I am in favour of most of the changes the cards brought in relation to their Starter Box iteration. This refers to both clarifications on old cards (admittedly some could stall the game a bit) as well as the brand new content. Even though not all situations arose during my plays, some guidelines are clear: create variables and options, not get-out-of-jail cards; make cards more interesting in more situations; increase their playing frequency; eliminate one-trick ponies that no player on his right mind would have included more than once in his deck. Depending on what one plays with, some changes might appear sweeping, even though not as sweeping as the ones in Mishima. Some of the changes speak for themselves about how often cards were used. As an example, the penalty for using Ripped From Reality was extrmely grave. Many of the changes are obvious clarifications, while others might not make full sense to the naked eye. With my number of plays however I am in no position to tell Prodos, or anybody else for that matter, that their changes are unblanacing it. I trust that they have done their research, and that it all leads to a more tense, more interesting game.

It might not sound like much, but I very much enjoy that I have all the cards from the beginning to create my decks of choice and see how they perform as if I had all the miniatures of the faction. This option did not exist before, and running simulations on the drawing board is not the same as playing an unsanctioned game, with the 'wrong' miniatures (ooh, the shame!), trying to figure out what works better. Bonus points to Prodos for having eight additional unique cards that work with the Starter Box miniatures even though they are related to other units. No matter how I look at it, the Dark Legion MegaDeck provides more options than there were before; even more so due to its size.

The weak points: As much as I am in favour of most of the changes, I can't but wonder why Prodos did not undertake the MegaDeck approach from the beginning and why the content of the cards is not constant between the two iterations. Surely the playtesting must have been adequate by then for Prodos to see that all cards needed to be equally useful, interesting and entertaining. The way it stands now, even the players who bought the Starter Boxes with the awkward non-standard cards are obliged to buy the MegaDecks. That is simply not fair. Good faith is hard to create and easy to lose. On the other hand, in the grand scheme of things the expense is neither high nor avoidable if one is serious about the game and purchases additional miniatures that lack the cards.

There are a few typos (nothing grave or confusing), but still. This is the second iteration of these cards. By now the cards should have been perfect.

Even though the Dark Legion is supposed to be evol (TM), the colour scheme on the upper part of each card could have been a bit less dark to find each card more easily. What is this fixation with Algeroth by the way? There's the Gaze of Algeroth, the Blessing of Algeroth, Algeroth's Dark Pattern and the Strangulation of Algeroth. Even TSR at its finest didn't name all its spells after Mordenkainen or Tenser. All in all, I feel the writers might have cheesed out a bit on their selection of titles. It's not easy to do evil right, I guess.

Conclusion: You didn't buy the most evil faction of Warzone Resurrection just to play with the simple rules without the cards? Buy the cards you human scum, in the name of the [cheese]Dark Unholy Bile of Algeroth![/cheese]

To find out more about the Dark Legion MegaDeck of Mutant Chronicles Warzone Resurrection, visit the Prodos Games website at prodosgames.com/.

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