Lock Decks

Post Nationals Depression continues, and I’m still fiddling with random ideas, but for the most part not even touching Redemption. I’ll work a bit more on some YouTube videos, but if you haven’t seen any of my Aug/Sept ROOT adventures, you can check them out here, where I use a rough Gates of Samaria deck to go a mediocre 3-3 in ROOT. The key here is that I had a lot of fun, and that’s what Redemption is all about. Some of the most fun decks I’ve ever played were lock decks, and I spent most of my early career of Redemption trying to make them work. Lock decks are a fairly common and powerful archetype in other TCGs, and a lock deck even won the Pokemon US National Tournament this past summer. Lock decks come in a variety of forms, but they all share one goal: to make it impossible for your opponent to win. Lock decks tend to be challenging to play, as one mistake can cost you the game, and make for extremely strategic games on both sides. Many people claim that it’s not fun to play against these sorts of decks, but I find that with correct deck building and smart play, they lead to some of the most fun games I’ve ever played. Site Lock: Probably the first deck archetype that comes to mind when I mention lock decks are Site Lock decks, which were fairly well known up until the Disciples expansion. Site Lock decks seek to use Sites to prevent heroes from rescuing, and contain cards that attempt to remove any site access cards the opponent may have. The reason these decks completely died out with the release of the Disciples expansion was Fishing Boat, a set-aside fortress that grants site access. At the time, there were no cards that could discard it, and it was played in ~30% of top decks. However, this is no longer the case; Assyrian Siege Army is the premier set-aside fortress discarder, and can also take out artifacts and sites that may grant site access. Additionally, Fishing Boat is no longer guaranteed to be seen in the top decks. With Site Lock being dead for years, many people have dropped extra site access, and rely on 1-2 cards and a multitude of heroes, allowing you to take the competition by surprise and come out on top. Unfortunately, Lost Soul generation is a very common strategy in aggressive decks, and while you may be able to keep all of your lost souls safe in sites, your opponent can pull out another one of your souls or create one of their own to rescue. You need both sites and a substantial defense to fend these rescues off. Pale Green, Brown, and Black tend to be the best Site Lock defenses, and offensive choice depends heavily on the defense, but Genesis can use Jacob’s Dream to steal a Site from your opponent. Many people have said Site Lock is dead, but that sort of thinking will only aid in its rise to victory. Soul Control: While this is technically a lock deck, and not a control deck, Soul Control just sounds so cool, and John Earley threatened to steal all my Bucklers if I didn’t use his name for it. Soul Control seeks to remove all lost souls from your deck or land of bondage, making it impossible for your opponent rescue 5 lost souls. This is accomplished several different ways. Burial, is of course the obvious card to use, but you can also discard lost souls from the top of your deck using cards like Jephthah in combination with Washing Hands. Discarding isn’t the only way to rid your deck of souls though. If you use cards like the Wanderer Lost Soul or Nebushashban to exchange lost souls with your opponent, you can then shuffle their souls back into their deck with a card like Death of Unrighteous, leaving yours in their land of bondage. Alternatively, you can put those lost souls to the bottom of their deck with Hormah, or exchange for a Captured Hero and then use I am Redemption to return it to territory. The deck has received a lot of help from a shifting metagame due to the I/J starters, as previously Soul Generation was primarily done by using the Hopper lost soul, or evil characters like The Amalekite’s Slave or Assyrian Survivor. Although these cards still see play, the more common soul generation are cards like Samaritan Water Jar, Fishers of Men, and Gideon’s Call, which merely accelerate the drawing of your lost souls, and don’t actually help in the long run against a Soul Control deck. Gray and Pale Green work best for Soul Control, and a Hormah is a pretty key addition as well. The offense can be a few different things, but Judges are the ideal choice because of Jephthah. There are many creative ways to get rid of these souls, but be careful, because a simple Death of Unrighteous can shuffle all the lost souls you gave to your opponent back to you. Hand Lock: Currently, this deck does not exist, but it has won a National tournament before. I am, of course, referring to the Sin in the Camp deck, originally built by Clift Crysel back in 2007, but piloted by Gabe Isbell to a T2-2P first place finish at California Nats in 2009. This deck seeks to rid your opponent of having any cards in his hand, ever. A similar breed of deck would be Hand Control, which has won Nationals in T1-2P in both 2008 and 2013, but the decks are distinctly different because Hand Control still gives your opponent a chance to play cards. Because of the Sin in the Camp deck, its unlikely Hand Lock will ever return, as SitC was given an errata to one per territory, and I doubt the playtesters will print another card like it, but you can perhaps do a soft lock by ridding their hand of cards and then setting up SitC, limiting them to 2 cards per turn, and then using The Generous Widow or other cards to discard them every turn, but they still have the opportunity to use draw cards to gain a hand back. I really don’t mind that this deck will never return, but I also don’t think the Sin in the Camp errata is necessary anymore when Covenant With Death currently shuts it down cold, and many other cards can be added to help beat it. I only had the displeasure of playing against it once, all the way back in 2007, and I just sat there and passed the entire game. This is the one lock deck that I think creates negative player experience. These are the three types of lock decks in Redemption. There are other types of locks, but they really don’t function like a standard lock deck. Examples of this would be Hero Lock (ridding your opponents of heroes) and Deck Lock (running your opponent completely out of resources). The reason I say they don’t function like standard decks is because these goals are very late game and depend in part on your opponent, whereas the others set up the lock as soon as possible all on their own. In future, we may have some sort of Hero lock, where you put a good multicolor card in your opponent’s territory, play Broken Cisterns, and have Plagued with Diseases active, but currently this is very difficult to accomplish. Currently the only way would be to use Seven Wicked Spirits to exchange with one of their characters, band to SWS, exchange with Saul, convert Saul to Paul, paralyze Paul with Palsy, place Broken Cisterns in territory, which will then decrease any hero they put in their territory by */8, and they can’t even attack with Paul. The main issue with this is that they can still put heroes directly into battle (Goliath helps solve that problem), and of course */9 and greater would be fine, as you can’t activate Plagued with Diseases without killing Paul. However this is still a soft lock and is completely unreasonable to pull off. In future, however, decrease could do something along these lines, and is something to keep an eye out for. Again, I think the metagame is ripe for a Lock deck to come out on top, just like Hand Control accomplished last year. People are moving more and more towards balanced lists, accelerating souls instead of generating them, and are dropping cards that are used solely for those matchups. With a good deck build and skillful playing, you can come on top at your next tournament with these decks. -Andrew