Hello Condemned! I hope you’ve had a great week. We had a ton of fun at Highlander Games last week, which you can read about here. Draft is a ton of fun, and I’m showing up at Highlander every Thursday to run more of them. You should totally drop by if you can!

But that’s not why you’re reading this post. You’re interested in seeing the latest and greatest card to get spoiled! And I’ve got one for you. Today, it’s another Condemned and an Armor card.

The first card today is a Condemned that’s going to be very useful in the new meta. This condemned has an extensive toolkit in Chaotic Assault, with new cards that have yet to be revealed. Behold, The Pacifier:

This Condemned is pretty fascinating, mainly because of her ability. Being able to ping a Weapon becomes a significant issue for your opponent. They need to be able to parry more attacks, but then they burn through their Weapons faster. It’s a fun little way to force your opponents into difficult situations.

In testing, I realized that this ability is good, without being massively overpowered. One of the things about The Condemned is that I want people playing the game to fee like they’re doing something massive. I want people forcing their opponents to make difficult decisions.

The way I describe it to new people is “building this big ball of death and dropping it on your opponent. At the same time, they’re throwing their own death balls at you, and you have to deal with fighting that off. It’s all about forcing difficult decisions on your opponents and dealing with acceptable losses sent your way.” I want those decisions to be more nuanced than “oh, I just built up a ton of damage, now you gotta deal with it.” I want secondary effects like what The Pacifier does here. If you don’t parry, yes, you’ll take damage. But so will your Weapon! Do you really want that? Another currently existing card that produces similar effects is the Molotov Cocktail. It has the chance to break every Armor equipped to a Condemned, and it deals damage to all the armor equipped to a Condemned. It’s another “parry me or else” kind of Weapon.

The second card is an Armor card, with art done by Logan Staeheli. Logan was really excited to work on this card. This was a card that was both top down and bottom up in terms of design. I say it was bottom up because I started with the mechanics of the card before everything else. But at the same time, I call it a top down designed card because the mechanics centered around an Armor that inspired new actions when you got hit. Without further ado, here’s the Inspiration Helmet:

Logan had fun coming up with this piece. He really enjoyed working on it. And I like this card, too! It’s fun having more Armor with Shielding that does funky things. I also want more cards that care about Multi-Hit. That’s why I gave Inspiration Helmet the wording that I did. It doesn’t matter if the first hit breaks the helmet. Each hit from a Multi-Hit Weapon still applies to this Armor. This armor will definitely see play in your decks, and I can’t wait for it to happen!

This past month has been nothing short of awesome for The Condemned. Between 2D Con, last week’s wild draft at Highlander, and all the new cards I’m spoiling, it’s a great time to be playing The Condemned.  With these two cards spoiled, we’re up to:

11/128 cards

It’s so exciting! I’m making good progress, this set is coming along, and it’s going to be great to see it finally release! I hope you’re as excited as I am for Chaotic Assault. This whole set is going to be wild by the time it’s done. But that’s going to wrap up this post. If you’re in the area, get out to Highlander Games and come play The Condemned. If you’re not, tell your local game store that you want The Condemned on their shelves. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you in The Arena!