Darwin Kastle

The Epic TCG is releasing their first expansion in August and it is called Time Wars. This expansion will produce 150 new cards to use in constructed and draft environments. The flavor text for the new expansion is as follows:

The walls of time have become weak as mighty clashes between gods rage. Beasts are plucked from the depths of the past and marvels pulled from the mists of the future to do battle as champions of the gods. This is Epic Time Wars. In this exciting new Epic set players will be able to pit dinosaurs and dragons against mechs, missiles and machine guns.

We were able to receive an exclusive preview card for Time Wars and it is spotlighted below by game designer Darwin Kastle.

The release of the first Epic expansion, Time Wars, is fast approaching. This set will include many cards likely to see a lot of play in Designed Deck. A good example is Breath of Life. It's a powerful main deck card for some archetypes and an amazing sideboard card for any deck.

When I'm trying to decide what cards to put in my sideboard I usually look for cards that while powerful in general are especially powerful against a deck archetype that is popular or that represents a particularly difficult match up for mine. One of the most popular/powerful strategies in designed deck at the moment is discard. The discard player uses cards that make his opponent discard the cards in their hand, so they will miss actions and not have answers to what the discard player does with his actions.



Breath of Life is great against discard for two reasons. First, if your opponent makes you discard Breath of Life, not only do you still get to use it, you get to use it without paying an action. You actually want to be made to discard it. Second, it draws you multiple cards, thus keeping your hand size high and helping stave off your opponent's efforts to get your hand size down to zero.

Another popular strategy is aggressive/burn. Burn decks use cards that can damage the opponent directly like Blast, Firespitter, and Spite to quickly reduce the opponent's Mojo to zero before their deck gets going. While Mojo gain is generally a good idea against this strategy, it can often only be a bandage measure that doesn't help bring you closer to your deck's goal. The nice thing about Breath of Life is that it gains you 5 Mojo while it's performing a useful function for your deck, drawing you cards.

As you can see, many decks can benefit from having Breath of Life in the sideboard. Breath of Life should also be given consideration as a main deck card. One reason to consider Breath of Life as a main deck card is if either discard or burn is really popular or really good against your deck. In the right deck however, Breath of Life will be a good main deck card no matter what your opponent is playing. One way achieve this is to make Mojo a resource for your deck. Playing with cards like Over My Dead Body, Necromancer Lord and Brothers of the Beast are ways to make sure that Mojo gain will always be a valuable asset to your deck. Another way to make it powerful in your main deck is to design a deck that likes to react to your opponent more than dictate the tempo. For example, a deck that uses lots of stop cards may find Breath of Life will be a good fit tempo-wise because it's a good card to play on a turn where nothing needed to be stopped. An aggressive deck usually wants to spend every action putting more pressure on an opponent, making Breath of Life not as good of a fit.

I expect we will see Breath of Life showing up in lots of main decks and many sideboards. If you like playing discard or burn, you should beware. If you don't like playing against them, you should be looking to trade for/buy/open some Breath of Life cards when Time Wars comes out.

Time Wars hits stores in August and will be available in Booster Case, Box and pack format. The MSRP for Packs is $3.99