If you don’t know what KeyForge is, it’s a 2-player card game where the decks of cards you play with are randomly generated so no two decks of cards are ever the same. I’m not going into great detail about the game itself, you can check it out here. But essentially, there are millions of combinations of cards so you never know what you are getting when you buy and open a new deck.
I started playing it shortly after the game came out with someone from work, and then decided to go to some tournaments to play some more. A couple of years later and it’s all got out of hand. I started with only a handful of decks until I went to a the UK Vault Tour (a national tournament) last year at the UK Games Expo. Now I’ve ended up with boxes full of bloody decks! The game definitely taps into that gambling/loot box part of your brain, as every time you buy a new deck (which are around £8), you think you might get the best deck in the world. Then you don’t. So you buy another one. Or a few. Always chasing that perfect combination of cards.
Now that the world is in lockdown, I decided to go over all of these cards under bed. I’ve been playing KeyForge a lot since the UK Vault Tour last year as there is a good community in London – the London Urchins – and figured that maybe some of those old decks I’d written off as rubbish might actually be good but I just hadn’t played enough games at the time and I’d like to think my skill level has improved a bit. I’ve also just finished working during the lockdown so I have some time on my hands. This all of this in mind, I have come up with…
The Grand Lockdown KeyForge Experiment
At the time of coming up with this plan, I had 57 decks under the bed (I’ve since bought more, it’s an addiction). I want to play them all again with my couple of years experience and determine which deck is the greatest deck I own. As we are on lockdown, there is no way to play them IRL (in real life) but there is a handy unofficial online way to play – The Crucible Online. So here are the rules of the experiment:
- Round 1: I will play every single deck online up to 3 times
- Round 2: To qualify for Round 2, a deck must win 2 games. Then I will play all qualified decks up to 3 times again.
- Round 3: AND SO ON until the ultimate deck is left standing.
Is this a very scientific experiment? No, my ‘best’ decks might get thrashed by some very good decks or players and my ‘worst’ might beat some newbies trying out other bad decks. But it will be fun right? Probably not for a big chunk of it as I have to grind through my average to terrible decks and go up against a lot of dinosaur cards (which are generally hard to beat if you don’t know KeyForge). BUT IT IS SOMETHING TO DO. And is that not what we all long for – something to do.
So when does this all start? It already has! You can check the list of decks I’m using below and you can use this handy link to see current progress before I publish the results of Round 1.
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