We Have an Army. (9 Power Words, 21XP)

Card draw simulator

Odds: 0% – 0% – 0% more
Derived from
None. Self-made deck here.
Inspiration for
None yet

Crazly · 166

This is ridiculously practical and may be illegal, and is an interesting spot in the rules. If it's not obvious enough, Parallel Agnes has 9 Power Words.

Diagram showing what I imagine the Upgrade timing windows are for Agnes' backside ability.

Diagram.png

By the Customizable rulings, checking a checkmark does count as upgrading, so Agnes's backside Additional Options can trigger. "But you're not leaving the lower level card in." Because the backside is a "When" trigger, the card is not yet upgraded when you spend the extra xp. As such you are "leaving the lower level card in" and then the card no longer becomes a copy in your deck. Then, the checkmark occurs and the "lower level" card is incidentally upgraded while still having been left in. Since upgrading a customizable does not actually add another card to your deck, suddenly your deck is 1 short. Unsurprisingly, you add another Power Word (since there is no longer a copy of Power Word in your deck). Repeat for every scenario +2-3 standalones. What does this give you? You control every non-Elite enemy in the scenario.

For those wondering, the final cost for the Power Words is 21xp (or potentially 12xp if you count by the cards' level and not the checklist card's xp).

12 comments

Jul 07, 2023 zfan2614 · 1

I have tried it, you can't do that on the app.

Jul 07, 2023 Valentin1331 · 67312

The moment you have to pull a Miro board to illustrate your deck principle is when you know that genius happened.

Have you actually tested it??

Jul 07, 2023 HungryColquhoun · 7282

It says to not count the lower level version for your deck limit. I appreciate they are all functionally the same level, but I think this rule would still be in effect (and so you would need to pad to a 31 card deck).

Generally I don't think you could add in new copies Power Word to make up for the short fall in your deck anyway, as the card limit of Power Word is already taken (and there isn't such a thing as a lower level equivalent of a customisable card). I guess if you hear otherwise from FF everyone would be all ears though!

Jul 07, 2023 Crazly · 166

@zfan2614 On the app? The above decklist has 9 power words in it.

@Valentin1331 Due to the nature of the deck requiring 6 scenarios before you can obtain 9 Power Words, and that most of the xp cost is stacked later in the campaign (Scenario 1: 1xp, Scenario 2: 2xp...) Agnes has plenty of xp for upgrading the deck in general. As such, the deck does work pretty well.

@HungryColquhoun Agnes's base deck limit is 25, so there would be no need to pad to 31. Due to Agnes' Deckbuilding ability, the "lower level" Power Word stops being a copy. As such, they do not count for the limit of how many Power Words you can have in your deck.

Jul 07, 2023 HungryColquhoun · 7282

@Crazly I think that's the point isn't it? The number of copies you can have under normal circumstances is 3, and so lower level versions don't count toward this (and as the thrust of this Additional Option is lower level copies should remain in the deck and not count towards the limit, they add on to the bulk of the deck).

Take for example Shrivelling and Shrivelling •••. Assuming you had two copies of Shrivelling, if you keep base Shrivelling in your deck and pay the full cost of upgraded Shrivelling, then base Shrivelling no longer counts towards your deck limit - making you have 27 non-weakness/signature cards.

My personal thought is customisable cards can't exist at a lower level due to their very nature, and so wouldn't be an appropriate target for this rule - because there is no appropriate 'lower level' target for this rule to land on. However that's just my opinion and as mentioned I think it's one to bottom out with FF, as naturally P-Agnes or P-Skids weren't built with customisable cards in mind. It also does present a bit of a proxying nightmare unless you want to buy 3 copies of TSK!

Jul 07, 2023 Julio_R · 500

Pretty funny although it sounds very far from what the design looks like it was intended to be. Anyway, you actually improve the reference sheet, not the Power Word card itself. I don't think two Customizable cards with the same title but different levels can coexist in the same deck because they all use the same reference sheet, unlike normal cards which you can have different levels at the same time in the deck.

On the other hand, a doubt about this card: If you play Power Word with Agnes' ability and attach it to an enemy, when the enemy is defeated, does the Power Word card go to the discard pile or does it return to your deck?

Jul 07, 2023 Kalín · 200

I love when see things like this. If it's actually legal, great job.

Jul 09, 2023 ElseWhere · 4445

I love this so much. As a member of your playgroup who actually argued against the plausibility of this at first, I don't think I've ever been more pleased to discover a glaring hole in the rules–the idea of controlling an entire scenario's worth of enemies is just flawless.

Can you imagine the moment you trigger it with Tonguetwister and Thrice Spoken and nine different enemies exhaust and attack a boss? AMAZING.

I do think Sixth Sense may be a better choice for default spell than Shriveling, just because of the unlimited uses, and I'm not sure if the cost on Scroll of Prophecies balances out the accelerated Power Word access, but I'll defer to your testing experience on that!

Jul 09, 2023 ThatLittleVoice · 1

Bold. Brilliant. Potential for absolute overkill. My favorite.

Jul 12, 2023 dalarpguy · 105

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this doesn't work. One, even if you could get nine power words, everything past the first two don't count towards the deck size. So you would need extra cards to fill out your deck size. Also, it would have to be done in campaign, you can't start like this for a standalone deck.

But two, the rules reference tells you that upgrading is removing an old card for a higher level version of the new card. Customizable cards are not higher level versions, they're the exact same card, the customize list is the only thing changing. You're adding abilities to the same card, not "upgrading" by definition of the game. I think the confusion comes from the fact that these changes to customized cards are called "upgrades". You're adding upgrades to your card, but you're not upgrading to a higher level version of the card.

Jul 13, 2023 crazydragonking · 1

@Crazly How are you spending more than 10 xp on power word check boxes? My understanding was that the Customizable rules cap you at 10 xp (lvl 5 card).

Jul 13, 2023 ethereal64 · 485

I actually send an e-mail to check if this is legal, as I really want to use it on our next TSK run. Sadly, it's not :(

"One important thing to state up front is that there is no “higher level version” or “lower level version” of a customizable card. Every copy of a customizable card in your deck is the same level as each other customizable card with the same title; when you spend XP on the upgrade sheet, the upgrade applies to each copy of that card. Parallel Agnes’ additional deckbuilding options does not interact with Power Word or other customizable cards."

——FFG Rules team

PIty, could be a lot of fun.