The Secondary Races: Spiders, Satyrs & Jackals

Fair warning, this is another speculation article, since Beta has been somewhat stymied due to the dreaded middleware bug of 2014. 

I have a confession to make: I'm secretly happy that the draft queues are down.  This is mostly because if they were up, I wouldn't have any of the work that I have for the semester's final papers done.  As is, there's not much to distract me from the end of semester, but my mind is still wistfully wandering away from Saul Kripke and the Great Syrian Revolt and back towards Hex.

Like many Kickstarter Backers, I got four copies of every starter deck, along with a fat stack of boosters.  I opened a small chunk of them at launch, just to get a collection going, and in slogging around the Proving Grounds I began to build up the starters a bit with cards from my collection.  Having drafted each archetype at least once (the first draft pack I opened in Alpha had Zoltog, which led to a very strong Orc deck) it wasn't to hard to find the main commons and uncommons.  If you are like me and didn't back enough to get a playset of every card, and also want to keep a majority of our boosters for draft, you're probably in the same boat when you log in and play a few games, busting out an Shin'hare+ or a Human+ deck.

After a few dozen games versus randoms and the AI, I thought I'd see if I could build a deck for each of the main Hex races.  But the main races of Hex that didn't get starters don't really have the sort of synergy found with the raging Orcs or ingenious Dwarves.  So while draft still glimmers like a mirage in the distance, I thought this would be a good chance to look at some of Hex's non-archetype races and speculate a bit on what we might expect of them strategy-wise in the upcoming sets and in the PvE campaign.  One of the first things that caught me in looking them over was how asynchronous the shard division was among the races:

Ardent

• Humans: Diamond, Sapphire, Ruby
• Coyotle: Diamond, Sapphire, Wild
• Orcs: Blood, Ruby
• Elves: Wild

Underworld

• Necrotic: Diamond, Blood, Sapphire*
• Dwarves: Sapphire, Ruby
• Shin'hare: Blood, Wild
• Vennen: Blood

The Necrotic technically have a troop in Ruby (Shadowblade Lurker) and Sapphire (Windbourne Acolyte) as well for the first set, though their main concentration is in Diamond and Blood.  They do, however, have a Champion with a Sapphire charge ability in Nin the Shadow, so I feel obliged to include Sapphire in their shard divison, though this may grow.  Along with the Coyotle, Vennen, and Elves, the Necrotic missed the boat in Set 1 PvP on having a dedicated strategy that revolves around their them.  In fact most of these races are woefully underrepresented in comparison to the other races.  However the troops that were released in these "secondary races" might have clues to what we can expect in future sets.

The first deck to break this guy better be called High Five.

The Necrotic are actually a good place to start, since they are the Underworld's only avenue of access to Diamond.  There are some cool cards in Blood that already produce Zombies, like Corrupted Afterlife and Zombie Plague, though none of these are directly tied into with the Necrotic.  Thematically the Necrotic seem to have some sentience and agency that Zombies do not, but raising troops from the dead, or at least abusing graveyard resources is something thematically tied to Blood.  One Necrotic Troop in particular that mimics this Reanimate strategy is Midnight Shepherd, which can resurrect a troop every turn if you manage to fetch up one of every threshold.  The threshold requirement also appears on Lixil, the Deathless Gem, granting her invincibility when you reach your domain.  Additionally her "enters play" ability fetches up a resource from your deck and grants you the threshold of that card.  In might not be a coincidence that both of these cards are necrotic.  Since they derive from the humans, they are likely to mimic their living counterparts in the shards that the humans also hold sway in: Diamond, Ruby, and Sapphire.  With the death-centered Blood shards added to the mix, the necrotic have stretched themselves very far across the domain table.  Existentially, their very being seems tied to these shards of the Hex comet:

Amidst the great necropolis where the humans kept their fallen heroes in carefully constructed stone vaults, the Hexing Gems somehow caused the dead to awaken. The risen corpses, who called themselves the necrotic, were the first sentient race on Entrath created by Hex, and their existence and motivations remain mysterious. Fresh necrotic were “awakened” by socketing diamond Hexing Gems in the eye sockets of dead humans, who would arise with no memory of their former lives and an entirely new sentience. 

As such the necrotic may unlock their true potential when all the various shards are brought together into a sort of harmony, and perhaps the Necrotic will be a race that spans all five shards, or that gets bonuses when you play additional shards.  Another mini-theme between a couple of the Necrotic Champions is Lifedrain, which also appears on Corrupt Harvester.  While Lifedrain is certainly not unique to the Necrotic, the "Bleed" mechanic (you lose life, I gain life) could also be a mini-theme that resonates throughout Hex.

The Vennen have the least amount of troops of any of the main eight races of Hex (only five).  All of them exist within the Blood shard, and have moderate resource costs to play.  Their Unique Troop, Xarlox, alongside Brood Creeper, demonstrate an ability to generate Spiderspawns.  Proliferation of a specific type of troop seems somewhat typical of races: Shin'hare have Battle Hoppers and Dwarves have Worker Bots, for example.  Spiderspawn are 2/1 troops, which make them a little more formidable than your average troop generated this way.  Incubation Slave also creates Spiderspawns despite being an Orc, though his existence might be attributed back to the Vennen and their hatred of their Ardent counterparts.  With so little cards to go on and so little threads to work with, it's hard to really surmise anything about the Vennen from current cards other than potentially amassing a swarm of Spiderspawns.  Thematically, they are extremely religious and relish in punishing heretics, perhaps explaining their depiction in the artwork of Inquisition.  Xarlox demonstrates an ability that marries the two: purging heretics (other troops) and generating Spiderspawn, which could be demonstrated in other ways on future Vennen cards.  An interesting and annoying Vennen card might infest your opponent's deck with Spiderspawn, thought this ability might be too heavily entrenched in Sapphire and Ruby now with cards like Sabotage and Reginald.

Elves aren't far ahead of Vennen in terms of numbers, with only six cards to their name, all in Wild.  They have even less cohesion in their tribal strategy than the Vennen do, with no two cards having similar abilities.  Briarpatch Conjurer makes Briar Legions, but this ability seems unique to her, and their Unique Troop Puck isn't stingy about which kind of troops will trigger his ability or be put into play: the bigger the better!  Thematically the elves look and act more similarly with satyrs than of something from Tolkien's Middle Earth, engaging in revelry and creativity.  Much like the Vennen, they are an isolationist race, even among their allies, which might explain why the two are only represented in a single shard.  Philosophically in keeping with their lore and with Wild in general, Elves are a race that wants to dominate the late game. Cards like Wild Root Dancer and Nelebrin Skirmisher are progressively stronger with time, while not necessarily needing the Inspire Engine of Humans.  Personally, something I would love is if Elves had Bards (among other non-playable classes, perhaps) that performed songs that got stronger if you played them on successive turns.  Maybe the Portensio of Avon mercenary is a portent of my bardic dreams coming true in the near future (though I still have to get my hands on a Portensio of my own).

The last race is my personal favorite race, possibly because they remind me so much of the Tauren society in WoW.  The Coyotle have a slightly more extensive list of troops spanning Wild, Diamond, and Sapphire, though these troops are no more cohesive than the Elves are in terms of what they do.  The action Spirit Dance and Dream Dance, both of which feature Coyotle artwork, might indicate a long term deck augmenting strategy for the Coyotle.  Sapphire and Wild are no stranger to deck tinkering, as Pack Raptor and Ancestors' Chosen can attest.  Again I will turn to the given lore on the race to surmise what we might be able to expect in future Coyotle cards.  Perhaps the most exciting one is that the Coyotle have the ability to control the weather, which means we could get Coyotle Stormcallers capable of changing the conditions of the battlefield, generating lightning storms that zap random troops or snowstorms that hamper attack plans (Cory's blog displayed a happy little cloud with happy little raindrops about a month ago, which could be a weather card).  Regarding generated troops, coyotle shamans can summon bestial spirits to attack for them, though lorewise they don't seem to have any utility in this aspect the way Worker Bots or Battle Hoppers might.  There may also be something to the constellation aspect of the Coyotle, now only passingly referenced on Zodiac Shaman.

Perhaps these races will shine more uniquely once PvE content is in, but I also think there is space in the lore and shard scheme for some cool and innovative design around these races for PvP.  Hopefully that design would let a future me draft a Coyotle Weather deck or a Necrotic Domain deck... though a few more days of tournament withdrawal and future me might be forced to draft the seed packets in the garden section of Home Depot (first pick windmill slam Basil).  I guess I can only hope the issues get resolved this weekend so that when I stumble from a paper writing stupor I can bust through my store of draft boosters.

That's all for this week though.  If you have any ideas for what you expect from the Necrotic, Vennen, Elves or Coyotle in future sets or in PvE, or thoughts on their lore, leave it in the comments!  Next week I'll hopefully have had a chance to draft a bit and try out the Wheel of Fate.  Also for those of you who enjoy the Phoenix Wright or Zero Escape video game series, there's a Kickstarter for a game called Exogenesis: Perils of Rebirth you should check out.  

Until next time, remember that we're all just part of one big coyotle world.... man.