Roots of Corruption is live on BGA, plus a new Frontier pool

The Roots of Corruption set is arriving on Board Game Arena, and with it comes an entire new group of Frontier uniques featuring the new characters. Beginning Aug. 17, players will be able to log in and play with the new cards, including uniques. Bringing this new set to BGA reaches another milestone in Re:Union’s roadmap.

RoC cards will be able to be mixed with any older sets across formats, but remember that new decks must still obey the rules of their formats to be legal. Decks can be created using any deckbuilder connected to Re:Union. If you’re having trouble loading your deck, please connect with the Re:Union team through our bug report channel. For issues within the games or the cards themselves, please report bugs within BGA as usual. Please share a “thank you!” with Nyleirel and noobiwow who both spent countless hours implementing and debugging the set 6 on BGA as well as with all the people on the test team that created the bugs they’ve found!

Get started by joining the first Frontier tournament with the new pool organized by Benhol at 20h UTC+2 by clicking here. Don’t forget to share your decklists to help inspire new RoC builds for other players! If you’re looking for other players to connect with for a shorter wait time, use our Looking for Game channel. 

The new set marks a shift in the available uniques for the community-created Frontier format. Check out the new 30,000 options by heading to the Card collection at altered.re, then select the Uniques tab. On that tab, select the “Frontier” button under Format and hit Search. You can further filter the results with other options to find exactly what you’re after. This new collection will last for about eight weeks before our next pool.

A few members of the Frontier Team came together to share some notes on how this new unique pool breaks down. Thanks to zerosuitsamuss and the rest of the team for the insights below!

Let’s start with a look back at Pool 1. Overall, the Frontier Team is very happy with how Pool 1 performed. The format generated strong interest both on the ladder and in competitive play. We believe Frontier offers a great opportunity for players to showcase their deckbuilding skills, and the SDU Qualifier was a great demonstration of this, with a very diverse range of unique deckbuilding choices represented at the top of the standings.

We also received very positive feedback from players who are less interested in deckbuilding themselves, but were able to use existing decklists and ideas effectively, or find uniques similar to those they were already familiar with. Going forward, we want to make this process even easier, as we believe that sharing decks and ideas is an important part of the game.

We are aware that some uniques can still feel frustrating, and that some factions may sometimes feel less well served than others. While we believe that highly invested players can find ways to push the limits of their faction and bring it to the top of the metagame, we remain very attentive to this aspect of the format.

Perfect balance between factions is not our goal. Instead, we want successive pools to give every faction and every player the opportunity to shine through the uniques available to them.

We are still willing to take action if certain combinations prove to be oppressive. However, we believe Pool 1 handled this aspect very well. We have already seen micro-metas develop, as well as counterplay emerging around some of the strongest strategies, and we do not believe that any particular combination of Uniques dominated this first Frontier season.

In general, our preference is to let the metagame develop naturally and avoid interfering with the pool except in extreme cases. Maintaining the random nature of the pool is an important part of the Frontier format for us.

For more details about our philosophy and our approach to the format, please refer to our previous article or to the full Frontier document shared with the community.

As a reminder, here is the distribution between sets that was used to generate Pool 1:

• Beyond the Gates - Kickstarter - 5%
• Beyond the Gates - Retail - 5%
• Trial by Frost - 10%
• Whispers from the Maze - 10%
• Skybound Odyssey - 30%
• Seeds of Unity - 40%

We are very happy with how this distribution helped bring uniques from Skybound Odyssey and Seeds of Unity into the spotlight.

A higher weight increases the likelihood of finding a consistent group of three Uniques with similar or complementary effects from that set. Conversely, Beyond the Gates, which is often considered to contain some of the more problematic Uniques, was given a lower weight. This makes it less likely to find three particularly strong and synergistic uniques from that set.

We intend to reuse the same principle for Pool 2.

Pool 2 has now been generated, and we are very happy to make it available for everyone to discover the variety of uniques it has to offer. We hope that Pool 2 will achieve the same objectives as Pool 1, while putting a stronger spotlight this time on Uniques from Roots of Corruption.

The pool again contains 30,000 Uniques, with the following distribution between sets:

• Beyond the Gates - Kickstarter - 2.5%
• Beyond the Gates - Retail - 2.5%
• Trial by Frost - 5%
• Whispers from the Maze - 5%
• Skybound Odyssey - 15%
• Seeds of Unity - 25%
• Roots of Corruption - 45%

With the release of Roots of Corruption, we wanted players to have the opportunity to explore a set that we have never had the chance to open in the quantities we would have liked.

In future pools, we may reduce the weight of this set. For now, however, we felt it was important to give it a significantly higher weight than the other sets and let players explore what it can bring to the Frontier metagame.

You may also notice that the weight given to Beyond the Gates has been reduced by half compared to Pool 1. This follows the same philosophy as before: we want to give the newest set more room to express itself while keeping the older, more problematic Uniques under control.

To conclude, we have selected a few uniques from Roots of Corruption that we think could be particularly interesting to explore in this pool.

We do not claim that these are the strongest uniques available in Pool 2. Instead, we believe they offer interesting deckbuilding possibilities and could lead to some unexpected or powerful combinations.

We are looking forward to seeing what the community does with them and perhaps seeing some of these ideas make their way into future competitive events!