BOOM! I begin the paragraph with all-caps bold text. It must be important. There are many other sentences in this paragraph, and those other sentences are made up of words, and each of those words are important. But you are going to remember that bold, underlined, all-caps word at the beginning, right? BOOM! How can you not? But, when you get right down to it, it mattered a lot at the beginning, and once in the middle, but not at the end. The most important part happens at the end, in this paragraph and in this week’s Arena: Right here, when I tell you that this week’s scenario rule matters but it isn’t the most important thing to win the majority of your games.

Welcome to the Arena for week eleven: Entrenched Loyalties.

Format Rules and Technical Data

The scenario rule for Entrenched Loyalties gives you the ability to have a dramatic start.

At the start of the game, each player is assigned a faction at random. Cards of that faction cost that player 1 trade less to acquire. The same faction may be assigned to both players.

This week, we’ve got the “bottom row” of sets to play with: Colony Wars, Promo Pack 2, and United Command. Because of the larger effects on cards in these sets, games will tend to be slightly faster on average than games that use the “top row” sets. I played a deliberately-slower style this week so my average game took 21 turns. If I had played a more-flexible style the average would have likely been in the 17-18 turn range.

There is an important detail to know about the cost-reduction the scenario provides: it does not make “acquire for free” cards any better. In the app, Parasite, Moonwurm, and Leviathan care about the printed cost of the card. You can’t acquire a seven-cost card in your chosen with Parasite, for instance.