As we all know by now, there are a great many races in Entrath, and each of them will ultimately have a great number of cards available. Today we’re going to look at some of the themes that exist throughout the cards we’ve seen for each of the eight major races. Of course, this is just going to be in the general case, I’m sure that every race will eventually get cards that don’t fit these themes, if we haven’t seen them already.

Humans

We’ve seen by far more cards for humans than any other race, so it makes sense to start with them. My initial thought for humans was that their theme was simply the Inspire mechanic – buffing subsequent troops that cost more than the first, but now I think it’s actually a little deeper than that. A better way to look at it, I think, is that human cards enhance other aspects of your game state besides themselves, that notion of good old human cooperation and selflessness. The Inspire rule doesn’t actually effect the card that has that rule, for example. Even King Gabriel’s incredibly powerful ability doesn’t affect himself, just those under his command. The theme of human cards, then, is best exemplified by Inspire and indeed the notion of inspiration itself, but is not directly the Inspire rule.

Orcs

Unlike the humans, the race theme of Orc cards is very simple to describe – fast, unrelenting damage. Speed and Rage are common traits of Orc cards, along with other effects that deal damage (even at the expense of themselves, or even your own champion.) Damage is what they do, and they do it well.

Elves

We haven’t seen many members of the Elf race yet, only 4 cards plus a Champion, but still the outlines of a theme can be seen. Like Orcs, Elves seem to favour damage, though it is a more subtle and more controlled approach. A slow escalation of damage over time in the form of either temporary or permanent ATT/DEF buffs for troops, rather than the blunt force of the Orcs, seems to be the favoured approach of the Elves. Of course, there’s very little subtlety about the Ambershire Instigator pictured above, though with both Rage 2 and Crush it definitely fits the theme.

Coyotle

We’ve only seen a couple of Coyotle troops so far (we’ve actually seen more Coyotle Champions than troops), though we’ve seen a number of non-troop cards that feature Coyotle so I’m going to take a guess anyway. From what we’ve seen, members of the Coyotle race will focus on defence and keeping your Champion alive via healing and Lifedrain effects. A card of note is the Zodiac Shaman, who has only 2 Attack but a beefy 5 Defence – enough to stop most things in their tracks.

Necrotic

The Necrotic are a tough race to pin down as again we haven’t seen much of them, but based on what we’ve seen so far their theme seems to be Lifedrain effects and deck and graveyard manipulation. This can be seen in cards that either let you draw cards from your deck, or force your opponent to mill cards from theirs, and in other effects that let you draw stuff from your graveyard.

Dwarves

Dwarves on the other hand are very easy to pin down – they focus on messing around with Artifacts and building robots – often at the same time! Almost every Dwarf card we’ve seen so far either has an effect that becomes more powerful based on the number of Artifacts you have in play or creates some form of Robot troop. Cards like the Master Theorycrafter even do both!

Shin’hare

The theme of the Shin’hare race has been made blatantly obvious from day one – they specialise in creating lots of small troops, and then either using those troops as sacrifices for other effects or buffing them to become an overwhelming force – or both! There is also at least one example of them synergysing well with other races too – the subject of Casual Hex’s first article, The Mushwocky – though perhaps not in the way the Shin’hare themselves would particularly care for.

Vennen

The Vennen are tricky in that we haven’t seen very much of them, and what we have seen doesn’t have an immediately apparent theme. They have a wide range of effects no 2 of which are obviously alike. What they do all seem to have in common is that their effects are generally annoying for your opponent, so maybe that is the theme of the Vennen – being a huge pain in the ass.

So, that’s all 8 major races. I may do a similar feature on the minor races in the future, though we’ve seen even less of those than we have of the major races in most cases so that would be a lot more speculation at this point, until we see some more cards.

In other news, as you may have already noticed, I’ve updated the header image at the top of the page! After seeing yet another fansite using the same Uruunaz image that Casual Hex and any number of other Hex sites were using, I decided it was something a bit more unique. Hopefully that fits the bill! I’ve also added some more sites to the Links page – if you have a Hex-related website you want me to add, feel free to get in touch. That’s all for now! [Insert cheesy sign-off here]