The Horus Heresy: Legions
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This is a /v/ related article, which we tolerate because it's relevant and/or popular on /tg/... or we just can't be bothered to delete it. |
Horus Heresy: Legions is a card game for mobile released by Everguild. The card game focus in each of the 30K Space Marine Legions and their conflict through the Age of Darkness (though you have a few Imperial Army Commanders, Mechanicum and Deamons in here). The card game can be surprisingly strategic, and not as RNG focused as say, Hearthstone. The game uses a basic resource called energy, with a max of 10 per turn.
Warlords
Warlords are your center characters of the game, with each possessing special abilities that differentiate them from each other. Each faction have their own unique commanders, and the Legions getting their own Primarchs. Primarchs differ from other warlords by having an alternative form (such as Daemon Primarchs) as a card that can only be played (or reduced in cost to be playable) under certain conditions, like having a certain number of troops die, being reduced to one health, or triggering a certain number of effects per game. They then heal a set amount of health and are buffed in some way, along with their special ability changing.
Warlords also vary in terms of starting hp (30, 35, and 40) and their initiative (Low, Medium, and High) which defines who goes first. If both Warlords have the same initiative, then it becomes a 50/50 chance. Despite the apparent advantage of higher hp, lower hp Warlords will often have more useful abilities, higher initiative, or additional advantages like starting with extra cards, extra energy, having unique cards, or other abilities like Relentless or Battle Honour (discussed later) to compensate, so having a Primarch with 10 extra HP isn't an automatic I WIN button.
Legions
Each legion have their own "shitck" as it should be, and some special abilities. So far Everguild released the following Legions:
I Legion: Dark Angels
NOT YET RELEASED
III Legion: Emperor's Children
- Emperor's Children: Fulgrim Perfect Boys. Their main skill is "Perfection" which activates if you spend the rest of your Energy on that card it triggers some special effect (drawing a card, for instance). Have lots of ways to reduce cost of cards. They also have a lot (but not all) of "Battle Honour" cards, which trigger an effect when a unit with it kills another.
IV Legion: Iron Warriors
- Iron Warriors: Using Siege, an ability to "prepare" for one turn, and allowing you to use it whenever you want. Said abilities are usually preportionately strong. They have lots of front lines as well as lots of ways to do damage to and destroy front lines and vehicles. Also have a theme of damaging/destroying their troops for buffs and generating new troops and recycling cards back into their deck.
V Legion: White Scars
NOT YET RELEASED
VI Legion: Space Wolves
NOT YET RELEASED
VII Legion: Imperial Fists
NOT YET RELEASED
VIII Legion: Night Lords
- Night Lords: Terror for the bully boys. Troops won't take damage when the enemy has less attack than you do, which synergises well with their plentiful debuffs for enemy attack power. They also get the ability to stop enemy troops from attacking, which you will need because your troops can't take as much of a hit as other legions. Lots of flank, unstoppable, conditional fast, and stealth.
IX Legion: Blood Angels
NOT YET RELEASED
X Legion: Iron Hands
- Iron Hands: Focused on Relentless cards, which activate at the start of each turn. Also have tons of healing and board clears as well as some powerful vehicles which can be created by Captured Forge. Their game plan is typically to either use their healing and board clears to outlast the enemy before dropping heavy units in the late game or to build a board of relentless buffing troops whose stats snowball out of control.
XII Legion: World Eaters
- World Eaters:THE aggro legion. Their gameplan is to hit the opposing warlord in the face every turn and kill him quickly. Have a lot of units with abilities that proc when damaged. Also have lots of board clears that damage themselves and the enemy. Their unique mechanics are Berserk (which forces the troop or Warlord to attack each turn) and Bloodthirst, which triggers an effect when the unit takes damage. As a result, the World Eaters also have a lot of cheap tactics that inflict damage, as well as tactics that buff damaged troops.
XIII Legion: Ultramarines
NOT YET RELEASED
XIV Legion: Death Guard
- Death Guard: Mortarion's own boys. They focus on poison (kills enemies in the following turn), high health front line troops, and healing themselves. Also have a lot of troops with backlash- abilities that trigger on destruction of the troop.Deathshroud is an 8/8 troop whose backlash ability spawns another Deathshroud!
XV Legion: Thousand Sons
NOT YET RELEASED
XVI Legion: Luna Wolves/Sons of Horus
- Sons of Horus: The Warmasters own, and the first deck you get with Loken as its center Warlord. A jack of all trades faction with a focus on drop pods, direct damage, and card draw. All of their warlords' abilities do direct damage, draw a card, or both.
XVII Legion: Word Bearers
NOT YET RELEASED (but soon)
XVIII Legion: Salamanders
- Salamanders: Vulkan's own boys, focused on fire (mostly attacking multiple enemies), "Survivor" (which allows it to survive when it should have been destroyed), and Sacrifice (very Salamanders, as when they die attacking an enemy, an effect is triggered, hopefully activating "Survivor" and bringing the unit back (where they can potentially activate their Sacrifice ability again). Lack fast or flank units and only have 2 direct damage tactics, both of which only do 2 damage per target. Rely heavily on troops and board presence to win. Can struggle to take the board back if they lose it.
XIX Legion: Raven Guard
- Raven Guard: Corax flighties. Focused on Stealth (making the unit untargetable), Sneak Attack (causing damage on attack without taking it back), and their own special skill "Sentence" (additonal damage caused to a unit that is marked as sentenced).
XX Legion: Alpha Legion
- Alpha Legion: Alpharius' Alpharius. They have special tactics like Orders, that target enemy units and forcing them to use certain abilities. Play very different from other factions and currently the only faction that can mill the opponent's deck and use fatigue damage as a win condition. All their Warlords also start each game as an 'anonymous' Legionary which can then be revealed at any point by the Alpha Legion player, along with healing the difference in health at the same time, thus simulating the "I am Alpharius" thing.
Neutral Decks
Imperial Army, Mechanicum, and Chaos are included here. Whilst Legion decks can take cards from any of the Neutral decks, the Neutral decks can only take cards from other Neutral decks, which is a pretty big handicap.
- Imperial Army: Lots of Frontline, cheap infantry, expensive vehicles, and structures - usually with buffing effects for troops.
- Mechanicum: Varied troops and vehicles with a variety of buffs, debuffs, and other effects. A few of their units and commanders generate mechadendrites - cheap buffs with a variety of effects.
- Chaos: A variety of aggressive unit types, debuffs and damaging effects, usually with an indiscriminate or random targetting. Their main shtick is Chaos Marks and Deamons. Chaos Marks are random but cheap buffs (one per Chaos god). If you manage to get all 4 on a non-deamon troop (you won't get the same twice, so you'll only need 4), they turn into one of the greater Deamon cards, which can be pretty powerful if you can get them off early. Deamons are (generally) pretty powerful units for their cost but they all have maintenance, which subtracts a given value from your total energy pool, which can be a handicap mid/late game. A few commanders and units can reduce maintenance or circumvent it completely.
Getting Started and Getting Cards
The game provide a few ways for getting cards. First, the currencies are gold and gems. Gems only come from crates (card packs), while gold can be purchased in the store. You can also get tickets for Events, which are focused on pre constructed decks used against each other.
Most of the games rewards are the "crates" that can give you gold, gems and obivously, cards. The few ways you can earn them:
- Doing the Daily Mission which can be done in both Practice and Ranked modes by winning games.
- Challenge, also daily, usually dictating some specific kind of unit, deck or type of action that you have do it many times (like hitting an enemy Warlord with your own). If you do it enough times, you can get a better crate.
- Free Crate that shows up each 6 hours (though its obviously not as good as the other crates, it can give some good rewards).
- Events Wins. For every two wins, you can get a better crate with better rewards while doing Events.