Dark Souls

This collection of decks is based on Dark Souls, by From Software.

Villains

Anor Londo

Anor Londo is a villain deck that represents a key middle point in Dark Souls. After defeating the Iron Golem, you leave the relatively familiar environment that you start in and travel through the majestic city of the gods, where you face a new variety of cruel enemies at every turn.

Mechanically, this deck requires you to surpass three major obstacles before you finally reach the boss of the area - the infamous Ornstein and Smough fight, which is a major wall for many new Dark Souls players. All three obstacles exist from the start, but each has a different condition for advancement, so each hero should decide each turn which obstacle they want to prioritize making progress on. Once the boss fight begins, the heroes face a much greater level of punishment each turn, but hopefully they're built up enough to handle it.

In general, Anor Londo is a difficult villain, but one that should allow a variety of play styles and heroes to find success. The only non-negotiable requirement is that you will probably need to bring enough damage to kill targets along the way, rather than exclusively bringing combo-style heroes that only do big bursts of damage.

Lordran

Lordran is the world in which Dark Souls takes place. It is a cruel and unforgiving world, filled with many monstrous bosses and a great many targets that must be killed. This deck represents approximately the first third of the game, where you wander around the world defeating bosses and trying to find the Bells of Awakening, and stops with the iron golem boss that blocks access to Anor Londo. Future decks will explore the rest of the massive Dark Souls world.

Mechanically, this villain is mostly made of scary targets to kill. In general, the damage of the targets is tuned higher than normal, especially for the bosses, but the villain also rewards the heroes for destroying the targets to compensate. This is intended to represent the level up / bonfire gameplay loop in Dark Souls, where killing enemies grants you souls to increase your power. Choosing between card draw and healing is also intended to help hero teams with very different play patterns survive the villain. High DPS teams with little damage mitigation may need to take as much healing as they can get to stay alive, while more defensive teams can use the card draw to dig for their more limited damage options. Once you kill enough bosses, Lordan becomes more dangerous and the villain's intrinsic healing goes away, forcing the heroes to kill or be killed to ensure that the game doesn't stagnate.

Here's a video by TakeWalker showing off a game with Lordran!

Environments

Blighttown

Blighttown is an environment representing one of the most infamous locations in Dark Souls. You enter Blighttown by travelling down a long segment of rickety scaffolding, facing toxic dart attacks from unseen foes and dangerous drops all along the way. When you finally reach the bottom, you are rewarded with a movement-slowing swamp that poisons you while it makes you more vulnerable to foes and generally being frustrating.

Mechanically, this deck plays and searches for Poison cards in the style of Plague Rat's Infections while presenting a variety of targets and a few tricky locations. Poison is easier to remove than Infection, since you don't have Plague Rat punching you for AOE damage whenever you dare to cure yourself, but it's still annoying and potentially dangerous. This is not a fundamentally novel environment, but I hope it succeeds at capturing the feel of the area and presenting heroes with additional challenges.

Sen's Fortress

Sen's Fortress is an environment full of traps and pitfalls, and players must be careful to avoid triggering them where possible. It's mechanically and thematically similar to the Tomb of Anubis, with a mixture of traps and targets, since they both draw on similar tropes.

Here's a video by TakeWalker showing off a game with Sen's Fortress!