The Gatewatch

This collection of decks is based on The Gatewatch, which is a group of characters from Magic: the Gathering, by Wizards of the Coast.

Heroes

Ajani Goldmane

Ajani is a noble cat-person warrior with fun support cards and a selection of great ways to use his giant two-bladed axe. His cycle of Avatar cards all temporarily augment other heroes and reward them for dealing damage, encouraging him to choose the right heroes to augment at the right time. He has a selection of cards that care about how many hit points he has relative to other heroes, encouraging you to manage your small amount of healing efficiently to get the best effect out of your cards. Some mostly standard one-shot damage effects with situationally useful secondary effects round out his deck, and he has a couple of panic buttons to push when the board gets scary or the heroes get too weak.

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

Chandra Nalaar

Chandra is an emotionally intense pyromancer struggling to learn control over her magic. Most of her cards deal damage, and most of those cards also hurt her in addition to hurting her enemies. She has a set of cards in her deck devoted to reducing the damage she deals herself, so once she learns to control her fire more effectively she can let loose freely. A set of hero targets that represent fire-based elementals round out her deck to give her more options than just setting fire to the world and increasing her survivability.

Gideon Jura

Beefslab McPecBounce is a virtually invulnerable tank who protects his allies and flexes enemies into submission. His cards generally protect himself and limit damage dealt by foes, though he also has a decent ability to punch enemies as needed. If the situation arises, he can switch away from dealing damage to lay waste to both his enemies and himself with the soul-stealing Blackblade.

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

Jace Beleren

Jace is an emotionally distant mind-mage who helps his allies and manipulates events with more subtle magic. He doesn't deal damage well, he doesn't protect himself or his allies well, and he doesn't give extra card plays or powers. However, his ability to guarantee that his allies always have exactly what they need, and to mitigate danger from the villain, is unmatched (except by Parse, but Extrasensory Awareness is a dumb card). He also has a complicated and improbable way to finish off villains that borders on being an alternate win condition.

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

Liliana Vess

Liliana is a manipulative necromancer who commands an army of undead to overwhelm her foes. She has a bunch of undead hero targets in her deck that deal damage when they enter play, when she directly commands them to, and at no other time. Her cards are generally stronger if she has a stock of dead undead in her trash, which gives her a fairly unique play style. The combination of limited undead actions and mixed rewards for having both living and dead undead helps solve the awkward scaling that target-heavy decks can have against villains that either deal too much or too little AOE.

Karn

Karn is a hero deck that represents an ancient time-travelling silver golem from Magic: the Gathering. He dates back to the early days of the Magic storyline, and has had many adventures over the decades.

Mechanically, Karn's unique niche comes from his ability to turn equipment cards into targets that can then punch things. He primarily operates as a mixed support/damage hero by playing a lot of equipment with supporting effects and animating them into targets that can punch things on their own. He barely deals any damage himself, but if his animated equipments stay in play long enough, they can end up dealing quite a bit of damage thanks to March of the Machines. He breaks a core Sentinels rule by having five copies of his core card that animates equipment, but I think it makes sense for his deck - I want to keep his maximum target count limited, but the ratio felt better at five than four.

Nissa Revane

Nissa is an animist who commands and draws strength from nature. She has a mixture of cards that scale their power based on the number of environment cards in play, cards that put more environment cards in play, and support cards to prevent the villain and environment from being too scary. More than any other hero, Nissa's play style will depend on the danger the environment poses, but not necessarily her contribution to the game. In weak environments, she'll be able to quickly scale her own power, and her ability to mitigate the dangers posed by strong environments with scrying and card manipulation is unmatched. Her ability to put environment cards into play face down also ensures that she can scale her own power as the game goes on no matter how devastating the environment is.

Teferi

Teferi is a scholarly time mage, and a more recent addition to the Gatewatch. Like Jace, he is a blue mage who tends to eschew direct damage dealing, but he tends to interact more directly with the board and with other heroes instead of primarily manipulating hands and decks. He has the ability to temporarily phase things out of existence by sending them through time, which can be helpful to reposition hero cards or to delay the effects of villain cards until they can be more easily dealt with. He can also manipulate the passage of time to accelerate his allies or delay his enemies, and has a smattering of protective abilities.

Villains

Nicol Bolas

Nicol Bolas is a villain deck that represents the Gatewatch's archenemy. He functioned as the primary antagonist of the game's plot for years, with the Gatewatch confronting his various schemes on different planes. His schemes culminated in a massive interplanar invasion of the game's most popular plane, Ravnica.

Mechanically, this deck presents you with three major schemes that Nicol Bolas is working on in the background. You can try to delay the schemes or even prevent them to coming to fruition entirely. If he completes any of his schemes, he flips briefly to unleash a devastating barrage of power at the heroes. As the game progresses and his schemes are either completed or foiled, the stakes ramp up, and damage dealt to and by Nicol Bolas is increased. This increases the tension and ensures the game ends - one way or another.

During the game, Nicol Bolas throws an army of targets at the heroes mixed with dangerous effects from his personal intervention. The deck has entirely unique cards to compensate for the similarity of the schemes between games. The schemes have enough interaction with the environment to help make the games feel very different on different environments. The targets tend to have high HP, but he doesn't flood you with targets from the start of the game, so the heroes should have time to build up to face the approaching onslaught.

Ob Nixilis

Ob Nixilis is a villain deck that represents an mass-murdering, life-consuming demon. Once upon a time, in the elder days of yore, he was a mortal ruler who sacrificed his entire kingdom in a dark ritual that killed every other living creature in his plane of existence. The experience ignited his planeswalker spark, and he moved on to other planes that he could conquer and consume, which eventually turned him into a demon.

More recently, Ob Nixilis found his way to a plane called Zendikar. When he arrived, he was defeated and branded with painful limiting magic by another planeswalker, Nahiri, who acts as Zendikar's protector. He spent centuries trying to regain his power, and he eventually tricked Jace of the Gatewatch into removing his curse. After that, he tried to siphon magic from the plane, but was defeated by Nissa. He swore revenge on her as well, and eventually took advantage of a massive magical battle on Zendikar to regain his planeswalker spark. Since then, he's back to wandering the multiverse wantonly inflicting cruelty as usual.

Mechanically, Ob Nixilis starts bound by a limiting hedron and deprived of his planeswalker spark. He needs heroes to arrive so he can trick them into releasing his hedron, which is represented very loosely by waiting until the heroes have built up enough. When targets die, including his own demons, he consumes them to make himself stronger over time. Once his hedron is released, he has to wait until the environment builds up enough for him to take advantage of the power and fully regain his spark. Once he regains his full power, he taps into the power he gained from dying targets to amplify his own damage and encourage the heroes to kill him before he scales entirely out of control. He hits all targets other than himself at the start of each turn, potentially allowing him to kill his own targets, which lets him play a full two extra cards from his deck, so it's important for the heroes to avoid letting him last-hit his own minions.

Ob Nixilis's deck is approximately balanced into three groups: Demons, imps, and non-target effects. Imps are 2 HP targets with minor effects that replace themselves when they enter play - they're basically candy for Ob Nixilis to eat if the heroes let them live. The larger demons have many more hit points and also pose more of a threat to the heroes. In general, the more hit points a demon has, the less devastating it is for it to stay out for a few turns, and the heroes can use Ob Nixilis's anti-villain damage to burn through the hit points of the stronger demons. Ob Nixilis's non-target effects are mostly one-shots that involve him beating up the heroes, with a couple of ongoings to round things out.

Tezzeret

Tezzeret is a villain deck that represents an ambitious and highly manipulative artificer with an incredible mastery of metal. He has replaced parts of his own body with a magical metal called etherium in his pursuit of perfection. He has spent much of his time acting as a minion of Nicol Bolas, though he has made mostly unsuccessful attempts to coopt Bolas's plans and resources for his own gain. Tezzeret has at times worked alongside Jace, though they are enemies now. His biggest contribution to Bolas's plans came as a result of a scheme on a plane called Kaladesh, where he used his position as Head Judge of the Inventor's Fair to forcibly steal the many inventions of everyone attending. This included the Planar Bridge, an artifact of incredible power that could connect two planes together. Tezzeret grafted the Bridge into his own body, and it formed the core of Nicol Bolas's plan for the first inter-planar invasion ever. Ultimately, Bolas was defeated, and Tezzeret is now free to pursue whatever sinister ends he devises...

Mechanically, Tezzeret's deck interacts heavily with equipment cards, and he uses devices to aid his goals. On his front side, he acts as Head Judge of the Inventor's Fair, drawing hero equipment cards out of their decks and judging people who fail to produce them. Over time, he researches the Planar Bridge, aided by any players who produce equipment for him to use for his research. After a few turns, he completes the Planar Bridge and uses it to summon a second environment as reinforcements. On both sides, he uses his mastery of metal to damage heroes with their own equipment cards and creates devices to do his bidding.

Unlike, say, Chokepoint, Tezzeret is designed to have interesting interactions with heroes regardless of the ratio of equipment cards they have. He shouldn't be excessively punishing to equipment-heavy heroes, since is ability to destroy hero equipment cards is limited, and he punishes heroes without equipment in addition to heroes with equipment. All of his targets are devices, which he makes minimal reference to in order to keep the focus on his equipment manipulation, but you probably shouldn't play him on Omnitron IV without a pretty stacked team.

Ulamog

Ulamog is an ancient and terrifying eldritch creature that consumes the environment to fuel his own power. He grows stronger the more he eats from the environment, and eventually uses what he has consumed to wreak havoc on the heroes. Ulamog operates on a cycle of variable speed depending on the cards he plays and how many environment cards he is able to eat, but he generally flips every 2-3 turns. His deck is a mixture of dangerous targets, cards that consume additional environment cards, and cards that add more environment cards to be consumed. His play patterns will depend heavily on the environment, which makes him very replayable.

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