Welcome to the fifth in a series of faction guides! Each of these articles will take a dive into one of the six factions within Altered. We will begin with an overview of the central mechanics in each faction, analyze their biggest strengths and weaknesses, and then look at each of the three heroes currently available alongside some sample decklists.
Ordis
The Ordis are a tightly organized faction who value order and equity. They are avid historians who seek to document and understand the changes and events in their world to bring out prosperity. Their social structure is rigid, but does slowly evolve over in time as the needs of their world evolve. At the top of their hierarchy is The Council who pass down recommendations, which gradually become decrees through a twisting labyrinth of bureaucracy.
Mechanics
Ordis is one of the more mechanically unified factions. This section will go over the main mechanics that are found across the faction as a whole.
Recruits
Anyone who has played a single game with Ordis will tell you that its defining mechanic is its ability to spam Recruits. A Recruit is a 1/1/1 character token that gets played as a bonus effect from other cards. These stats are very small, but combined with multiple Recruits or other cards can easily work to take over a round.
You can almost think of a Recruit as an alternative to a boost, as it adds the same amount of stats to a lane. Recruits come with some nice advantages over a boost though – you can add a Recruit to a zone with no characters in it, allowing it to present a threat all on its own. Boosting one character to be very large also comes with a risk if your opponent has removal, while putting out a bunch of Recruits makes it hard for your opponent to use their action cards to remove your advantage.
Recruits really make their presence felt all throughout the faction. All three Ordis heroes directly utilize Recruits as we will see later in the article. There are cards that make recruits cheaply, such as Ordis Cadets, and cards that make larger quantities such as Jeanne d’Arc and Open the Gates. Cards like Charge! Or Kakoba, Legion Commander don’t mention Recruits by name, but are much more powerful when you are playing multiple bodies onto the board.
Bureaucrats
Bureaucrats are one of three character types in Altered which currently have synergistic effects, alongside Plants and Robots. The only maindeck card which directly benefits Bureaucrats is the faction-shifted Bountiful Meadow, which lets you play a Bureaucrat character for one less mana each round. There is a hero who works with Bureaucrats which we will see later in this article, and this provides the real backbone of a Bureaucrat deck.
While there is no additional specific synergy across Bureaucrats, they do share a common play pattern which comprises a lot of Ordis’s strategic value overall. Bureaucrat characters tend to have effects which limit your opponent’s options on the board. This can be Robin Hood making their card plays cost extra mana, The Council removing “when played” abilities from cards, or Quetzalcoatl punishing the opponent for drawing extra cards. There are also Bureaucrats which reward you for failing to move an expedition forward, a weird effect which thematically represents the glacial pace of bureaucracy. A deck full of Bureaucrats is a control deck which seeks to limit the opponent’s options while slowly pushing expeditions forward when convenient to do so.
These two mechanical spaces make up the majority of Ordis’s identity. Each of these categories is quite broad – there are many different ways to utilize Recruit tokens, and many different types of disruption effects on Bureaucrat characters. Even with relatively little defined mechanical identity Ordis has an impressively wide range of strategies available.
Strengths
The big strength of Ordis comes from the flexibility provided by Recruit tokens. As discussed earlier, these are effectively boosts that are easier to spread out across expeditions and harder to use removal against. Ordis has an easy time either playing into one expedition with huge stats, or spreading out its characters as necessary. As long as you have sufficient time to respond to what your opponent is doing you can almost always end in a favorable gamestate.
Building on this idea, Ordis has some of the best late game potential of any faction. It has extremely powerful permanents such as The Monolith and Grand Endeavor which can swing games on their own. In other TCGs decks with powerful end games often have to give up their early game stats, so the fact that Ordis still has efficient characters all across the mana curve makes it that much easier to take time off to drop one of these permanents into play and utilize it to push into a final victory.
Weaknesses
A major weakness of Ordis is its lack of card advantage. In some ways generating Ordis recruits can be seen as an alternative form of card advantage, as they represent multiple characters out of a single card in many cases. But outside of this Ordis really struggles to find draw or resupply effects. As a result you may find yourself with limited options going into the midgame, and if you are forced to pass early you are giving up some of that flexibility normally provided by your Recruits and other flexible cards. Each hero has its own way to mitigate this downside however.
Heroes
Ordis has some of the most unique hero effects in the game, and each hero really has a distinct playstyle from each other. This section will cover the effects of each hero as well as providing a basic strategy overview and sample decklist.
Sigismar & Wingspan
Hero
Character
Spell
Permanent
The scourge of the starter deck meta, Sigismar & Wingspan has the simple ability to put a Recruit into play at noon every turn. While this is not an incredible amount of stats compared to what a hero like Afanas can provide, the consistency is an incredibly valuable tool to build a deck around. In other TCGs token-based decks often struggle because you want to play lots of cards that make tokens, as well as cards that benefit from these tokens, and you often draw too much of one without the other. Knowing that you will always have an extra body in play makes cards such as Charge or The Monolith far stronger than they may be in other games.
Sigismar can fit well with aggressive and controlling strategies. The list provided here is more on the aggressive side. It is hoping to put as many stats onto the board as quickly as possible. While your board will not be impressive on the turn you play the Monolith, having a 2/2/2 in play every turn from that point onwards is incredibly tough for any opponent to overcome. This gets even worse if you also have Ordis Carrier in play – now your opponent is behind in both lanes every round before they play a single card! Beyond this we play cards like Anubis and Teamwork Training which can turn our board presence into a way to remove opponent’s threats, allowing for a very balanced strategy.
Waru & Mack
Hero
Permanent
Character
Spell
Sigismar may be the scourge of the starter deck meta, but Waru is currently public enemy number one for constructed Altered. His ability may seem odd at first – why would you want to regularly put your characters to sleep? And then you take a look at the Bureaucrat creatures in the game and the answer becomes clear. First you have creatures like Monolith Legate and Ordis Attorney that don’t want you to win their lanes. Playing these and putting them to sleep is great for building up card advantage in the early game, something Ordis traditionally lacks. And then you can follow up with The Council or Robin Hood to majorly restrict your opponent’s options. A single rare Robin Hood can tax every card your opponent plays for four whole rounds if you put it to sleep twice!
Waru would honestly be a perfectly strong hero if it only had its first effect, but he also makes a Recruit token every turn at noon – same as Sigismar! As long as you are putting a Bureaucrat to sleep every turn you are almost getting two hero powers worth of value. These extra tokens make it easier to justify playing a round behind with all your sleepy Bureaucrats, creating a positive feedback loop that’s brutal to play into.
This deck is chock full of the best Bureaucrats available. We prioritize playing rares when the mana cost would be cheaper, as Waru wants to start playing multiple creatures as early as possible. Bountiful Meadow is fantastic in early game in order to consistently play multiple Bureaucrats in a turn. As mentioned above this deck has unusually good card draw for an Ordis deck, and this is another reason to keep the mana costs low. You will be able to play multiple cards a turn for the entire game when sequencing your rounds correctly, and this makes the strategy even more flexible.
Gulrang & Tocsin
Hero
Character
Permanent
Spell
Gulrang has perhaps the biggest upside as well as the biggest downside of any hero in Altered. Boosting every single token is a massive bonus, but with defender you will probably not get a single expedition advancement until you reach eight mana. As such the gameplan becomes one of full control, using your supercharged Recruits to block your opponent at every opportunity until you are able to fully swing the game in your favor.
The decklist on the surface looks similar to our aggressive Sigismar decklist, but we utilize the cards in a very different manner. Our early game is entirely devoted to blocking the opponent’s expeditions. If there are rounds where you won’t be able to block properly you should instead develop your permanents to get a better advantage in future rounds. Note that Gulrang buffs any tokens you make, not just Recruits, so the Brassbug Hub creates 3/3/3 tokens! Once you get to 8 mana you should hopefully have at least one, if not two permanents in play, and these will become the key to dominating your opponent. Cards that make multiple tokens like Open the Gates become exponentially more dangerous at this stage – making multiple 3/3/3 tokens each turn is one of the easier ways to come back from behind!
Conclusion
I hope you have enjoyed this analysis of Ordis! This faction has been in the spotlight since day one, providing a great introductory experience for newer players as well as some great skill-intensive meta decks. Next up in this series will be Yzmir, the final entry!
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