Cactus Game Design Message Boards

Since the other thread has pretty much exclusively started talking about offensive tiers, I feel that a different thread is in order. Here is my first suggestion with reasons:

Tier A:
-Pale Green (Magicians mixed with Assyrians provides tons of speed, great stopping power, initiative, staying power, and Magic Charms)
-Egyptians (Very fast, lots of soul generation, stopping power second only to brown).
-Brown (most stopping power, best characters, Haman's Plot)

Tier B:
-Babylonians (Good speed, good stopping power, good characters)
-Demons (Rarely prepared-for, good battle-extention, great characters)

Tier C:
-Pharisees (Fast, some stopping power, few but great characters, NT)
-Heretics (Good stopping power once set up, NT)
-Herods (Best answer to banding, NT)

Defense is a lot harder to pin down tiers on because size becomes a much bigger factor. In general for the offensive tiers, we assume that somewhere around 6-10 cards on defense are being used, so that gives a good mark of roughly how many cards are used in the offense. In this case for instance, Babylonians are stronger than anything beyond Standalone when limited to ten or less cards. Genyptians may be better, but only when paired with a Genesis offense. Pale Green is probably strongest in high numbers (besides a Gates of Samaria deck), but it's pretty weak in smaller numbers. I think to effectively manage tiers, we'd have to separate them into small and large defenses. I think that for small defenses, S tier is of course standalone (either the six or nine card variants), A tier is Babs, Egyptians, and possibly Magicians, B tier is Assyrians and Demons. For larger defenses, GoS, Pale Green, and a Brown/Magicians are all A tier, Babs and Demons are B tier.

Standalone is the best, but Pale Green is too France to deserve A tier.  Babs have speed and blocks, as do Egyptians.