Keyforge New Houses? Rampant Speculation!!!

Thanks to a spoiled new deck box design with accompanying house stickers, we have been teased at the possibility of new Keyforge Houses. When the game first came out, we were told that we would be getting new houses at some point, but we did not know when. Now, with this news, we may be getting them sooner than expected. My guess is we'll get the announcement at Gencon in August. But until then, let's speculate! Here are some of my thoughts/wishes/guesses as to what we might get.

Screenshot from Wossy Plays video, here

First, let's loosely look at the Houses we currently have and their color scheme, theme, and mechanics:

Brobnar - Orange background, Yellow foreground - Big creatures with giants and goblins. Bombastic. Lots of power. Amber generation is done by fighting.

Logos - Silver/White/Gray background, blue foreground - Small creatures. Robots and scientists. Card draw and archiving.

Shadows - White/Silver/Gray background, Black foreground (possibly a little purple or dark blue in those "eyes") - Very small creatures. Stealing and Elusive.

Sanctum - Blue background, Yellow foreground (or vice versa) - Solid creatures with armor. Big board states using armor and capturing amber. Spirit Knights.

Mars - Green background, Purple foreground - Martians with UFOs and laser beams. Relies on in-house synergies for everything and can do a little bit of everything including stunning, direct damage, amber generation, amber control, card draw, etc.

Dis - Black background, Pink foreground - Demons and insect like look. Disruption of all kinds whether through hand size and card discard, board manipulation, key cost, etc. Inflicts pain on themselves for benefit. Antithesis of Sanctum in theme.

Untamed - Green background, Orange foreground (or vice versa) - Lots of creature synergies and great amber generation. Naturalistic tree hugging with ferocious beasts.

So, with that in mind, let's look at the possible color schemes, themes, and mechanics of possible new Houses.

Color Schemes

Right now, we can easily identify each of the new Houses based on their color scheme in their logo. Now some of the colors have been duplicated, but I think this is a good place to start when thinking of something new.

1. Using pink/purple in the background - Dis has pink as their little dots, currently, and Mars has purple in the eyes, but I think we could get a house that uses pink or purple as a primary background color. I think that would serve as a very eye-catching new house.

2. Using Red anywhere - Some how, they have not used red yet, which I find crazy.

3. Using Brown/Tan anywhere - Probably not as eye catching, but it is a color they haven't used yet.

4. Using metallic colors - I am thinking this is for much later, but they could go the Pokemon route and start using metallic colors for houses.

Themes

1. Military - I am thinking just like Sanctum vs Dis, we could have Martian vs. Military. Classically, I am thinking 50s US or USSR military, leaning towards the US since we seem to be more obsessed with UFOs and aliens. They could also go a little more sci-fi and make it like Halo UNSC, Gears of War Cogs, Star Trek, etc. I'm not saying to actually use an existing IP, I'm just thinking general theme. Could definitely use the red/brown/tan unused color scheme.

2. Eldritch - They could jump on the Cthulhu bandwagon, which I am always for. Eldrazi/ Lovecraftian cosmic entities.

3. Horror - They could also go the horror route with ghosts, skeletons, zombies, necromancy, vampires, werewolves, possessed trees, etc.

4. High Fantasy - We have steampunk giants/goblins, and sneaky cyberpunk elves and some forest elves already. But we could get more fantasy stuff. Dwarves and dragons and wizards and witches. Orcs and ogres. Any other alliterative options? More like a pure magic faction, rather than magic + technology.

5. Coyboys/Pirates/Samurai - These are other common gaming tropes that a lot of games use, and avenues that could be used for Keyforge.

Mechanics

With Age of Ascension, we got a couple of new keywords, and I'm sure we could expect maybe a couple more with this set as well. I hope they are limited, or at least, flow easily into the rules like AoA did for the most part.

1. Maybe a house that uses more purging? This is a fun mechanic that has only been used sparingly by a few houses, but maybe we could get a house that really specializes in it. And not only purging opponent's cards. The house could purge its own stuff, manipulate the purge pile, and use it as a kind of resource. I think direct purging could be an interesting strategy for players to have. You can get rid of specific power cards from your opponent, or get rid of cards in your own deck to make it easier to draw your best cards.

2. New win condition? - We have key cheats, but perhaps they could explore alternate win conditions. This is a tricky road, since it could easily be broken, but it's a design space most card games go to at some point.

3. More tokens and token manipulation - We could have power/armor -1 tokens. We could have a faction that manipulates those negative ones, perhaps the magic or horror house? They could also have more cards that use tokens, similar to what they did in AoA with cards like Wretched Doll.

4. A vehicle/ship/mount mechanic - We could get upgrades that function like vehicles. Like you put a creature in it as a pilot. Maybe they are upgrades that just go into play in the battlefield like a creature, but do nothing unless they are piloted (but can still be damaged maybe?). Or maybe they are just upgrades and require a creature in play first. They could boost stats, give special abilities, protect creatures, etc. You could have an AI artifact that makes it so all your vehicles can work without pilots as the AI controls them or something. This could also be a good mechanic for the military house I mentioned above. But, what I also like about this is that every existing house could get these kinds of upgrades and it would make sense. Horses for Sanctum, UFOs for Mars, flying cards for Shadows, etc.




5. Token creatures - A lot of card games use token creatures. It would be preferable to get actual cards to use as tokens (and it would be great as alternate art prize support), but anything could be used in a pinch. These could be zombies/skeletons for the horror house, cultists for the eldritch, generic troops for military, or they could be used in existing houses like goblins for Brobnar, drones for Logos, etc. These generic creatures could be used in swarm decks, or creature generation, or Dis sacrifice fodder, or whatever. There are a lot of mechanics that can spawn off of this.

Tokens from Epic: The Card Game

6. Creature/Action/Upgrade/Artifact... fall mechanic - Similar to Landfall in Magic the Gathering, we could get cards whose abilities go off when a certain card enters play. Maybe a creature that has Artifactfall (insert better name here), where "this creature captures 1 amber when an artifact is played", or something like that. There is a lot of room for design space here.

-

So that's all I got. I am very curious as to what you think will be added? Are there themes you'd like to see? Mechanics? Are these new houses going to be added to the list in an expansion or will they replace houses and the game will go in a rotation each expansion? Do you like my speculation? Let me know in the comments, and as always, thanks for reading and happy gaming!