This here’s a part of Spent Glory’s Custom Rules series, and you can see other custom rules on the page by clicking here.

Today I will introduce a new format of play, best used for casual games but is adaptable for tournaments or even league play as a Nemesis rules variant. Normally, when you put together a Nemesis deck, you take roughly half of the available cards from the two Rivals decks you’ve chosen for your pairing. But what do you do with the other half? Don’t leave them at home, sleeve them up and bring them along as your ‘Leftovers’ deck, and see if you can’t make some magic happen with the dregs of your pairing.

Leftovers Format Rules

Players build a 32-card nemesis deck – this constitutes your ‘Main Deck’. Keep the other 32 cards to the side. These constitute your ‘Leftovers Deck’. For the purposes of Leftovers play, your main deck is not allowed to exceed 32 cards in order to prevent the Leftovers from falling below the 32-card minimum.

Prior to a game, one player rolls an attack dice. On a hammer or crit, play the Nemesis game as usual. Otherwise, both players use their ‘leftovers’ deck.

There are no deckbuilding rule restrictions on Leftovers decks.

• If your leftovers somehow come to more than 6 surges (say, the main deck only took 5), that is allowed.
• If there are multiple copies of a single card in your nemesis pairing and both happen to be in your Leftovers (say, two copies of Great Strength), that is allowed.
• You can play both copies and have them both active at once if they’re upgrades, score both through the course of a game if they’re objectives, etc.

Tournament/League/Best-of-Three Expansion

Outside of single pickup games, the Leftovers rules variant has its best potential in prolonged campaigns, tournaments, and the like. In a tournament or league setting, players have the opportunity to be quite intentional about what is and is not included in the Leftovers as they will be guaranteed to use it some percentage of the time.

In any best-of-three scenario, players will play one game with their main deck and one game with their leftovers, then roll off again for the third game if necessary. In a league or tournament setting, the organizer may randomly assign matches to use either main or leftovers decks, or declare the entire field is to play one or the other for a given round, and so on.

Strategy wise, players may consider constructing one ‘good deck’ as usual in Nemesis, leaving them with one ‘bad deck’. This makes for potentially hilarious slap-fests between two bad decks and reduces the effort a player must make above and beyond their usual Nemesis deck preparations. An alternate approach for Leftovers format play is to try to make both halves ‘passable’ so that you have a puncher’s chance of winning the game regardless of which deck is chosen, and this also opens up a pathway to taking a given Nemesis pairing in two different objective directions.

For optimum casual fun, I recommend the leftovers deck should be really, really bad. Imagine a Raging Slayers deck where you have to take all of those horrible end phase objectives, or a Realmstone Raiders deck that has very few (and all terrible) Emberstone cards. If both players have un-scorable conditions with ridiculously niche power cards, you’ll have to get mighty creative and might even come home with some hilarious and otherwise impossible stories about how Frenzy of Greed won you a game, or you breathed a sigh of relief when you drew the Stand Firm or Territorial Welcome you were somehow desperate for when you took a Focus action, a thing you’d never before say.

Glenn Dean has a Best of Three modifier which could be fun:

An alternate way to employ this in a best of three: start play with your main deck. Once your main deck wins, you must switch to your Leftovers deck. Winning a match means you have to win with both decks; winning a match 2-0 means you beat your opponent’s main deck with both main and leftover decks.

Wrap

What do you think? I personally can see some really interesting angles to a competitive event where players MUST use every one of their 64 cards.

• Do some pairings that are typically taken become less viable when you’re not allowed to leave the garbage out?
• Do some pairings you don’t see very often become more prominent if they have few standout cards but plenty of ‘decent’ choices?
• Does a player who balances both decks outcompete a player who goes all in on their main deck and hopes dice carry them in the Leftovers games?
• Does it pay to take advantage of the rule-breaking extra surges, duplicate power cards etc allowed in the Leftovers deck?

If you and your group decide to take this format out for a spin I would absolutely love to hear about it at SpentGlory@gmail.com. Whether it’s a dedicated tournament, a fun one-off game night, or how you entertain players who didn’t advance to the top cut in your tournament, I hope you have fun spending glory on the leftovers!

Today’s special article was part of the Custom Rules series. Click here to see other custom rules we’ve put together