Age of Ascension
Age of Ascension is the second KeyForge set, announced in a FFG live stream with Richard Garfield on February 12th 2019 and released on May 30, 2019. In Europe, the game launched with a Sealed Vault Tour at UK Games Expo in Birmingham. With 388 players, this is the largest KeyForge Organized Play event to date.
Keeping 166 cards from Call of the Archons and adding 204 new cards, Age of Ascension again contains 370 cards, spread among the same seven houses as: Brobnar, Dis, Logos, Mars, Sanctum, Shadows and Untamed
New Set Mechanics
New Keywords: Alpha, Omega, Deploy
New keywords introduced in Age of Ascension were Alpha, Omega and Deploy: restricting when certain cards can be played and freeing others from the constraints of standard placement. These are keywords that are considered "evergreen" as they regularly show up in subsequent sets.
Legacy Cards
Age of Ascension introduced Legacy cards. These are cards from a previous set (such as CotA) that are not part of the current set, but on very rare occasions can appear in a deck. Legacy Mavericks are also possible and extremely rare. Legacies occur in about 8.4% of AoA decks, but legacy mavericks are only found in about 1 in 11,000 of them. Legacy cards have continued to appear in subsequent sets.
Gameplay
Age of Ascension features more board based abilities and less Æmber bonus cards than Call of the Archons, and introduces abilities that punish or stop reaping. This creates a more complex and interactive gameplay, which along with improved house strength balance made Age of Ascension especially enjoyable in the Sealed format.
Iconic and powerful combos include Martian Generosity + Key Abduction in Mars and Drummernaut + Ganger Chieftain in Brobnar. Grump Buggy, Proclamation 346E and especially Heart of the Forest are artifacts that change the flow of the game considerably. Another popular combo is Binate Rupture + Interdimensional Graft in Logos, and Archimedes was one of the best cards in the game before the errata (the previous ruling stated that it could archive the player’s entire battleline when a board wipe was played).
Special Rarity Cards
Special rarity cards include Ambassador variants (in Sanctum) for each other house, as well as the three Key Imps. “Fixed” cards are Ortannu the Chained that always appears together with two Ortannu’s Bindings, as well as Timetraveller with Help from Future Self.
Each house also contains a unique Shard artifact, which always appears with at least one other Shard from another house. Cards that always appear with another card are Grumpus Tamer and Project Z.Y.X.
Routine Job always appears at least in a pair, while Plague Rat is the first card introduced that always appears with minimum 3 copies in a deck.
Card Distribution
This table indicates how many cards are in each house of Age of Ascension and how many are of each rarity. The bottom section displays the number of reprints in each house and the set from which they originated.
| Rarity |
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Total |
| Total | 52 | 55 | 52 | 51 | 56 | 52 | 52 | 370 |
| Common | 16 | 16 | 16 | 16 | 16 | 16 | 16 | 112 |
| Uncommon | 16 | 15 | 15 | 16 | 15 | 16 | 16 | 109 |
| Rare | 20 | 20 | 20 | 19 | 19 | 20 | 20 | 138 |
| Special | 4 | 1 | 6 | 11 | ||||
| Set of first appearance: | ||||||||
| New in AoA | 28 | 31 | 28 | 28 | 33 | 28 | 28 | 204 |
| CotA | 24 | 24 | 24 | 23 | 23 | 24 | 24 | 166 |
Reception
More than 100.000 Age of Ascension decks were registered in the 3 weeks within release, but AoA did not match CotA’s number of registered decks or competitive success. To date, no Age of Ascension deck has won a non-Sealed Vault Tour or Grand Championship event.
Competitive Success
| Most Popular Cards in AoA Vault Tour Winning Decks, by Rarity | |
| Commons | |
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| Uncommons | |
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| Rares & Specials | |
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A deck from Age of Ascension has yet to win an Archon Vault Tour; the highest Archon ranking the set has achieved is second place in the 2019 Krakow Archon Vault Tour and 2019 Madrid Vault Tour. The set contains several powerful combos, such as "GenKA", the Martian Generosity/Key Abduction combo which often allows the player to draw many cards and forge a key for free. Of the fifteen Age of Ascension decks that made the top cut of an Archon Vault Tour, however, only three were GenKA combo decks. Instead, decks containing Dis, Shadows, and Logos were the most common. Brobnar, Sanctum, and Untamed were the least represented houses among Age of Ascension decks making the top cut of Archon Vault Tours.
| Card | House | Rarity | Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nerve Blast | 
|
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5 |
| Ronnie Wristclocks |
|
|
5 |
| Sucker Punch |
|
|
5 |
| Life for a Life |
|
|
4 |
| 1-2 Punch | 
|
|
3 |
| Brend the Fanatic |
|
|
3 |
| Dusk Chronicles |
|
|
3 |
| Furtive Investors |
|
|
3 |
| Lamindra |
|
|
3 |
| Lash of Broken Dreams | 
|
|
3 |
| Mars First | 
|
|
3 |
| Throwing Stars |
|
|
3 |
| Whistling Darts |
|
|
3 |
Last updated on February 7, 2020
Products
| Name | Model | Description |
|---|---|---|
| KeyForge: Age of Ascension Archon Deck | KF03a | |
| KeyForge: Age of Ascension Display | KF03d | Contains 12 Age of Ascension Archon Decks |
| KeyForge: Age of Ascension 2 Player Starter Set | KF04 | Contains:
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See also
• All cards in Age of Ascension
• Cards with an errata: Drummernaut, Life for a Life, Yzphyz Knowdrone, Pain Reaction
• Deck registration data
• Competitive success among houses
| KeyForge Sets |
| Supplements | |
| Resources | |
| Cards | |
| News | |