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.

Age of Ascension

Houses:

Set Number:

2

Symbol:

Released:

May 30, 2019

Cards:

370

New Cards:

204

Design:

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Design and Development:

Brad Andres, Skaff Elias and Richard Garfield

Languages:

10 - English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Thai

Preceded by:

Call of the Archons

Followed by:

Worlds Collide

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 in This Set

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.

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.

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.

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.

Products

Unlike the Call of the Archons starter set, the Age of Ascension starter set does not include two learning decks, and stun and power cards were replaced by tokens. The AoA starter set includes 2 Archon decks, 6 Key Tokens, 2 Paper Playmats, 2 Chain Tracker cards, 24 Damage tokens, 26 Æmber tokens and 44 Power and Stun tokens.

Card Distribution

Rarity								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

Competitive Success

Most Popular Cards in AoA Vault Tour Winning Decks, by Rarity
Commons
Nerve Blast (5) Ronnie Wristclocks (5)	Sucker Punch (5) Life for a Life (4)
Uncommons
Brend the Fanatic (3) Gongoozle (2) Mimicry (2)	Murkens (2) Oubliette (2) Too Much to Protect (2)
Rares & Specials
Neutron Shark (2)	Onyx Knight (2)

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. 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.

Last updated on February 7, 2020

See also

• All cards in Age of Ascension
• Cards with an errata: Drummernaut, Life for a Life, Yzphyz Knowdrone
• Deck registration data
• Competitive success among houses