How to play Horde magic: Horde Magic: A New Way to Play Magic and Survive Zombie Invasions

Horde Magic Variant – The Raid

Horde Magic requires the same dedication and imagination that playing a quest in Dungeons and Dragons does – you could magically gift yourself some high-level items to make the quest really easy, but that’s not fun. D&D is about the experience, and so is Horde Magic.

To give an example, and keeping with the theme of roleplaying games, I present to you a spin on Horde Magic that focuses on completing a series of quests. When trying out this format, please bear in mind it is a work-in-progress and you may have to a lot of trial and error to get the right set of rules and Horde deck to achieve the best gameplay.

The Raid variant plays the same as a normal Horde magic game, but takes a few liberties.

• The Horde deck needs to be semi-ordered before you can play. This makes sure that you fight the battles in the correct order, but the cards within each “quest” should be random.
• When an artifact is flipped over, it doesn’t count as a non-token card and is considered loot for the survivors to use for themselves.
• You can’t attack the Horde deck in the Raid variant. This makes constructed Horde decks (and choosing the deck you play with) little more difficult because you are playing defense the whole time.
• Your mileage may vary, so you should feel free to add any additional rules that you find makes games more fun.

This deck requires a different set of rules, but I think if you follow them, you will actually find that the roleplaying feel come alive.

Put the deck in this order, and within each ground make sure they are randomized:

1. Green cards and tokens
2. First Dragon Boss
3. White cards and tokens
4. Second Dragon Boss
5. Black cards and tokens
6. Red Cards and Zombie tokens
7. Final Boss

You’ll first notice that the list looks like a complete mess, but hear me out. As a team, your goal is to eliminate Alduin and his army of newly-risen dragons. However, you find yourself trapped in the forest filled with wolves, bears, and other detestable creatures. Your goal is to battle through the wilderness, single-handedly stymie the Stormcloak rebels, retrieve a valuable artifact from Dark Brotherhood, and then make your way to Sovngarde to put an end to the world-eating dragon.

Feel free to give this a shot – I felt that the survivors were very favored in this particular matchup, which leads me to want to add either a reset rule after each stage or more sweepers as random effects.

Alt Rules

3x 60 card decks (i use different sleeves per deck), and a loot deck (random assorted junk rares). The first deck is mostly small critters like wolves, elves, humans and so on. As you kill non-token creatures, the player who actually destroys it gets a card from the loot deck. The last card of the first 60 card deck i think was huntmaster of the fells. the 'boss' so to speak. When he pops up, the GY is shuffled back in, and you keep churning through till you kill the boss.
Then the next 60 card deck has trolls and wurms and bigger monsters, and ends with some bigger giant guy. Can't remember which.
The final 60 cards are basically the biggest monsters/dragon tokens. I think it averages 5-7 tokens per flop. The final boss is utvara hellkite or something like that. Makes some silly number of dragons.

I remembered once, i had 1 other mate of mine go through the skyrim horde, and between beating the previous boss and before starting the next deck, we would have a "recuperation" phase, where you would be able to spend some number of 'loot cards' and cashed it in for extra card draws or lifegain and some other minor effects.

Source: Horde Magic 2.0 – Introducing The Raid
The Undying Horde comment