Brewers

## Overview

Drink up: Here's the Brewers! Masters of their craft, they seek to create the perfect deck recipe by thinning out the cards they don't need. There are plenty of ways that these mixologists shake up their decks and discard piles, and they can be quite explosive to start. Sometimes their deck thinning can result in, well, running out of cards. But we're here for a good time and not a long one, right? Brewers are a great support deck that can headline in the early game, and whittle down their cards so that their partners can hit their best plays consistently.

### Details

#### General

* Name: Brewers
* Author: Onassi
* Complexity: 3/5
* Version: 1.1
* Last updated: July 27th, 2022

### Breakdown

Brewers have the standard 10 minions and 10 actions with a total minion power of 30, with 3 power per minion on average. Among their actions, they have:

* 0 play-on-minion actions.
* 1 play-on-base action: The Cunning Snail
* 9 standard actions, 5 of which directly affect one or more minions (in **bold**): **2x Perfect Pour,** 2x Gang's All Here, **Cheers!, Hops,** A Fine Wine, **Tavern Tussle,** Homebrew.
* 4 actions that directly increase a minion's power: 2x Perfect Pour, Hops, Cheers!

### Minions (10)

* **1x Brewmaster (5):** You may shuffle your discard pile into your deck. Talent: Search your hand and/or deck for a standard action and play it as an extra action, and then return it to the box.
* **2x Yeast Beast (4):** You may return two cards in your hand to the box to search your deck or discard pile for a card and place it in your hand. Ongoing: After you return one or more cards to the box, place a +1 power counter on this minion.
* **3x Engibeer (3):** Ongoing: At the start of your turn, you may return a card from your hand to the box to draw a card.
* **4x Taste Tester (2):** Ongoing: This minion has +1 power for every six cards you have returned to the box. Special: If you return this card to the box, place two +1 power counters on one of your minions.

### Actions (10)

* **2x Perfect Pour:** Search your deck for a card and return it to the box OR choose up to two cards from your discard pile and return them to the box. Place a number of power counters equal to the number of cards you chose on the same number of your minions.
* **2x Gang's All Here:** Shuffle your discard pile into your deck and draw a card. Special: When you return this card to the box, shuffle your discard pile into your deck and draw two cards.
* **1x Cheers!:** Give one of your minions +3 power until the end of the turn. Special: If you return this card to the box, give one of your minions +1 power for every four cards you’ve returned to the box until the end of the turn.
* **1x The Cunning Snail:** Play on a base. Ongoing: Once per turn after you return a card to the box, you may draw a card and place a +1 power counter on one of your minions.
* **1x Hops:** Move one of your minions. Special: When you return this card to the box, you may move up to three of your minions and give them +1 power each until the end of the turn.
* **1x A Fine Wine:** Gain 1 VP for every 12 cards you returned to the box. After you play this card, return it to the box.
* **1x Tavern Tussle:** Return one of your minions to the box to destroy a minion on the same base. Special: When you return this card to the box, destroy a base and replace it with the top card of the base deck. All minions remain on the new base.
* **1x Homebrew:** Return any number of cards from your hand to the box to draw that many cards. After you play this card, return it to the box.

### Bases

* **Daybreak Tavern (22 BP) 421**: At the start of your turn, you may return a card from your hand to the box to draw two cards. If you do, you must play your next minion this turn here.
* **Experimental Microbrewery (19 BP) 321**: Once per turn, after you play a minion here, you may choose a player with a minion here. Shuffle a random card from that player's discard pile into your deck.

## Clarifications

* **Perfect Pour:** If you choose one card, you place one +1 power counter on a minion. If you choose two cards, you place two +1 power counters on two minions.
* **A Fine Wine:** A Fine Wine does not count itself as a boxed card when resolving its effect.
* **Tavern Tussle:** When you target one of your minions, it is not destroyed; only returned to the box.
* Boxed **Madness** cards still consider the player that boxed them their owner.

## Strategy

### General

Brewers explore design space that has only slightly been touched upon so far: putting cards in the box. This, at a high level, is good for two things: fueling their abilities that often include powerful searching or buffing tools, and thinning your deck to the point where you're only drawing your wanted cards. It can also be a dangerous tactic; run out of steam too early, and you'll have no good targets for your boxing abilities. If not planned out properly you may also end up boxing cards that would have been valuable later on in the game. To play Brewers successfully, the player will have to find the balance between this.

There are multiple avenues of play for the Brewers. They are able to sustain themselves as a headliner faction, being able to buff their Taste Testers to a huge amount power if they can manage to put enough cards in the box. Engibeers and Brewmaster are great cards to whittle down your deck each turn, with Brewmaster being especially potent as an Anansi-esque search tool that allows you to play a standard action from your deck. If you choose the Brewer standard actions, you can set up some amazing power plays because after the standard action is used, its "when this card is boxed" ability triggers as well. They possess enough ways to boost their own power, provided they have ingredients to do this. Once they run out, it can be hard to rely on them for more power. This is where their lategame strategy kicks in: they like to bolster their partner faction. After they've whittled down their deck to half or less, their partner faction will be much more consistent in drawing and having access to the cards they need. Imagine Aliens with access to both Invaders, Terraforming, and Crop Circles every few turns. This is a bit of a race against the clock however, as by the time Brewers are able to get their deck down this far, the game is likely almost over.

How they want to play depends very much on their partners. They have ways to really speed up their game plan with cards like Homebrew, if the goal is to bolster their Taste Testers and set up for a maximum value Fine Wine. They can also box their own Taste Testers to give power counters to their other minions, and this may be especially useful in factions like Big Hero 6 or Kung Fu Fighters. They may also choose to be more conservative, boxing low impact cards slowly to sustain an engine with Engibeer and The Cunning Snail. They're able to really adapt to the playstyle of the decks they support, which feels like a neat touch. Masters of Evil, for example, tend to start painfully slowly. If you go all out with the Brewers in the crucial first turns of the game, perhaps on an unsustainable pace, Masters of Evil can carry the burnt-out Brewers in the late game once they've acquired the necessary VP. Balancing the equalibrium between the two decks will be a welcome challenge.

### Partner Suggestions

As mentioned above, Brewers can function as both support and as a headlining faction. Boxing cards is both a good and bad thing, and any deck that relies on having access to just a few key cards at a time may really appreciate the Brewer game plan.

#### Published

* **Vampires:** Everyone's favourite least favourite faction. Vampire cards are rather weak, so you don't mind spending them to fuel your Brewers. Save a few more key Vampire cards, you could very well box almost every partner card and not miss them depending on the matchup. If paced properly, you'll be able to fuel the powerful Brewer abilities well into the game.
* **Aliens:** As mentioned above, the engine potential with Crop Circles, Invaders, and Terraforming when you get your deck down to just a few cards can be devastating. As also mentioned, the challenge will be to get to that point in the game. Aliens have some decent stall tools and Yeast Beast allows you to search for what you need, so it's very possible to get yourself into position realtviely early on.
* **Masters of Evil:** MoE can be frustratingly slow to start. The Brewers can come out the gates swinging, perhaps even overextending themselves, but MoE can hit that powerful late game state earlier on which makes them much more threatening than they normally are. If Aborbing Man isn't doing the trick for you, box them and fuel your better abilities.

#### Custom

* **Astronomers** (by **Berryl**): Berryl often refers to an "uber-state", where Astronomers reveal their cards in a specific order from their deck to gain lots of resources. While this combo has not been playtested yet, I believe Brewers would make an excellent partner for them for the same reasons they make a decent partner for MoE: accelerating your late-game gameplan by disposing of the cards you don't need. Once you've whittled down your deck to just Andromeda, Halley's Comet, Jupiter, and a few other key cards dependent on what you intend to use those effects for, you can achieve their uber-state pretty consistently. I would be remisced not to mention potential anti-synergy with the amount of shuffling the Brewers do. However, this isn't always a bad thing as you have consistent access to minions like Hipparchus and Hubble, even if you're not 100% sure of your bottom 5 cards.

## Author Notes

This faction was made for a friend of mine that's a brewer himself. Initially, I tried to invent a new keyword, "Expel", to box cards but since then I've become very opposed to introducing new mechanics that aren't in vanilla Smash Up unless the idea is impossible to execute otherwise. I've only had a couple of test games with them so far, but they have definitely been able to achieve an "uber-state" of their own if the partner faction allows for it. I hope you have a good time with it, and leave a review if you get around to trying them.

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