Vessels

## Overview

   *The Pale King’s children have made their way out of the Abyss and into Smash Up! When your minions die, their shades live on, but others can absorb their essence and continue the cycle of the Vessels anew.*

The Vessels will persist equity built up on your minions to placeholder minions, which are easy to play and provide a staging ground to build even more equity.

### Details

#### General

* Name: Vessels
* Author: Berryl
* Complexity: 3.5/5
* Version: 1.6
* Last updated: April 21, 2023

#### Special details

Featured in the Hollow Knight custom expansion

### Breakdown

Vessels have the standard 10 minions and 10 actions. They have an unusually low total minion power of 22, or an average of 2.2 per minion. Among their actions, there are:

* 4 play-on-minion actions: 2x Kingsoul, Mothwing Cloak, Monarch Wings.
* 1 play-on-base action: The Abyss
* 5 standard actions, 1 of which directly affects one or more minions (in **bold**): 2x Infection, Voidheart, **Howling Wraiths**, Dream No More

### Minions

* **1x The Knight (5):** Search your deck and/or discard pile for a Sibling and place it into your hand. Ongoing: After you return a Sibling to your hand from play, give one of your minions at its base +2 power until the end of the turn.
* **2x Hornet (4):** Talent: Place a +1 power counter on one of your minions of printed power 2 or less.
* **1x Mossy Vessel (3):** If there is a Sibling here, move one of your minions to or from here. Ongoing: After this minion goes to the discard pile, you may transfer all +1 power counters and/or an action from this minion to one of your other minions.
* **1x Pure Vessel (3):** If there is a Sibling here, place a +1 power counter on each of your other minions here. Ongoing: After this minion goes to the discard pile, you may transfer all +1 power counters and/or an action from this minion to one of your other minions.
* **1x Broken Vessel (3):** If there is a Sibling here, you may destroy another player’s minion here of power 3 or less. Ongoing: After this minion goes to the discard pile, you may transfer all +1 power counters and/or an action from this minion to one of your other minions.
* **4x Sibling (0):** Ongoing: After you play a non-Sibling minion here, you may transfer all power counters and actions from this minion to that minion, then return this minion to your hand. Special: When one of your non-Sibling minions goes to the discard pile from play, you may play this minion as an extra minion on a different base. Only use each Sibling ability once per trigger.

### Actions

* **2x Kingsoul:** Play on one of your minions. Ongoing: After you transfer this action to another minion, place a +1 power counter on the new minion. Talent: Transfer this action to another one of your minions with printed power less than or equal to this minion’s printed power.
* **2x Infection:** Reveal cards from your deck until the printed power of revealed minions equals 4 or more. Draw all revealed minions, then shuffle the rest into your deck.
* **1x The Abyss:** Play on a base. Ongoing: After you play a Sibling here, place a +1 power counter on it. Once per turn, after you play a minion here, draw a card.
* **1x Voidheart:** Shuffle any number of Siblings from your discard pile into your deck OR For each of your Siblings, shuffle a minion from your discard pile into your deck and draw a card.
* **1x Mothwing Cloak:** Play on a minion. Talent: Choose another base. Move this minion and any number of your other minions here of total printed power 2 or less to there.
* **1x Howling Wraiths:** You may search your deck for a Sibling and place it into your hand. Play any number of Siblings as extra minions. Place a +1 power counter on each of your Siblings.
* **1x Monarch Wings:** Play on one of your minions. Ongoing: After this minion goes to the discard pile from play, you may place it in your hand as soon as it has no +1 power counters or actions on it. Talent: This minion gains +2 power until the end of the turn.
* **1x Dream No More:** For each of your Siblings, you may play an extra minion at its base.

## Clarifications

* **Mossy Vessel, Pure Vessel, Broken Vessel:** If you play a Sibling interrupting this minion going to the discard pile, you can transfer the action and power counters to that Sibling even if you have no other minions in play.
* **Sibling:** Only one Sibling can be played per minion that goes to the discard pile, but if multiple minions go to the discard pile at the same time (e.g. after a base scores) you can play one Sibling for each of them. Similarly, only one Sibling can return to your hand per minion play, even if multiple Siblings are at the same base when you play a minion.
* **Voidheart, Dream No More:** "Each of your Siblings" refers to Siblings in play at the time the action was played.
* **Monarch Wings:** If the Broken, Pure, or Mossy Vessel cards transfer Monarch Wings away as they go to the discard, they can still be returned to your hand.

## Strategy

### General

This faction revolves around cycling between the Siblings and the three unique 3-power minions, hereafter referred to as the Vessels. It can be slow to get going since you want to stack as much equity as possible on the Siblings who can be easily played for free, but the trigger for playing them doesn't generally happen until the game is well underway (typically a base scoring), and it can feel bad in the moment to use a minion play on a 0-power minion. To assist with this, Infection will stock your hand with minions, and you're guaranteed to get at least one non-Sibling minion this way. Once things get going, they can snowball quite quickly.

Generally, you have to work with whichever Vessels you find and base your strategy around that, but no matter which one you get you can count on keeping around one or two engine minion modifiers around for the long haul, bouncing them from Siblings to Vessels and back again. In this regard, seeing Monarch Wings or Mothwing Cloak can be extremely important in making sure you can keep your puzzle pieces around. Even without those, though, power counters can add up quickly with Hornet and Kingsoul potentially adding up to four counters every turn. Vessels are generally played terminally for their on-plays which are designed to be used in a burst context.

Although Siblings are safe and easy to play, they are susceptible to removal and will remain so for longer than most minions even when you put equity into them. When playing against factions with high amounts of removal, be careful about stacking your Siblings or being noncommittal with your equity or you run the risk of losing your investments. If you do lose them, you can always get them back with Voidheart.

### Partner Suggestions

Partners that add lots of power counters will obviously benefit from Vessels' ability to persist them and give low-footprint places to put them, but they're not necessary. Similarly, having valuable minion modifiers worth keeping around is beneficial, but Vessels bring four of their own. The faction lacks many ways to fill a terminal action play, so a partner that has options on that end will go a long way in making the deck more efficient.

#### Published

* **Mad Scientists:** Mad Scientists bring everything you would want for a Vessels partner, from power counters galore to key minion modifiers worth keeping around. Uberserum protects Siblings from destruction and solves a key footprint issue, while still allowing you to eventually add to that footprint with a terminal Vessel + Body Shop play. With the addition of The Bride, you can enhance this further with Angry Mob before Body Shop, where Siblings conveniently stock your hand to provide more power even after they're returned to your hand.
* **Time Travellers:** With how often Siblings return to your hand, Time Box will be extremely easy to bring out, and Time Box also provides more avenues to get Siblings out for big Voidheart recursion or Dream No More plays. Although there aren't really ways to spam Time Walk, Vessels offer plenty of ways to shuffle it off the bottom to increase the likelihood of playing it multiple times in a game.
* **Superheroes:** Getting The Knight out early with a Mild Mannered Citizen does double duty with also getting a Sibling out without a base scoring. They also provide protection for Siblings and ways to get them back if they do die. Vessels can boost their lower-ranking minions up to power 5 for bigger Justice Friends plays.
* **Kree:** Kree provide plenty of terminal actions to round out the kit, and while Righteous Fury is just flat power, it's more power than anything Vessels can persist internally so; Relentless Attack is also a worthy persistence option.
* **Shapeshifters:** The ability to tailor GELFs into either Hornet or whichever Vessel you need for the job is invaluable, and Shapeshifters offer mild self-destruction to help get Siblings out. Cellular Bonding is a real wild card modifier. The opportunity to play Copycats en-masse with Dream No More can be devatstating in the right matchup.

#### Custom

* **(To be added) Soul Sanctum:** Although any of the other three factions from the Hollow Knight expansion will go well with Vessels, Soul Sanctum offers the most of what Vessels augment - self-destruction to get Siblings out, modifiers to persist, and plenty of power counters.
* **(To be added) Mantis Tribe:** Siblings being freely playable works really well with Mantis Tribe's swarm tendencies, especially with Mantis Warriors to give the Siblings a head start on equity.
* **(To be added) The Grimm Troupe:** The Troupe's stalling works very well with the slow power build of the Vessels, and persisting Grimmchildren means you don't have to completely avoid bases where you play them.

## Author Notes

Originally this was a one-off Hollow Knight faction with the Dreamers in place of the unique Vessels. Eventually I got ideas for a bunch more HK-themed factions, so this morphed into the form it's in now. Developing this one has been a lot of fun, despite it possibly having the highest word count in any of my factions (Sibling is my longest-winded ability at a whopping 66 words, and it has four copies!). I do think I managed to capture the feeling of your minions leaving behind their souls/shades when they die for others to collect later, although the symbolic meaning of this changed drastically between the Hollow Knight version and the Vessels version.