Five Predictions for Gothic

13/6/2025

Note: this was written and not published before the spoilers on 13/6/2025, so I will resist the urge to update this blog with those in mind.

Note: Please forgive the current lack of graphic design. This blog is a work in progress, but most importantly for me is the writing, and I need to start getting that out into the world for feedback and to prevent procrastination, so please enjoy this old-school column. To look up cards, please visit: https://curiosa.io/cards

Greetings. We’re currently in a lull period between sets, and whilst things have slowed down a touch, the whirring in my brain has not. Sorcery has taken over my life in the best way possible, providing me an opportunity to socialise, enjoy an incredible new hobby, and occupy my brain with something somewhat more constructive than its usual overthinking. I am constantly thinking about new decks, new strategies, and with a new set on the horizon possible new cards.

So, here are five of my personal predictions for the upcoming Sorcery set of Gothic. Some of these are pretty wild and some are probably pretty obvious. It will be interesting to see how far off the mark I am once the set has been released. This is a big of a long-form article, and hopefully my thoughts aren’t too meandering. Number five is a bit of a controversial one, and I have included a prediction on the release date at the bottom.

These ideas and thoughts came about by thinking (probably too much) of cards and mechanics that would benefit current competitive and casual gameplay, how cards interact with other cards from Alpha-Beta and Arthurian Legends, thematic ideas that would fit into a dark and gritty Gothic set, and parallels to other card games that might have influenced the designers.

1. New and more minion tokens:

This is an easy one to start off with. In many games of Sorcery, it feels like the board gets simplified too easily. Minions trade, spell removal is clean and efficient, and the board gets cleared quickly through these interactions. There are plenty of cards that easily clean up small minions, such as the Desert sites and Magic Missiles. We even already have a silver bullet card with Rain of Arrows. Even the design of The Great Famine and the Black Plague feel like precursors to more complex boards and the expectation that number of token-generating cards will increase.

An advantage of having more small minion and minion tokens is that they can protect your larger and more expensive minions by ‘chump blocking’. One of the disappointments in Arthurian Legends is that the awesome knights get easily taken down by the usual suspects of efficient minions and removal spells. All the minion token generating cards in AL are expensive, such as Guards! and Invasion, so it often felt like the Sirs and Dames didn’t have the necessary backup to stick around on the board long enough to do anything meaningful.

Lance tokens were a good design choice to help remedy this, but it feels like Lance tokens were cost slightly too high to really achieve this purpose as they function more like removal spells than speed bumps.

So minion tokens are the perfect compromise to this problem. Already we have seen Gift of the Frog spoiled for Gothic. This is a strong early game roadblock for water decks, but requires a one-drop minion to function on curve, so my prediction for this category is a basic Ordinary site: 

Lily Pad Pond.

Water threshold.

An Ordinary site emits a lonely croak.

Genesis – create a submerged frog token.

This helps fill the one-two curve for water decks with Gift of the Frog. Having the token enter submerged makes it play similar to Tadpole Pool, so it functions how players would expect it to. Having the token entered submerged lowers the power of the site by making the chump blocker be more constrained by having to unsubmerge to protect adjacent sites. It’s a choice to make the genesis effect free, compared to the ordinary village sites, but I think the zero power minion and entering submerged is enough of a drawback to justify this.

2. Tribal archetypes (that use new minion token types)

Tribal synergies are a fan favourite in many games. Elves and Goblins are fantasy classics, and it’s time that they come to take the throne from the frogs and wolves in Sorcery. Though, I can easily see Erik’s Curiosa deciding to eschew the tropey classics in favour of something else. But we’re definitely getting more Undead tribal in Gothic, and likely more Demons and Spirits based on Sir Galahad.

My prediction is that in order to support these new tribal synergies, we will see one or two new Minion Tokens. The first is the Skeleton minion token  – a zero power undead Minion that is created by Earth and Air threshold cards. Such as:

Rank of the Damned.

3 cost. Air, Air Threshold.

An Exceptional Magic that demands service.

Choose a row. Summon a Skeleton token to each site you control in that row.

This means you can get one to five tokens for the cost of three, putting it at a similar rate as Border Militia, but forces you to play your sites in a very different formation. A design issue is that Skeleton tokens need to be flavourfully and mechanically distinct from Soldier tokens, so limitations such as summoning to a row versus summoning nearby is important and help create different play patterns.

Earth and Air could both share skeleton tokens but use them very differently. Both elements will benefit from the tokens slowing the game down. The Air element has an existing archetype of expensive and powerful effects such as Lord of the Void and ramp spells to help play them, but this didn’t really take off because aggressive Air strategies are too dominant. 

Then Earth and Air elements could utilise these tokens in distinct ways. Earth can synergise Skelton tokens with power boosting effects, such as House Arn Bannerman and the spoiled Death Knight. Air could specialise in upgrading these skeleton tokens, such as into Mages and Archers. Even in death, we have to go to school and specialise in a subject that will define our entire lives:

Scholomance.

Air threshold.

An Elite site of profane knowledge.

Your Skeleton tokens gain Spellcaster.

Tap four Spellcasters here to draw a card.

I just really want to see the day where Occult Ritual is a staple and I can use that awesome Frank Frazetta art in my deck.

Finally, on this point and going into a lot less detail, my second guess for a new minion token is a token for Fire and Water, the Cultist. These will be one-power minions, but there will be a focus on sacrificing them for fun and power. Feed them to the Cauldron Crone for a card draw. Then similar cards can turn them into life, damage, mana, threshold, or sacrifice them to summon the big bad. 

3. An aggressive Avatar that utilises sites and ramp.

One thing I feel that Sorcery is missing is an Avatar that wants to be aggressive and also ramp to play larger minions on curve beyond four cost. Avatar of Earth is almost like this, but it needs to stop playing sites so that it can try to actually win the game before it gets stopped by the opponent’s card advantage. Currently, we’re seeing a bit of it out of Flamecaller and Druid playing Fire threshold going up to Infernal Legion on the curve, but I think that’s more due to Fire’s strength in the meta rather than the Avatars actively encouraging this play style. Seer is also able to play like this because its scrying ability can allow it to play a wider curve and actually draw the minions at the appropriate part of the game. But all of these still don’t quite hit the mark, so my suggestion is:

Titan – 2 power.

Your Avatar shapes the land through mighty deeds.

When Titan kills a minion, replace an adjacent Rubble with a site from your hand.

Titan is a mash up of Battlemage and Geomancer. Note, that it doesn’t require attacking to trigger its ability. Playing Firebolts to kill three minions would create three triggers. The limitation is that it requires adequate Rubble tokens adjacent and Site cards in hand to fuel this ability, so it would likely be slow off the mark and then have explosive turns later in the game. It also would probably require a bunch of new cards. These cards would likely also help Avatar of Fire, which is a good thing. Existing cards that play into this strategy include: Star seeds of Uhr, which can provide plenty of Rubble. Scorched Earth can trigger the ability multiple times and provide rubble. And Tithe is an all-star that with this avatar will be great even later into the game. 

The biggest clue that had me thinking about this Avatar was how out of place in Arthurian Legends Stone Rain felt. Just something about it made me feel that it had received changes late into the piece. Stone Rain requires you to have three sites in hand to make it a four-cost Minor Explosion, and this feels weak. Maybe it was changed late in development because it was too strong or there were cards that supported it that didn’t make it into the set. Perhaps for Limited play considerations, these cards were broken up into different sets. So my far-out prediction is we’ll see a lot more cards that draw sites in Gothic and support Stone Rain and a possible avatar like Titan.

And talking of sites…

4. Something to rival the Ordinary Towers

Bans and restrictions are always a contentious issue, and I think Erik’s Curiosa has shown that it doesn’t want to go down that route. The three towers from Alpha and Beta (Lone, Gothic, and Dark) are incredibly powerful, and I think there could be sites that rival their power.

Also, it’s very likely that similar to how we got the fourth ordinary village in Arthurian Legends (and technically the fourth ordinary river in Alpha), Gothic will give us the fourth ordinary tower.

So here is an incredibly broken site:

Crumbling Castle. No Threshold.

An exceptional site that is doomed to disintegrate to dust.

Genesis – gain Three this turn.

At the start of your turn, replace Crumbling Castle with Rubble.

A three-mana burst is probably far too strong, but it needs to be three to clear the towers. The timing of when it becomes Rubble is also another issue. If it generates mana on the turn it becomes rubble, that boosts this card’s power further. This is an example of how complex design is, as there are so many little things that have complex implications and  small flow-on effects – my utmost respect to the team for the great work they do on this game. Mostly, I designed this card as a homage to the band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, so this card is a top-down design that might just need to go right back to the drawing board.

5. A Jesus Christ Minion Card

Depicting Jesus on a trading card is a contentious issue. It’s a culturally sensitive issue and one that many would say is inappropriate. We have seen with Crusade and Jihad, where Erik’s Curiosa possibly stand on that debate, so we can go ahead with the thought experiment without getting bogged down in the cultural debate.

There are already references to the Christian religion in the game. The Spear of Destiny is famously the one that pierced Jesus’ side. We have Sir Balin wielding it to deliver his dolorous stroke. We have references to the cross with the spoiled Day of Judgement. We have Pact with the Devil referencing the devil. It’s impossible to separate Arthurian mythos from Christianity, so the entire set is steeped in it.

The most convincing reason for me is that in Gothic art, as in the style from the 12th Century, depictions of Christian figures and Jesus were incredibly prominent and important. As art is such a core inspiration to this game, it would be a shame to not delve into that rich source and have the opportunity to take inspiration from that era of art fully.

So could we get a Jesus Christ minion to move, attack and block for us in a game of Sorcery? It certainly would create a marketing buzz for good or ill. Here we go:

Jesus Christ.

A unique Mortal of the divine trinity.

4 Cost – Earth, Water threshold. 0 power.

Other minions nearby can’t be destroyed.

Already in that design there’s plenty of issues, thematically, power level, and theologically. Is this idea a worse White Hart or an overpowered monster?

I think ultimately there will be a card that is essentially Jesus, but they won’t use the name directly. Instead, it will be a minion called The Messiah or something similar and have a much more interesting twist to it than what I have come up with.

But the ultimate takeaway point is that there are so many fascinating ways to take Sorcery, and I think the team are willing to go further and take more risks than other current card games through complex and fun designs, concepts that encourage thought and discussion, and incredible art.

Bonus – release date prediction:

My final prediction is the release date. I’ve always been optimistic, and my guess is November 2025. It feels like Erik’s Curiosa has been working diligently over the last year and didn’t even pause to rest following the release of Arthurian Legends. They’ve resolved many problems with production, and where other companies might struggle in the face of this year’s political uncertainty, I think they have enough momentum to clear that hurdle.