When playing Myth: Pantheons, your single most important resource is your hand of Deity cards. Not only do they translate the flavor of your deity into game mechanics, they also provide a unique set of advantages to the player holding them. Their special effects can be as simple as a 13 (in a game where most cards stop at 12) or always acting as the ruling domain (Myth’s special term for trump), or they can be more exotic effects such as stealing cards or stopping players from drawing cards. Each one, if played at the proper time, can potentially change the flow of the game.
As powerful as they are, though, there is a limit. Specifically, each player only has five to last the entire game. Once a deity card is used, it is forever gone – unless some other deity card dictates otherwise. It may seem like a good idea to use them all in the first few challenges, claiming some cities quickly and early. This will give a good collection of special abilities from the captured cities, but it makes you an early target of other players – and leaves you with little in hand to defend yourself!
On the other hand, knowing how powerful they are, it can be very tempting to constantly hold on to them, reasoning that a better time to use them will come later. When taken too far, this leads to a hand full of unused deity cards at the end of the game. There is absolutely no benefit to unused cards when the game is over – merely wasted opportunities.
So – when should they be used?
At its core, Myth is a trick taking game – and with any such game, the key to victory is in guiding how cards are played out. The first person to play in each challenge (trick) wields considerable power in the ability to decide what domain (suit) the challenge will focus on. By playing a War card, he forces the rest of the players to play War cards, if they have them. If War happens to be the ruling domain (trump), then he pulls ruling domain cards out of everybody’s hands, which makes his leads in future challenges safer. If nobody else can play the ruling domain, he can win challenges with impunity.
This is where the deity cards come in.
No matter what their particular individual abilities happen to be, the vast majority of deity cards share one common characteristic: they are good for taking the lead, especially when you do not already have it. Thus, the time to use a deity card is when it will put you in the driver’s seat at a critical moment. With that in mind, here are some times you should consider using one of your deity cards:
- A player already ahead on cities is getting ready to claim another one
- You have a good collection of tokens in hand and want to play some actions
- You have a weather token (so you can change the ruling domain) and a strong hand in a suit which is not the current ruling domain
- You need tokens of a particular type, you have no mortal cards to give them to you, and one of your deity cards will give you what you need
In all of these examples, the key is recognizing the situation where the benefit will help the most.
May your timing be strong!
