Horseman of Conquest - Hecatomb

"I'm still waiting for a call for Darksiders III."

So, here's an issue I've been sidestepping. Most games have some sort of goal behind them. In Monopoly it's to acquire all property. Magic the Gathering is two wizards trying to reduce the other's life to 0. What is the goal of this game? To reap 20 souls so you can destroy the world. What. Ignoring the fact that destroying the planet you're standing on is an idiotic move, the game casts its players as villain protagonists. This was another innovation of the game, a world where you cast the players as villains instead of the hero, but the game also was trying to build some sort of story, and this didn't help. In Magic the Gathering, you have the freedom to switch worlds and build characters. Here though, the game makes it very clear this is set on Earth. The planet most of the protagonists are trying to destroy. How do you makes us care about them? We don't want them to succeed, not just because they're evil but because once the Earth is destroyed, that's the end of the story. The final expansion tried to rectify this with the introduction of the aliens, presenting the possibility that there are other worlds out there for them to destroy, and providing a way to survive the destruction of this one. That said, the story was still kind of grounded. It's hard to build up a world when your characters are intent on destroying it.

Well, enough with that rant, here's our card, appropriately enough a horseman. One of the horsemen actually. For those who never read Revelations, there is a sequence with the breaking of the seven seals. When the first four seals are broken, they summon the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Conquest, War, Famine, and Death. Pestilence is a side-interpretation/member, I guess the part-time Horseman, usually standing in for Conquest or Death. As shown above, Conquest is depicted riding a white horse. He carries a bow and arrow and he wears a crown on his head. I personally feel Conquest steps a little too far into War's territory, which is probably why most writers depict him as Pestilence.

Another mechanical note about these cards. Notice how the text box is red. Look at the four other corners. Notice the blue triangles. When you place a card on top of another, called stitching, you rotate the bottom card by one so the text is clear under the plastic edges. This causes one of the four triangles above to appear in clear triangle on the text box. If the colors match, it triggers the effect in that text box. In this case, if you stitch Conquest on top of a destruction minion (remember, destruction is red, deceit is blue), you will trigger the text in the red box. This is Hecatomb's version of encouraging multicolored play and off-color triggers.