I have "discovered" this card few years ago and got really interested. It wasn't played in our playgroup at all before then (or very little). After witnessing Lutz and converts with mass revolts and banishments, it got me thinking. Now I have two decks with them and I am struggling to not put them in others. I do not want to overflow our metagame with them, so I will probably keep it to two decks maximum, but I just wanted to express how much I like this card and why.
1) Pool damage
I will start with obvious one. If it is left unchecked on table and no one else is anarch, It keeps doing 4 pool damage between your two rounds. If it stays there 5 rounds, that is 20 pool damage for one master card and that is just brutal.
2) Blood loss
Sometimes players will want to prevent themselves from taking damage from multiple revolts, they will go anarch the old fashioned way. Even when it would be done by each player in first round which that revolt hits the table, that is still 8 blood lost on the table. And all of other players were hit for one pool in that round. Which again is 4 pool damage. Additionaly, everyone spends one action doing something else, that their deck is not supposed to do initially. And that is huge loss for most decks.
3) Actions wasting
Depending on how heavy are these featured in your deck, players might start removing those revolts from play as soon as they hit the table. Although that might seem as the worst possible option for you (and it often is), it is still wasting action. More often than less, it is your predator or prey removing that card. If your prey removes it, that means that you hit him for one pool, your cross-table "buddies" are safe and he spent one action doing something else than tooling up. This is still better than if he done govern superior. If your predator has done the removing, that is even better. You just scored 4 pool damage and your predator is doing something else than tooling up or trying to oust you.
4) Speeding up the table
Whichever option is happening with those revolts, the end results are, that there are less pool on the table, less blood on the table or less tooling up. Usually that means the games are quicker, there usually are no time outs and you are not so tired after three rounds of playing. I am a fan of this, since I do not like to play until time ends, since those games are tiresome and usually not as interesting.
5) More dynamic games
When players loose their resources, they tend to do something about it. Even hardcore block decks are forced to act - either to remove revolts or make themselves anarch. They can be blocked doing this. Players that would go for removing revolts may vote against just because their prey is dying quicker than them. If nobody is able to remove them, they just go forward and try to oust their prey. Usualy there are more actions, more blocking and more interactions between players. I have experienced few games where there were 4 block decks and for two hours, almost nothing happened. I hate those games and with few revolts, they just do not happen.
That is basically it. There are some cards, that can produce similar effect, but I really like these. I am not fan of them as only ousting mechanism, but they are great as support for almost every anarch deck. Of course having too much of these deck could eventualy distort playgroups, which tend to get smaller and smaller and that players would deploy counterstrategies and eventualy the playstyle of group may chage. That is one reason why i keep only two decks with them. Another problem, which you can expect is anarch decks on the table. Your revolts won't slow them down and they may even profit from them more than you. That is why it is important to have more options for ousting.
Well that is all from me now. Just wanted to share one of my favourite cards. If you disagree with anything or just want to add som facts, feel free to comment below.
See you next time...
