{"id":477,"date":"2026-05-26T22:11:47","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T22:11:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mountbakergames.com\/manifold\/blog\/?p=477"},"modified":"2026-05-26T23:11:26","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T23:11:26","slug":"the-monks-of-docide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mountbakergames.com\/manifold\/blog\/the-monks-of-docide\/","title":{"rendered":"The Monks of Docide"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

[editors note: This is a guest article written by one of our PAO-winning players, Steven Boston]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have the good fortune to have been playing Manifold with just Tyryn Sentinels for almost three years.

My memory of the first game I ever played is crisp. I had known some of the designers for a long time, and after a good stretch of them trying to convince me to come by and give the game a shot, I finally found the opportunity to make my way over to Pair O’ Dice Games for a learn to play day. Brad sat me down across from the friend I had traveled with to play.

After a quick rundown of the rules (we both had deep experience in other card games), we were wisely advised to look for a way to spend five gems while mulliganing. I shrugged and put a card or two back, and after grabbing a couple off the top I could not have felt more rewarded:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This wonderful structure has captured my imagination ever since. I have always loved some good value; I love structures that care more about their text than their dice, and I especially love decks where I get to sacrifice my characters for some sort of effect, which the monastery promised to help with immediately by turning up a Cathedral Lookout on that first turn.

The keen observer at this point might think me a fraud. I tell a flowery story of my persistent enchantment with a card that despite years of opportunity has never appeared in any published decklist of mine. Also, what does this have to do with Docide Underworlds?

The answer is very straightforward. On the second turn of that game, I activated my monastery again\u2026 and didn’t play a character. Not surprising for a preconstructed deck to have something like that happen, but that made me wonder how lucky it was to have gotten one on the first turn that I could actually play, to say nothing of having gotten one that takes full advantage of the {U}{U} down payment.

After that, as I am wont to do, I ventured into constructed, and I pored over the list of cards in Tyryn Sentinels\u2026 and found them wanting in this department. A quick jaunt over to our friendly neighborhood hypergeometric calculator can get some rough estimates on how many hits we might want in order to feel good about our monastery. For this, I assumed 40 Cards (given a 45 card deck that we have already drawn 5 cards from), and went looking for what kind of “population” (the number of cards that work for what we want) needs to be in that stack of 40 to give us various chances to hit (note that since this doesn’t account for cards already in hand, real results will be slightly worse):\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

– 74.2% at 9 Hits
– 85.1% at 12 Hits
– 91.9% at 15 Hits

We can debate what counts, but for my money we need:

– A character that can be played directly off the monastery activation, preferably that costs 2 rather than 1
– A character that we actually want to play in our deck
– A character that we are happy with getting into play on turn 1 with nothing else going on (sorry [[Federation Battlemage]])

Given the numbers above, I’d like to be closer to the 15 hits range if possible. I’ll spare an exhaustive list, but lets just say that with only one set of Manifold cards counting up to 15 required a good bit more bending of the rules that I would like, so though I have spent quite a lot of time thinking about Djoln’s Monastery, when the chips are down it hasn’t made it to a decklist.

It seems like our humble monastery is in need of some additional monks. I wonder if there are any of those in Docide Underworlds?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Get ready to see Ramorand’s Elite quite a lot. Longtime deckbuilders in Manifold are well acquainted with [[Docide Thug]], and while that card certainly has some of its own strengths in comparison, the Elite here have some of their own with the ability to get right at the opposing heroes (which, I’ll note, is quite valuable given that we might find ourselves playing them off of a structure before there is a support character to target). An additional red dice is always welcome, especially when we might presuppose ourselves to be rolling a blue and a white.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A side note that I have about sacrifice decks in Tyryn sentinels is that they were a bit better at having good ways to sacrifice their support characters than they were at having an abundance of them to sacrifice. Eurus’s entourage offers us slightly better than rolling a red dice at a baseline (because you can transmute a blank that may or may not be the black dice rolled by the entourage itself), with the large additional benefit of getting two characters on the board at a great bargain (and as they say, the only thing better than finding something you’re looking for is finding something you weren’t<\/em> looking for at a great bargain)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Over the course of my time with Tyryn Sentinels I have become quite the fan of Enthusiastic Harmonist. A simple character, not a flashy one, but that finds its way into decks by just getting the job done. Another red dice is always welcome (I note that all three of these new characters getting a red dice on the table might make more space for Martyr for the Old Gods or even Eternal Listeners), and that second point of durability gives it some critical advantages versus the aforementioned Docide Thug.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a long vigil as a Sentinel of Tyryn, I can’t wait to get my hands on what Docide Underworlds has to offer, but first I’ll leave you with a quick decklist that will be my starting point for adding these new support characters to a classic DADO-14 \/\/ Ramorand Ulysses shell:

Heroes:
Ramorand Ulysses
DADO-14 (Combative)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Support Deck:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Characters: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

3x Augur’s Auspice
3x Federation Battlemage
3x Radar Servo
3x Cathedral Lookout
3x Eurus’s Entourage
3x Ramorand’s Elite
2x Hired Lookout
2x Martyr for the Old Gods
2x Revenant

Attachments:
1x Blessed Mender<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Structures:
3x Black Altar
3x Djoln’s Monastery
2x Remembrance

Events:
3x Protection of Belief
2x Excommunicatus
2x Crackle
2x Sever the Ties
2x Declaration of War
1x Pacify<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[editors note: This is a guest article written by one of our PAO-winning players, Steven Boston] I have the good fortune to have been playing Manifold with just Tyryn Sentinels for almost three years. My memory of the first game I ever played is crisp. I had known some of the designers for a long […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":483,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,59,58],"tags":[60,61,62],"class_list":["post-477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-updates","category-pro-article","category-spoilers","tag-docide-underworlds","tag-spoilers","tag-steven-boston"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mountbakergames.com\/manifold\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mountbakergames.com\/manifold\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mountbakergames.com\/manifold\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mountbakergames.com\/manifold\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mountbakergames.com\/manifold\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=477"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mountbakergames.com\/manifold\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":484,"href":"https:\/\/www.mountbakergames.com\/manifold\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477\/revisions\/484"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mountbakergames.com\/manifold\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mountbakergames.com\/manifold\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mountbakergames.com\/manifold\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mountbakergames.com\/manifold\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}