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Welcome to Christmas Town!
by Andrew Parks
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The Christmas Town Expansion introduces many new concepts to The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG. There are now 15 Locales and 12 Characters devoted entirely to Christmas Town, and these Christmas cards are distinguished by the use of electric lights down the sides of the cards instead of the wavy spear design on the sides of the Halloween cards. Players may now include up to 5 Christmas Locales in their Locale Decks (replacing Halloween Locales), but may still have only 6 total Locales in their Locale Decks. Halloween Locales and Christmas Locales are kept separate from each other on the table, and only Characters who are from a particular Holiday Town can be played to that Holiday Town. Futhermore, only Characters with special text can "cross the line" from one Holiday Town to the next. For more details on how the Christmas Town Locales work in your Locale Deck, be sure to visit Jack's House and download the newly posted Christmas Town Rules!
So why play with Christmas Locales anyway? To receive their awesome bonuses, of course! All Christmas Characters have a Scare Number of 0, which means you can play them for free but they aren't worth any Scare Points at the end of the game. However, all Christmas Locales have a "Joy Threshold" in the upper left corner instead of a Scare Threshold. In order to activate a Christmas Locale, you need to have a number of Christmas Characters at that Locale equal to or greater than the Joy Threshold. Once you do, you receive a "Bonus" instead of a "Function". This Bonus remains in effect for as long as the Christmas Locale remains Active. Although players can still perform only one Halloween Function every turn, they can benefit from any number of Christmas Town Bonuses at the same time!
For example, take a close look at the Toy Factory above. It has a Joy Threshold of 6 (the most difficult Christmas Locale to activate in the game). However, once you've got 6 Christmas Characters there, all of your Creations are -1 Cost! This is in addition to any other Cost reductions in effect, so once the Toy Factory is up and running, you will have the potential to play a lot of Creations at a very reasonable Cost!
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So who are these Christmas Characters anyway? How about Santa and his Elves, with a couple of Penguins and Mrs. Claus to boot! Santa Claus actually has a different card title than "Sandy Claws", but Santa's text qualifies that you cannot play him if you already have Sandy in play (or vice versa).
But Santa is more than just a figurehead in Christmas Town! He is a vital resource to getting all your Elves in play. Every turn, you get a free Search 6 for as many Elves as you can find. That helps get things set up for you in Christmas Town as soon as possible. You have to be careful, though. Even though there are eight different Elves who live in Christmas Town, Santa's text does not allow you to find Mrs. Claus or the Penguins, so you may have to use the Premiere Surprise What Have I Done? to retrieve those cards if you fly past them.
Only Santa and Mrs. Claus have text that is usable every turn. The Elves and Penguins all have text which is only triggered when the respective Christmas Character comes into play. However, since these Characters are all free to play, getting to use their immediate rewards early in the game can be very handy. And Mrs. Claus can feed pies to your Elves in order to discard them (which earns you a card if she's at the Bakery), which means you can play the Elves again to generate their effects once more. Once an Elf gets a taste of Mrs. Claus' pies, they always come running back for more!
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One of the fun parts of playing with Christmas Characters is that their abilities tend to be quite friendly! Take Eddy the Elf, for example. When you play him, everyone in the game gets to draw a card! Of course, you want to make sure you play Eddy when you're the one who really needs that card the most!
Other Christmas Characters have abilities that allow you to draw cards or move cards based upon where they are played and who they are played with. For the most part, however, since this is Christmas and not Halloween, Christmas Characters and Christmas Locales don't allow you to Add Pumpkin Points (with one exception: poor Iggy the Elf, who is scared out of his mind when Jack wakes him up in the middle of the night!)
Because of this, players will find that Christmas Town is a great way to enhance their Halloweentown strategies, but players will not be able to replace Halloweentown altogether, as their core focus of generating Pumpkin Points to play out cards that are worth Scare Points will still come from their Halloween Characters and Locales. Player who wish to earn the Christmas Locale bonuses will have to choose carefully exactly how many Christmas bonuses they wish to pursue, and hope they can still get their core Halloween strategies set up in time.
Now you might be wondering if everyone will be required to play with Christmas Locales in order to succeed in the game's new play environment. And the answer is certainly not! Although Christmas decks can be quite powerful due to their bonuses, there are many new strategies that are part of the new expansion that have nothing to do with Christmas Town. Players of the Premiere set have commented favorably on the high number of different viable decks that can be built in the game. With the introduction of the Christmas Town Expansion, that number rises exponentially. We can't wait to show you more goodies from the upcoming set, so stay tuned!
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