Many challenges await in Trial by Frost and only the most skilled and resilient will make their way to the top of the mountain. For the first time since leaving Asgartha, your expeditions will be put to the test, faced with a hostile environment of slippery ice and relentless winds. Pack your best climbing gear, adapt to the region’s harsh weather and manage your resources carefully if you hope to make it through!

As the first expansion for Altered, Trial by Frost required a different approach to set design than Beyond the Gates. Game designers Charles Wickham and Nathanaël Dufour met the challenge head on, crafting a bold set fit for the beginning of competitive play. Here’s a quick introduction for each of them:

Charles is fond of strategy games and competition. His focus on Trial by Frost was on mechanical depths, coherence, and balance. As a winter enjoyer, he was passionate about the thematic and the visual identity of the set, showcasing a new side of Altered.

Nathanaël is an avid boardgamer, nitpicky rules lawyer and roleplaying game master. Enthusiastic about the lore of Altered, he’s been very intent on making the cards of the set evocative of the narration, with the Icebound Landmarks as a key element.

Nathanaël tells us more about where the set comes from and what you can experience in Trial by Frost.

“From the onset, we knew Trial by Frost was going to be about the harshness of facing the wild, unexplored Tumult. We wanted our players to experience the need to prepare their climb: including preparing their future days, being mindful of where their Characters are played (in terms of region type and Expedition), and emphasizing the feeling of "build-up". We also wanted them to feel the cold slowing them down. And finally, we wanted the Icebound regions themselves to be important features of the new set.”

A successful ascent begins well before setting foot on the mountain by preparing the most suitable gear for the climb. Whether that be well fitted shoes, winter clothes or a much needed carton of spicy Arcolano milk for the road, in the fields of ice and snow, chance favors the prepared mind, and those with a full backpack.

Gears are Expedition Permanents with the new Gear subtype.

When playing an Expedition Permanent :

• The player must choose in which of their Expeditions they play it.
• If played from Reserve, it gains Fleeting
  During Rest, Gears whose Expedition has moved forward this Day are sent to Reserve.

As you can see below, to welcome this new design, we’ve updated the frame for permanents to distinguish between different subtypes of permanents. From now on, each permanent will specify which game zone it goes in and will feature the associated symbol to better identify their type.

We wanted Permanent cards to remain understandable to new players learning Altered for the first time, while making it easy for someone who knows how Landmark Permanents and Expedition Permanents work to just ignore that text. In the end we felt separating the reminder text from the card effect was the best way to do both.

A Gear is played in an Expedition, and provides its bonus to the Expedition it’s in. This provides their controller with a clear incentive to play in that Expedition.

However, as long as that Expedition hasn’t moved forward, the Gear remains in it, for an unlimited amount of days. Therefore, a player also has an incentive to focus on their other Expedition and save the bonus of the Gear for a future day.

Technical Boots and Winter Outfits are cheap 1-mana Gears for example, that play respectively around Bravos’ fast gameplay with Fleeting characters and Lyra’s characters with base statistics of 0. Both give you a lot of adaptability if you do decide to use them, but you can also choose to play around them and keep them for a later day!

When that Expedition eventually moves forward, the Gear is sent to Reserve, along with the Characters. A player will sometimes need to abandon Gear they could still use because they don’t have enough space in Reserve, but more often the Gear will serve its purpose twice: like a Character, it becomes Fleeting when played from Reserve, so the second time its Expedition moves forward it will be discarded. Note however that unlike most Characters, a Gear effect might perdure beyond the Day it's played, since it may remain in the Expedition longer.

“Gears were something that we thought about for a while–and even imagined for the Core Set at some point. There's something very thematic about providing your Expeditions with efficient clothes, equipment and supplies. They have a very satisfying rubberbanding effect: if your opponent keeps preventing you from moving forward, your Gear stays, making it easier to catch up the next Day.”

Through freezing winds, sudden avalanches and cold restless nights, resource management is a skill you can’t discard if you hope to make it all the way to the top. Trial by Frost shines a light (of the northern kind) on the Exhaust mechanic, with new keywords and cards that care about having exhausted cards, both in yours or your opponent’s Reserve.

Exhausting a card means turning it sideways to show that its quick actions cannot be used again for this day and that it cannot be played from the Reserve. Trial by Frost takes it a step further and introduces new mechanics revolving around Exhaust such as Exhausted Resupply, Cooldown and the ability to exhaust cards in Reserve.

Exhausted status: Exhausted cards can’t be played and have no Support abilities.

The most common form of Exhaustion is a kind of soft sabotage: exhausting a card will prevent your opponent from using it until the next Day, when they will ready it (along with their exhausted Mana Orbs, Landmark Permanents and/or Hero).

While it may seem less impactful against opponents that have many cards in hand (since they’ll have more alternatives to play that Day), it will often cause their Reserve to overflow at Night, reducing their card advantage.

Spells with Cooldown can be played twice (unlike Fleeting spells), but not twice on the same Day. After playing them, the player puts them in Reserve and exhausts them. In order to get full benefit from them, the player needs to keep them in Reserve until the next Morning.

Some powerful Spells can send a Character to Reserve, then exhaust it, preventing their controller from replaying them that Day. They are often cheaper or easier to replay than a Spell that would outright remove that card.

Exhausted Resupply is a new type of Resupply. The player puts the top card of their deck in Reserve, then exhausts it, which is less immediately useful than if it were ready, but fuels some interesting synergies.

Moving through steep and rocky cliffs, treacherous icy lakes or deep pine forests where the sun can’t pierce through the canopy doesn’t challenge the same skills. In Trial by Frost, some cards can reward you depending on the region you play them in, some have an additional effect depending on the region their target is in, and some others directly interact with the region types. Adapt to the elements and take advantage of the regions you are in to ease your progress or hinder your opponent’s expeditions.

In its rare version, Skadi, Scandinavian goddess of ski, is stronger if the Expedition she’s played in is in a Mountain region.

Persephone brings Spring with her and makes it so that the region she is in becomes Forest in addition to its other types. As such she is a powerful combo with any other card that benefits from being played in Forest.

“We decided early on during development that each of the regions crossed during the Trial By Frost timeline would have its own distinctive Icebound Landmark, and we wanted to bring the player’s focus on those regions and have them notice where they were on the map. The Forest region type is especially important for Muna, which has a lot of ways to interact with it.”

Trial by Frost should give you many new tools and synergies to build new decks and complete the ones you already have from Beyond the Gates. The set releases on January 31, 2025, but the warm-up starts now!

Join the adventure at #AlteredTBF and on the official Altered Discord server!