So what do the artifacts do? Well they all go on one dude and they stack. 2 of them lets you reroll defence dice, 3 lets you reroll attack. 4 let's you draw two power cards after taking an action, and all 6 lets your action just be to simply score 4 glory points. Get all these artifacts on a guy by the beginning of turn 3, you can grab an almost certainly game winning 16 glory points.
So obviously that's a lot of the upgrades in this deck already taken, so what have I cherry picked to accompany them. Well, equipment designed to keep the artefact bearer alive of course...
The cursed artefact gives +1 defence at the cost of a wound, but great fortitude replaces that wound so we're all square there. Deathly fortitude adds 2 wounds at the cost of 2 movement, but with a range 4 attack on the guy I want to upgrade, I figure I can stomach this. Blessed armour means critical defence rolls remove wounds (and inspired and upgraded I'll be chucking out 3 defence dice with a reroll, so hopefully can keep regenerating. And army of one means if the other two sell their lives in gathering glory points to equip the leader he get's +1 attack and defence, meaning he'll be rolling 4 defence with a reroll with crits healing him on his base 6 wounds. Tough nut to crack!
Farstrider himself is the one I wish to upgrade, the other two are just to grab glory points to pay for it.
So, what ploys did I squeeze into this deck? Well, healing potion is no surprise surely. I also have great concussion to push fighters apart - great for an entirely ranged warband. ephemereal shield can give a fighter +1 defence, and misdirection should protect farstrider from the first ploy meant to undermine him.
To help get the ball rolling on upgrades I have spoils of battle for a freebie, daylight robbery to make someone else hopefully pay for one, and scavenge that is situational but might get me an extra point so why not.
To round out my deck I have duel of wits to get more power cards in hand and inspiration strikes... handy to inspire farstrider if I plan to keep him hanging back with upgrades while the other two do the legwork.
As for that legwork, how will that be achieved? I went for cheap easy to score objectives, with plenty of "immediates" to try to rack up a good early score. There are no "end of third phase" or big scoring objectives in this deck, as at the end of the third phase they're too late to do me any good as part of the overall plan.
So how does the deck play? Well I played one game (4 way) so far with it, and I did a bit of a doozy... I either forgot to shuffle my deck or didn't shuffle it properly. Basically, all the kat artifacts were the bottom 6 cards of my power deck. I didn't know this when I started. I started with 1 upgrade and 4 ploys, not bad we can work with this. The plan worked for cheap objectives, and I ditched the unused ploys at the end of the turn and drew a fresh set of... 5 ploys. Ah. By the end of turn 2 I had 9 glory points, which would have been plenty to get all necessary upgrades equipped. However... the upgrades were still in the deck. I worked out that if I drew a card every turn and spent a glory point every turn, I would get to 5 artifacts at the end of turn 3. If, once 4 were in place, I activated my leader and thus drew two extra cards, I could just about get the 6th in place... but gain no glory from doing so. So instead I spent my last turn defending my slender lead by knocking the ork player off the central objective that was worth 3 glory points at the end, and I won the game by 3 glory points, so a close fought thing. However it was a low scoring game all round and I think that a better game from my opponents would have seen the deck fail, due to the katophrane stuff being buried. So I shall shuffle the deck thoroughly and try again, although the downside is that now they know the farstriders are set up like this they'll perhaps try to prevent me from gearing one guy up. But I'd like to see if it can work, before I make a deck that is more suited to the farstriders playstyle.