Type: Hex Power
Effect Text: Send your highest total strength unit(s) in your strongest row to the graveyard. All other players then do the same.
Flavor Text: Deus Vult!
Artwork: Saint Gregory the Great by Jusepe de Ribera (1614)
Strategy:
Crusade works as a counter for adjacency. If your opponent has many adjacent pairs in the same row, it’s likely that they are also the strongest cards, in which case Crusade would destroy them all. You will need to plan carefully, such that you don’t destroy too many of your own strongest cards.
About the card:
Pope Gregory the First (or later Saint Gregory) led an interesting life, presiding as pope in a time when heretical branches of the church were close to Rome and most of northern Europe was still Pagan or Christian in name only. To the North of Rome sat many of the Gothic kingdoms that had invaded and destroyed the Western Roman Empire over the previous centuries and part of Gregory's life was dedicated to fending off this looming threat (see also Sack). If you like podcasts, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History has a series on this early medieval period in northern Europe called: "Twilight of the Aesir". The crusade to convert the north would be slow and gruesome taking half a millennium before all of the kings of Europe were Christianized.
Gregory himself pressured the kings of northern europe to suppress their pagan subjects and tried to stamp out schisms in northern Italy and northern Africa with armies raised by the church. Many of the later Popes used his actions over 6 centuries prior as justification for their invasions and crusades into the Baltics and toward Jerusalem.
