By Dale Medhurst
Over two years ago, Plaid Hat Games released the small, but perfectly-formed Summoner Wars Starter Sets and there was much rejoicing!
Since then we’ve seen four new Factions, beautiful premium playing boards, expansions for all the Factions and, finally, last year, the wonderful Summoner Wars Master Set, which has such great box design that you could store EVERYTHING released for the game and still have more room for new Factions.
Now, we have two new Factions, one of which is the rather-delightfully named Filth.
This 36-card set is very different from previous Factions. There are no Champions card; instead we have Mutations… Where other Factions would summon Champions onto the board with the 
magic they had accumulated by discarding cards or killing their enemies, the Filth use magic to place Mutation Cards on top of existing Common Cards, giving them special abilities, augmented attacks and more life points.
All of the Mutation cards are unique so when they are on the board they’re a bit like a group of super villains and very deadly.
The only Champion is the Abomination, an expensive card and very random. A bit reminiscent of the Chaos Spawn from the Warhammer 40K universe, the Abomination rolls a die each round and the result is the number of attacks it has that round, so it can be very deadly or …meh! However, it can soak a lot of damage so it’ll be round a long time harrying your opponent.
The Filth’s Common Cards are cheap, as in FREE, to summon and there are a lot of them, so, even though they die all over the place, they’re soon mutating into something much nastier… 
One other neat trick the Filth has under its vile sleeve are some great Event Cards. They can mutate their enemies, turning them against their former allies and they can possess an opponent’s wall! It then can’t be used to summon until the Wall’s owner discards two cards from their hand! Ouch!
The Filth faction are one of the most flavourful set. I love them!
You start the game running your weak Cultists and Zealots around the board then…BANG! A mutation occurs and the game shifts. As usual with the Summoner Wars series, the cards are gorgeous: well produced, great art and very nice card stock.
Well done, Plaid Hat, another great addition to an already-fabulous game… Viva Summoner Wars!