Agents and Deck Building Systems

A great way to improve your faction's abilities

The Agents:

Each faction at play is represented on the map by its leader, which has no special abilities, so only the faction abilities do apply.
In order to benefit from additional abilities, the player needs to put Agents in play.
Agents are faction-specific characters who each possess an array of active and passive abilities, which are balanced by one or several weaknesses.
A faction is able to put in play each Agent it possesses in its portfolio, provided always that players have agreed to play with extended characters. Should this not be the case, all factions play only with their base set of Agents.
It really does not matter at all how many Agents a faction has in play at a given moment, as Agents require action points, which are in limited number for each faction, in order to be able to act.
Therefore, a faction which does not possess a large number of Agents in its portfolio, such as the Locals, suffers no real disadvantage towards a faction such as the Yanks, which has a large number of Agents in its portfolio when in extended characters mode.

Agents abilities and the Deck

The Agents' non-passive abilities usually belong to three possible categories: multiple-use, multi-level or conditional.
Depending upon the category they belong too, abilities might require different activation tokens in order to respectively be used multiple times, be upgraded or be enabled for use.
The activation tokens are introduced in play from the players' decks.
A deck is a selection of tokens which can be used during a given game, with all players having the exact same number of tokens, regardless of the tokens they effectively own.
Games played using the extended characters mode are allowing users to use either their own customized deck or a standardized deck, while games played using the base characters mode are played using only standardized decks.

Deck Building :

Deck building as a roleplaying element:
Players are encouraged to build their own customized deck, allowing deeper and more versatile gameplay.
In Let's Kill Hitler, players are encouraged to roleplay. They just don't play a character, but a faction, and customizing one's deck is a great way to give a distinctive flavor to their version of the faction, by focusing more on less on different distinctive aspects of the faction.
Deck building as a reflection of experience:
Players are accumulating xp as they participate in games, this xp being computed for each faction they play with.
The accumulated xp can be converted into deck tokens, leading to access improved (but more costly) effects of abilities (in extended character mode), providing the equivalent of a skill tree for each of the faction's agents.
Deck building is an optional feature:
Players not willing to focus on deck building while still having a good time, or wishing to not develop decks for certain factions while still being able to play them can access at all times random standardized decks, which allow them to participate into multiplayer sessions with the guarantee they will have a fair chance to win.

Fair treatment of players :

Let's Kill Hitler does not endorse "pay to win" models, and its mechanics are designed so that players using the free to play mode can participate into multiplayer games with the same chance to win as paid players.
For these reasons, the use of extended characters (and therefore as a consequence of customized decks) is restricted to willing participants, while all players, paid and non paid, can participate into multiplayer game sessions which are played with standardized decks.