Month: November 2024

Week two of community spoiler season is behind us and we got ourselves our first fully revealed investigator (well, we basically know Marion, but the 100% confirmation through an image is still missing). It’s George Barnaby, the Lawyer. And just like Marion, he’s got a lot of stuff going on mechanically. Let’s check it out.

Sources

George Barnaby was revealed in full by Drawn to the Flame on their podcast.

Survivor

We saw the front of George already weeks ago, but now we have the full picture including the deckbuilding rules. He is blessed with nice and really open deckbuilding options that allow him access to three classes without trait or card type restrictions. This meshes really well with his open-ended statline that sets him up as a strong flex. While a flat statline like this would usually be detrimental, Survivor access does change that view considerably, they are easily the best at making 3s in your skills work.
The central puzzle around playing George is going to be managing that interaction of his handsize with the cards under him. Discarding cards as parts of other effects is going to be very valuable as it will draw additional cards while tucking the discarded card under him where it still can be committed for icons. After drawing his starting hand of 5, he gets to tuck any number of those cards under him to provide a base hand size. Any skill cards you draw in your opener are prime candidates for this of course, as they can still be committed from beneath George.
It will be interesting to see how this ends up playing in practice. Are you going to try and trigger a discard in as many phases as possible? In theory, you could match Patrice’s draw power that way which seems exceptionally powerful. However that will require you to constantly commit cards from your special stash to make room for new ones. It may very well turn out that a more restrained approach that uses the cards to their fullest instead ends up being preferable. Or a playstyle that leans more into using those cards beneath him as a second hand through his signature cards, as we’ll see in a bit.
To push back against all the innate drawing power, George has a pretty chunky deck. Not only does he have a deck size of 35, but after his 3 signatures, personal weakness and random weakness he’s already at 40 cards. Throw in some cards earned during the campaign and George is going to need a bigger boat.

Luckily, those signatures turn out to be mechanically interesting, so you won’t be unhappy to draw them at all. Since they are skill cards, you can discard them for value and put them under George without missing out on being able to play them at will. They provide a single wild icon, but they also allow swapping cards from your hand with cards under him. This expands the potential of his investigator mechanic even further, allowing it to serve as a second hand for other cards than skills as well. Notably, being allowed to do this swap isn’t tied to success or failure of the test, you get to do this after the test resolves no matter the outcome. Sounds great!
His weakness empties his second hand or shuffles back if no card could be discarded this way. This can be very, very impactful as this will also reset his maximum handsize to zero. If he drew his weakness in his upkeep, that will mean you have to chuck your hand too. One of those cards can go back under him at least and you also get to draw a new card from that trigger… but overall that will be painful indeed and may just make it extremely worth to include card selection that fishes for his weakness during the investigator phase where you have more options to recover.

There’s a whole bunch of considerations that will be fun to figure out with him. How many skill cards do we run to make use of the circumstance that they are basically free discards for him? What do we use to trigger discards at the various phases? Is Forced Learning as great here as it seems? Blood-Rites go pretty hard here, right? But that’s going way deeper than i want to go for this spoiler roundup, past initial impressions and right into detailed analysis. Maybe some other time :)

Overall, this looks like a very exciting investigator to me. Novel mechanics to figure out and open deckbuilding to experiment with are exactly what i look for in survivors. So while it was a bit of a surprise to see the lawyer character appear in this class, i am very happy with what we got here!

And just like that, we start into the community spoiler season. Expect new cards being revealed every week until the actual release of the set across various content creators and community members. Of course I will be doing my weekly spoiler roundups again as well, where you can find all the new stuff in one place without having to hunt all over the internet for it. In exchange, i make you suffer through my takes on the cards.
Want just the cards, without all the chaff? Check the Visual Spoiler!

Sources

Mob Connections and Lawrence Carlisle were previewed by Little Geek on their YouTube.

Rogue

Mob Connection asks for a rather steep cost upfront, with 4XP paid, 3 resources invested and two actions used when you first use this to recur a previously spent asset. This means that you will want to use it many times to make the value proposition look better. Which in turn means you want to draw it early, however being an Exceptional card makes that difficult. You can put it into an Underworld Market or fish it out of your deck with Dirty Deeds to help with that, but that adds even more upfront XP costs.
Ultimately i have to wonder what we are using this for. If the goal is just making sure that we always have another weapon (or investigation tool) in the wings after spending the old one, then Underworld Market already does that. So we’d want to recur a specific card, possibly something that itself required some heavy investment? Like maybe a Sawed-Off Shotgun? But then why aren’t we just playing ammo events?
There’s also a bit of awkwardness around using this with weapons and investigation tools where those assets don’t discard themselves after being spent. So you need to discard them from your hand in the first place… which you usually do by playing your replacement asset.
I don’t know, it seems like something is missing here. Maybe this would need to be Permanent. Maybe it’d need to not be Exceptional. Maybe it needed to play the asset on activation, not just draw it. But as it is, this just looks too clunky to me for what it offers. It’s not a completely hopeless card. You can make it more action efficient through Fence, Joey the Rat and/or Haste, for example. But how much support am i really supposed to throw at my 4XP one-off? As an engine card it might find the right shell to play it in eventually, but I am at least not seeing it right now. This is asking for too much upfront and then only pays off too slowly.

Survivor

Now this however is hot stuff. Quite powerful in a generic way, giving some extra Intellect to any survivors out for clues. From survivor allies, this was previously only available on Guiding Spirit(1) and Granny Orne(3), only one of which currently sees all that much play and she’s level 3.
Lawrence sweetens the deal with some resource generation, inviting the inevitable comparison to Milan Christopher. Now, he’s no Milan, but just the fact that we can hold him next to one of the most influential cards of the Core Set should make us pay attention.
You are obviously not looking to discard cards just for a resource, but if discarding stuff is already something that you are doing, then this seems like a great payoff, quickly refunding your ally and then some.
Notably, his reaction ability can only be triggered during your turn, so it won’t fire in response to Patrice’s forced discard during her upkeep. Patrice is known to toss cards around in her turn all the time however and getting even more resources out of your Violin or as a bonus to your Cornered could be pretty sweet.
The two best users for Carlisle are probably Wendy and Pete. Both have an investigator ability that has them discard cards from their hand for profit and both of them have a need for an intellect ally. As a global boost, Carlisle’s bonus does of course count for investigating with Duke.
George Barnaby, Drowned City’s own survivor, also thrives on discarding cards, so that looks to be an intentional synergy as well.
This new ally also provides yet another way to gain resources in a Dark Horse deck which seems relevant. Madame Labranche does offer a similar benefit there and might beat out Lawrence just for the Dark Horse interaction, but once you factor in that you may want the +1 intellect, then things start to shift fairly quick and you might see Lawrence and Hunting Jacket power out some surprisingly costly cards even in a Dark Horse deck.
The one drawback here is a lack of soak. Labranche is notable for giving a cheap 2/2 soak, both Guiding Spirit and Granny Orne throw a hefty 3 sanity around. Even Milan has that extra point of sanity that is quite relevant. Carlisle doesn’t have that, so he’ll have to make it just on the back of his strong textbox.
So yeah, great ally to have in the arsenal. Is he going to be as omnipresent as Milan is? No, but he doesn’t need to be. He has strong synergies with several aspects of Survivor and is going to carve out a nice, chunky niche in the card pool on the back of them.

Hey, I just wanted to post a short info that I got myself the ancientevils.com domain and that you can reach this site through it now. It will redirect to the frontpage. The actual adresses within the blog stay unchanged of course, but i figure that ancientevils.com is a lot easier to remember than derbk.com/ancientevils when you aren’t going through a link or bookmark.

On that note, why don’t you have this site bookmarked? Wtf is wrong with you :D

That’s already all i had to say! Cheers o/