Sacred Oath and Working A Hunch(2) were previewed by Arkham Chronicle on their Youtube Ample Supplies and Quick-Witted were previewed on an FFG Livestream on their Youtube.
Seeker
Truth be told, i don’t really play Working a Hunch anymore. In a world where “a card for a clue” is a common thing, especially in Seeker, paying 2 resources for the privilege just doesn’t cut it. The one exception is Joe’s hunch deck of course, which skips the 2 cost and just turns it into a free clue with very little opportunity cost. Now we get an upgrade for the classic core set card… and i don’t think it offers enough to me to make me want Working a Hunch again. Grabbing the clue from any location is a solid upgrade, sure. But it doesn’t actually solve anything for me. Unless i am playing solo (and to be fair, WaH(2) is probably a sick solo card!), picking up a single clue won’t mean that i can just skip that location. There will still be more clues on it, so i still need to move there and finish off the rest if i want that location cleaned up. And if i have to move there anyways, i might as well play the level 0. One way i could imagine Working a Hunch(2) making a good impression is in a deck with more ways to remotely pick up clues. Deciphered Reality, Testing Sprint… In the Know? If this helps such a deck to gain critical mass, then sure i could see it being worth it. But just by itself? I’m not convinced.
(In case this is too blurry for you: Quick-Witted is a level 1 Innate skill, commits for an intellect and agility. It has Myriad and gains an extra +1 int and +1 agi for each copy of it in the discard. After the test, you may shuffle the other Quick-Witteds in your discard back into your deck.)
If you can get some survivor cards for synergy or gain synergy from discarding cards, this could be something to go for to gain extra value from those discards. The first one of these just commits for a single icon, so i don’t think you want to plan on having to commit it the natural way. You’ll probably want to get this in the discard through an activation of Nautical Charts, Forced Learning or similar instead. The second copy is a more limited Unexpected Courage which is where it starts to be okay. Only the third one will give you +3 to your int or agi test where we actually gain something worth talking about. I don’t know, seems to me like we can do better? As a 1xp Myriad card, it is super cheap to get though, so i’d almost evaluate it as a level 0 card. And it’s fine for that. Like all skills that have specific icons instead of wild icons, i am also immediately thinking of Bestow Resolve which could turn this into 2, 4 or 6 wild icons. Overall, this seems fine, but only barely so.
Survivor
Another way to get extra value out of your discard effects. Unless you have shenanigans, you can gain 1 resource with it per round, but unlike with Mortar and Pestle which we’ve seen earlier this preview season, we can only access those resources if we discard the asset from play. So it plays like an Investments which is considerably worse than the Mortar and Pestle deal. Unlike Investments, this does start with 2 resources stored on it already. So if you are really strapped for resources, you could play this, trigger one of your discard effects for a third supply. Then sacrifice this and be up 2 resources for 1 action and a card. Obviously this is not what you want to do, but it’s a considerably better floor than what Investments offered. From that floor you leave it in play, let it ramp and cash it out down the line for a payout. How much is the payout going to be? Assuming you get to play it early and are able to ride it for most of the scenario… what are you doing in Survivor that would pay off for gaining 10 resources on turn 10? If you find a suitable payoff for this situation, then maybe this is a card to go for. Seems like an okay card, but one that i don’t see an immediate home for. I also have to ask two questions: Did this really need to be level 2? And why is this limit 1 per investigator? I find that it’s really weird how that limit 1 per investigator is on every second card this set.
So a Sacred Oath is a Ward that i have to play in advance and that hits only a narrow band of treacheries? And it takes up an arcane slot too? I am not sure that i would want to play one of these if i have Mystic access, never mind three. Or pay 5xp for the privilege of getting to play three limited Wards. Looking at the investigators that can play this card, i’d say that rules out Amina and Kohaku at least. Diana is sad to see a cancel card tailored to both of her investigator traits, and then that card doesn’t work with her signature. It does work with her ability though – so if she’s not using her arcane slots for something else, then maybe? Calvin doesn’t strike me as too interested (and he can play Wards), but at least he has the arcane slots. Is this a Preston card? Canceling treacheries is something he can do with Counterespionage, but i actually could see him wanting to have these prepared in his play area to further have something to protect him from those mythos cards that he can’t handle all that well otherwise. Especially if you don’t own the Return to TFA and thus don’t have Alter Fate(1) for Preston. Patrice is interesting here. Reactive cards like Wards aren’t great in her and getting to store a cancel on the board could be really good for her. You’d need to play a version that doesn’t use Mind’s Eye though (or gain additional arcane slots). So while the initial impression was quite negative for me, i think this could end up be something that Preston or Patrice are interested in. Maaaybe Diana. Not really the sort of banger i hoped for from a 5xp card, but fair enough… if we look at it as three level 2 cards that need to be bought as a bundle it looks pretty good, even if a bit niche.
There has been much handwringing over the somewhat cursed doomplay archetype that is present in many of the mystic cards of the last couple sets. The archetype even got a focus put on it in Scarlet Keys, including its own investigator. Aside from general dissatisfaction with the powerlevel of these cards, an innate issue with an archetype that puts out doom multiple times is that it is very scenario dependent on whether you are actually allowed to do this. ArkhamLCG uses very small numbers when it comes to doom, meaning that even one token is a big change in board state. In turn, the effects can’t be measured all that well, there is no real granularity to it… meaning that attempts to fix the issues through rebalancing just numbers would need to be heavy handed. But even then they’d leave out that many scenarios simply do not allow for the sort of extra doom that the archetype is asking for. Or the fact that doom in play hits every player, so how good your deal “doom for power” ends up being is going to change dramatically with player count. That’s not great.
Note that this is different from cards or investigators that just put out a single doom as a one-time cost or enabler. Arcane Initiate is a card that puts a doom into play once, but then is able to do her thing without further investment into doom. Similarly, Marie gains a bonus as long a doom is in play, but doesn’t require constant engagement with doom beyond that. Actually, that Initiate can turn on Marie’s ability and there is nothing required beyond that. This is not what i would consider doom play. Doom play is something like Amina whose ability needs to be used several times to be worth it and whose signatures key off of putting doom into play on assets and removing it later. Or the cycle of doom charms that will keep on generating doom when being used.
The theme behind the doom play is very evocative and cool though. Mystics draw on powers they can’t fully control, put themselves and everyone around them in danger, but gain power from it. Clearly something worth exploring thematically, this is something that is at the core of the Arkham Horror and just lovecraftian fiction in general.
Today, i’d like to propose an alternative way to express this part of the fiction, allowing players to meddle with dark forces for payoff. But in a way that is not as prone to collapsing from scenario-related circumstances: Drawing extra encounter cards for profit.
Star-Lord, man! Legendary Outlaw?
This concept actually exists in Arkham’s sister LCG, Marvel Champions. There, Peter Quill aka Star-Lord is a hero whose kit is built around being able to voluntarily draw extra encounter cards to power up his economy and add scaling to his effects. It’s a fun and risky way of playing. Now, encounter cards in Champions are a lot less dangerous than in Arkham (on average, at least…) so Star-Lord can go pretty deep into this, drawing several extra cards per turn and cause a lot of movement on the board as a result, both in favor of the players and adding new challenges. For Arkham, we’ll be wanting to power this idea down considerably, but we can at least look at Star-Lord as a precedent that this sort of thing works in principle.
There’s also one notable difference between how encounter cards in Arkham and Champions work: In Champions, encounter cards are only drawn and resolved in a specific phase of the round. Any extras drawn are dealt to you face-down until that phase, so Star-Lord’s kit has cards that scale with the number of those face-down encounters waiting for you. In Arkham, we can resolve drawn encounter cards right away and i think that is definitely the way to go here. While this won’t allow us to do fancy scaling things with the number of encounters drawn this turn (unless using tokens to track or inviting memory issues), it does cut down on extra rules. And having encounters interrupt and mess up your turn is half the fun of them anyways!
Imani Zadine
So let’s just jump straight off the deep end and check out how this idea would look when transplanted into Arkham.
Imani Zadine – Investigator, “The Operator” Chosen. Cursed. Skills 3/3/3/3 5 health, 9 sanity <Reaction> when you play an asset: Reduce its resource cost by 3. After the asset enters play, draw the top card of the encounter deck. (Limit once per round.) Elder Sign: +2. Look at the top two cards of the encounter deck. Discard one of them. Deckbuilding: Mystic 0-5, Neutral 0-5, Charms 0-4
Word of Woe – Event, 2 cost Pact. Imani Zadine deck only. Fast. Play only during your turn, after resolving an encounter card. Resolve the <action> ability on an asset you control, ignoring all costs. Then, if Word of Weal is in your discard pile, you may shuffle Word of Weal back into your deck.
Word of Weal – Event, 0 cost Pact. Imani Zadine deck only. Fast. Play only during your turn, when performing a skill test on an encounter card. Add your willpower to your skill value for this test. Then, if Word of Woe is in your discard pile, you may shuffle Word of Woe back into your deck.
Starting with the big one, with the investigator that anchors much of the archetype and who is commonly cited as not being up for the task: Amina Zidane. What i did here is leaving as much of her intact as possible, while changing the core mechanic she revolves around from “doom to pay for stuff” to “encounters to pay for stuff”. This does require changing the signatures as well, so i did those too. The weakness needs changing too, but it’s not as simple to just port. That’d probably need to be designed from scratch… maybe something that has you draw an extra encounter card, but reduces your skills to 0 while resolving, then shuffles back into your deck? Anyways, you get the idea of what i am going for here in terms of design, details would need to be ironed out during development. I believe changing Amina’s investigator ability to what i propose here would already do a whole lot towards making it more feasible to actually engage with her fantasy of “Power, but at what price?”. It removes the heavy scaling with doom thresholds on the agenda and also with player count. Instead it provides a system that the player can interact and manipulate in a way that isn’t wildly swingy with factors beyond their control. At the same time, it does keep the theme of the investigator intact, you are constantly playing with fire here.
Charmed, I’m sure
An archetype doesn’t start and end with an investigator of course. Conveniently enough, this mechanic was seeded in the game all the way back in Core and Dunwich with Drawn to the Flame and Delve Too Deep, but we’d expect more than two cards to get our deckbuilding up to snuff. So in this hypothetical where Amina The Doom Investigator was instead released as Imani The Encounter Investigator we’d also have gotten some extra cards in the set to support her way of playing. Like, we’d have a cycle of Encounter Charms instead of Doom Charms.
Ceremonial Sickle(0) – Asset, 3 cost Item. Charm. Weapon. Melee. <action>: Fight. Either use your willpower or get +1 combat for this attack. When you initiate this ability, choose one – – Exhaust Ceremonial Sickle to get +1 skill value and deal +1 damage for this attack. Draw the top of the encounter deck. – If this attack defeats an enemy, look at the top two cards of the encounter deck. Discard one of them.
Ceremonial Sickle(4) – Asset, 3 cost, hand slot Item. Charm. Weapon. Melee. <action>: Fight. Either use your willpower or get +1 combat for this attack. When you initiate this ability, choose one – – Exhaust Ceremonial Sickle to get +3 skill value and deal +1 damage for this attack. Draw the top of the encounter deck. – If this attack defeats an enemy, look at the top three cards of the encounter deck. Discard two of them. Ready Ceremonial Sickle.
One could similarly “translate” the Dowsing Rod and Onyx Pentacle. You get the idea. This new version of the level 4 sickle is not quite what I’d call worth paying 4xp for, but it’s at least a lot more feasible to repeatedly use it now than what we got in TSK. I’d definitely call it a step in the right direction.
Further support
So we now have an investigator that anchors the archetype, a cycle of assets and a few events as additional enablers. How about some payoff cards that reward you for committing to the bit? Check this out:
Blood of Thoth – Asset, 2 cost, accessory slot Item. Relic. <Reaction> After you resolve an encounter card: Place 1 resource on Blood of Thoth, as an offering. <Fast trigger> If Blood of Thoth has 3 or more offerings on it, remove all offerings and exhaust it: Choose an investigator at your location to immediately gain an extra action as if it were their turn.
At a base rate, this gives an extra action every three turns from the regular encounter card drawn during Mythos, which is an unexciting (and probably bad) baseline but through braving extra encounter cards you can speed up the rate and get somewhere where this card starts being worth the accessory slot it takes up. There are two safeguards that stop it from being abused: The exhaust on spending the offerings and making it spend all offerings instead of just three so you can’t stockpile. And yes, i took the liberty here of removing the exhaust clause on the reaction.
Bottom line
Well, there you have it, a suggestion on how to “fix” doom play: Straight up replace it with encounter play. Honestly, this seems pretty neat seeing it all laid out like that. I might just fire up the Strange Eons card editor and put some more time into turning this thought experiment into a small set of properly done cards. Maybe even put Imani through a campaign if i really start feeling it.
What do you think? Is this something?
Would there be interest in having this available as a print&play?
Hey. So, some time around New Years, i marked the Unofficial Return to Dream-Eaters as “discontinued” in the navigation bar of this site. Honestly, i didn’t even expect anyone to notice. But since then i have gotten a couple of emails and there’s even been a reddit thread about it, so I figure I should do an actual post about this.
Yes, i am currently not working on the URtTDE anymore and I do not expect to start on it again.
It’s just not something that i am personally as interested in as i was in the URt Innsmouth, so the whole thing just keeps stalling out over and over. Instead of constantly having this project loom over my head as something i should do instead of other things that i am more excited about, i finally decided to just call it over to give me the peace of mind required to start new stuff. Like the small set of investigators i shared the other day.
Of course, i am not super happy about this myself. While I didn’t manage to get everything done, there are a few things in this half-finished set that i quite like and that i think are worth sharing. Examples are the reworked Thousand Shapes and the improved boss fights with Atlach-Nacha and Nyarlathothep. So I might at least bundle the changes to these three scenarios and the encounter replacements for a mini-patch to Dream-Eaters? Better than nothing, right? Maybe?
Since i am already standing on a soap-box now, i also want to apologize to coldtoes and Hauke here, both of which have poured a considerable amount of effort into this project as well. I hope we find an outlet for some of it, like the weakness location frames, somewhere else.
Talks about making a fan-made Return to Dream-Eaters pops up every now and then in various channel, so hopefully someone else that cares about that campaign more than I do will take up the mantle eventually. If they want to build on anything I have done, they are of course welcome to. But chances are that starting from scratch with own ideas and approaches (and maybe not as slavishly devoted to mimic the official product as i am) will be the better way. In any case, I’ll gladly share whatever source files i have (some pdfs and Strange Eons files, mostly) if there’s demand for it for such a project.
Again, my apologies for pulling the plug on something that quite a few people were interested in. But i felt like having a clean break there was necessary and ultimately preferable to just half-heartedly finish this thing and push out a set that i didn’t really enjoy myself.
Blood of Thoth, Lost Arcana and Scientific Studies Grant were previewed by Northern Lights over Arkham on their YouTube. Double Down and Gift of Nodens were previewed by Bradley Galbraith on his Youtube. Cosmic Revelation and Obscure were previewed by The Barnaby Files on their blog. Hand Hook and Bum’s Rush were previewed by Tatort Arkham on their Youtube.
Seeker
More handslots are difficult to come by. Arcane Enlightenment does exist, but getting an additional slot is worth the 2xp investment, even before we consider the different trait synergies. As with Enlightenment, it’s a bit of a drain that we need to find this in our deck first and then pay and play it before getting its effect. So we can’t depend on it, but as a way to raise the ceiling on what we can dump on the board, this is solid. Kate can put even more Science stuff into play if that’s what she wants to. Joe can hold flex investigation tools together with some guns. Daisy can hold some Mag Glasses here without having to cut down on Tomes. Lots of uses for this one. Three resources is a lot though, and unlike with for example Bandolier you can’t find it with a Backpack. Overall a fine card.
Cards for the support seeker? Will we actually see this archetype made real at some point? This seems pretty nice. Obviously it scales hard with player count, making it mostly undesirable in two player and near-useless in solo. Once you do hand out the bonus action to three or four players, this looks pretty fancy. Notably, this allows the players to play any card from their hand, which with many events allows them to take any sort of action out of the normal turn order. This can be quite potent, as Carson has demonstrated. Actually, Carson can even take this and double up on his ability that way. This gets compared to Ever Vigilant a lot, but there are some very notable differences here. It doesn’t save any money on the played cards, which makes it a lot worse for setting up boards in the first turns than EV would be. If you even get Revelation on your first turn… because the thing that always propped up EV was its interaction with Stick to the Plan. So those comparisons don’t really hold up too much weight in my opinion. EV is a card that accelerates you from zero to hero in the first or second turn. Revelation is a card that gives everyone some extra value in the mid to late game. I like this one, seems like a reasonably strong card that does something that i want Seeker to do more often: Interact with the other players instead of just sitting in a corner, testing Book vs Shroud all day. As someone who exclusively plays 2-handed solo, this card probably won’t do a whole lot for me, though.
Rogue
Ah, more sealing cards that Agatha can’t take. Excellent. Snark aside, this does have some promise. Getting to evade or fight Hunter enemies when they move into you is quite strong and since it’s not restricted to Non-Elites, this can do some really neat scenario-dependent things like keeping an Organist or a Beast in a Crimson Cowl in check. According to the ruling that was relayed in the article, any fight or evade action can be used here, so you could attack the hunter enemy with your British Bulldog or play a Slip Away to stop it from reaching you again. The combination with Dirty Fighting also looks promising. The one thing that stops me right now from really getting into this card is how it replaces the Fight and Evade values with the location shroud. That doesn’t have to be a good thing. Actually, in a deck where i would plan on playing the cards that work well with Obscure, i would expect to have an innately good combat or agility. So this will likely cause the card to have some moments where it doesn’t work properly because you’d just be evading at base 2 or something… Of course it could also end up being a good thing. It’s not Illicit, so it’s finally a card that could enable Preston to get some enemy handling done. We could use this to allow Wendy to fight small enemies that engage her. I mean… we probably won’t, but that’s not nothing, right :D The whole business of sealing the 0 token is slightly going to make the bag worse, but i wouldn’t expect it to be a huge factor tbh. Overall a card that doesn’t immediately jump into a deck, but i could see finding a use for it. Solid.
Reverse Cheap Shot? Sure, why not. I think this is actually a good bit better than Cheap Shot, because when i succeed without oversucceeding as well, i’d rather miss out on a point of damage than an evade. And then there’s the whole enemy movement thing as well. This does a good job of getting rid of an enemy. Even if they are a Hunter, this buys an okay amount of time to finish up whatever business you have on your current location. I wonder if we will get the upgraded version as well, like we have gotten for those other Trick events that return back to the hand. A self-recurring event that moves enemies out of the way could be pretty spicy. This is not going to be a huge game changer, but will definitely see a good amount of play in my decks. Which is exactly what i am asking of a level 0 card.
Mystic
Oh no, this is bloody awful D: This card has been reviewed in this article on the Rite of Seeking blog better than i ever could, so i will just refer you to that. Absolutely dreadful card, completely unplayable chaff. I am not exactly Amina’s foremost advocate, but even I believe she deserves better. This does as much to help Amina as Curse of Aeons does for Jim. Actually, this might be worse than Curse of Aeons… which is an accomplishment indeed. Let’s move on quickly. As this next card shows, Mystic does get some playable cards as well.
Charges are still so much harder to get than secrets, ammo or supplies. We did get Call the Beyond in the previous expansion and that is a super good card for a one-shot replenishment, but Lost Arcana gives a bit more of a long-term solution to the charge issues. Coming into play with 2 charges and (conservatively) expecting that you can gain 3 to 5 more over the course of the scenario (possibly more if you do clue drop shenanigans, but that might not be worth it just for Lost Arcana), you get a handful of charges that you can freely spend on spells and rituals. This works basically like the Cleaning Kit in Guardian, and like with the Cleaning Kit there are some tricks that are possible with Lost Arcana too. For example, you can replicate the Cleaning Kit/Ornate Bow interaction by using Lost Arcana with True Magick. This is a good card that can do some things that are hard to replicate otherwise in the card pool. Call the Beyond is really the only competition for what the Arcana does and i think it definitely has enough unique use cases for both cards to have their place alongside each other. Recharge is also a card that exists and that in a Blurse context is actually quite good, but notably Recharge can not replenish charges on a Ritual. And with Eldritch Tongue, Close the Circle and Bestow Resolve, there are at least a few worthwhile Ritual targets around.
Survivor
Being able to double dip on your Take Hearts and Resourcefuls alone justifies getting this card. This is a fairly outrageous value machine that draws fists full of cards with Relentless, Take Heart and Resourceful. Beyond that, turning cards into damage (Long Shot, Brute Force) or clues (Sharp Vision) seems quite strong too. One interesting thing to point out is that Stella’s signature skills have a survivor frame, so they too can be replayed with Gift of Nodens. Stella probably doesn’t need it and she already has a high XP card to lean on, but it’s an option. This card definitely is worth its cost in XP and sounds like a fun thing to do. Neatly, the skills it interacts with are themselves rather cheap to get so you can build around this fairly well. If you keep the rest of your deck cheap enough, you can even justify getting a second copy despite it being unique.
There’s the predictable third entry in the cycle started by Anchor Chain and Nautical Atlas. It’s basically exactly as expected… which isn’t a super great thing in this case to be honest. Exhausting on use is just a lot more painful on a weapon than it is on an investigation or evasion tool. Evading and getting a clue are also much more reasonable baselines for an activation than a 1 damage attack, so discarding cards into Hand Hook just gets it up to the point where it does what every weapon does. While Charts and Chain get something for discarding that goes beyond that. Now, Hand Hook certainly shouldn’t deal an extra damage, repeatable 3 damage per action simply shouldn’t be available at level 0. But the Hand Hook does appear to be missing something to make it desirable next to other Survivor weapons. It can be played like an event which is good and maybe the discard synergy can also get it ahead. Getting Improvised Weapon into the discard pile is definitely valuable and that’s something that Hand Hook can do without me needing to spend the 3 resources on it. Maybe that’s enough. It’s not a complete coaster, but this card lives in a very constrained niche.
Nuking a test for 3 resources can be quite valuable. The immediate things to do with it that come to mind are passing crucial willpower test as a rogue and oversuccess. It also acts as a near-cancel to many treacheries or just simply as a way to secure a clutch test. As long as you have the money to spare, this is a really nice piece of security to be able to fall back on. I’ve been a fan of the Defensive Stance cycle of cards for a long while, so paying XP for skills that give nothing but icons isn’t particularly bothersome to me. It solves problems, it helps winning, why wouldn’t that be worth paying XP for. A couple of the investigators on the list that can use it can also use Savant, but that still leaves the other half with a neat way to get troublesome tests out of your way. I mean, even Preston or Charlie gets to take a test at skill 8 with this committed. If you can use this for oversuccess, not just on any of the rogues, but also for example with Breach the Door on Nathaniel or Daniela, things look interesting too. Although for non-rogues the cost in resources is definitely more meaningful. Winifred will gladly pick up any skill that gives her wild icons to keep her motor running. Double Down is basically copy 2 and 3 of Wini’s signature, at that point you really can stop fearing any random treacheries gunning for your willpower. I like this well enough. 7 icons is a chunk more than the 3 or 4 that you usually get for 1XP… so i don’t think that level 2 is too much to ask either.
Yeah, we are doing shenanigans today. I want to start throwing some of the new cards into decks and see if we can make some magic happen. As you can probably tell by the image above, we are going to jump straight off the deep end.
I am going to warn you right from the start that this is one of those articles that i write while exploring the thing, so i don’t have any idea where it will end up. It’s entirely possible that the end result is that i came up with a heap of garbage. Hopefully we still have learned something along the way, though :D And hey, maybe it results in a banger of a deck, who knows!
Here’s the idea:
The concept
On Monday, this card was revealed to be in the upcoming Drowned City expansion:
Clearly a powerful card, Gift of Nodens allows us to double dip on impactful survivor skills. This is of course very valuable because some of those are really, really good. They are also varied enough to offer anything from damage over clues to cards. The most significant cost for that is spending two cards from hand, one to commit to the test, the other to discard. We will then end up with two cards committed to the test.
Two cards committed to the test? Hey, that’s Winifred’s thing! What a shame that Winifred can not take level 5 survivor cards… Or can she?
Patrice can not only play Gift of Nodens, but also Transfiguration which allows her to turn into Winifred midscenario! Genius! We expect Transfiguration decks to struggle a bit when they don’t draw their namesake card, but with Patrice’s innate draw power that should not be too much of a problem. Maybe? Hopefully? Surely! So yes, that’s what we are doing today. We are going to load up a Patrice deck with skills that we’d want to play in Winifred and build an absolutely absurd deck that draws hands upon hands of cards while doing disgusting things to the game. All without ever touching one of those icky seeker cards. Let’s go.
[EDIT: Actually, let me slip in a little note here. There is a bit of contention about how Sign of Nodens trigger exactly works. My interpretation of “When you commit skills to a skill test” is that it’s a reaction to the act of commiting skills. Another interpretation (that seems to be winning the popular vote) is that it refers to the point in the sequencing when you would commit skills. So in other words, it wouldn’t require a previous commit to trigger the one from the discard. My interpretation is the more pessimistic one, so either way the deck works just fine. But the deck idea may have sprung from a wrong interpretation of somewhat ambiguous rules text.]
Checking for viability: Skills
Any Winifred decks lives and dies by the selection of skills in it. I’ve written about my philosophy on how to pilot Winifred before (in my Winifred Primer) but the tl;dr on the matter is this:
We want to commit two cards to every single skill test we take, because that way we can tear through our deck, draw metric tons of cards and gain extra value with every little thing we do. This urge to always commit cards in pairs means that we need to curate skill icons in our deck, so we don’t look at a fight test with only agility and intellect icons in our hand. However, one of Winifred’s big strengths is that she can do everything, she’s the flex to end all flexes. So we wouldn’t necessarily want to specialize too much either. To make a long story short, we want wild icons on our skills because those can always be tossed into any skill test, allowing us to keep churning our hand and deck constantly.
Gift of Nodens is going to be incredibly helpful for this, as it allows us to toss any card from our hand and just commit whatever matching skill from the discard instead.
Throwing two cards into a skill test to draw a new one still means a net loss of a card, so Winifred uses some tricks to keep her engine running. Those tricks are skills like Opportunity, Daredevil or Manual Dexterity that either draw cards or return to hand. And also some support assets like Lucky Cigarette Case that add more draw power to her. Except for Manual Dexterity, not of these cards are going to be available for our Patrice deck, so we will need to find replacements. Luckily, there are some options as Survivor does indeed have some skills that draw cards or replace themselves.
Going through my box of player cards, here’s the skills i pulled out for level 0:
Unexpected Courage: If we want skills with wilds, this is the baseline. Pretty safe to assume that UC will make it into the deck. Guts, Manual Dexterity: We are going to eventually have a real decision to make about how we need to balance the deck between Patrice’s needs and Winifred’s wants. For now i will set both of these aside, at least at level 0 they will probably make the cut. Perception, Overpower: These don’t make the cut for me when i build a Wini deck, but i’ll keep them in mind at least if we need to fill up numbers. Promise of Power: This is just a slam dunk. There is no world where i don’t put a skill with 4 wilds into my Wini deck if I am able to. Resourceful: Replaces itself on a successful test, this is a powerful engine card that will serve to do the job of Opportunity or Daredevil for us. Once we have some XP in the deck i will aim to recur card draw like At a Crossroads with this to keep us fueled forever. Take Heart: Technically, this is a skill that draws cards. Now, the whole “failing a test” thing isn’t really one that fits Wini, but i think this still makes the deck. For one, it helps with resources and finding Transfig while still in Patrice’s body. And once we are Wini, we can at least treat this as an easy extra addition to a skill test to get our ability draw because it works as if it had a wild icon. Long Shot: Doesn’t add any icons, but it’s a relatively flexible commit that should be able to do some work. Potentially interesting to have available as a target for Gift of Nodens, too.
This list of skills looks a bit light on wild icons to me. Once we get XP into the list, the array of skills opens up enormously, but at level 0 this is actually kinda meh, aside from some big hits in Promise of Power and Resourceful. So i am going to add some wild icons through events, too.
A Glimmer of Hope: Great placeholder at the very least. Hopefully we won’t need to keep this in our deck forever, but as a way to get more wild icons into our 42 card deck, this is fantastic. Wrong Place, Right Time: The card is pretty bad for us, but i could see using this just for its icons(1 wild, 1 will, 1 agi). It’d get immediately replaced once XP is available, though. Deny Existence, Ward of Protection: Good cards and they have a wild icon. Seems good to me.
Where this whole deck idea really starts to take off is once we add some XP however. Here’s the list of interesting skills at level 1+: Brute Force and Sharp Vision: Clue and damage compression in a skill. Recurrable by Gift of Nodens. We can definitely make those work. Dauntless Spirit and Occult Theory: Willpower protection for Winifred that can also be used as a generic wild in a fight/investigation. Considerably worse than Savant, but might still work out in some number. Gumption: The actual upgrade to Unexpected Courage. We can even run this in addition to UC. Great combo with Winging It and Improvised Weapon, if we end up running those (i assume we will). Unrelenting: And there’s the card draw skill. We want this desperately. Persistence: As a skill that replaces itself, that’s going to be our Opportunity replacement.
[EDIT: Strength in Number actuall deserves a mention too. Considering that this deck will end up with a red/green investigator card and potentially plays a smattering of x/purple multi-class cards, it should be quite good.]
This looks like a long list of upgrades, but every single one of these skills is only 1xp each. So for just 10xp we are looking at adding full sets of Brute Force, Sharp Vision, Gumption, Unrelenting and Persistence to the deck. If we have another spare xp or two, we might even throw in a Dauntless Spirit or Occult Theory. So we can assume from this that the deck is going to start out relatively flat, but upgrade very very well once we have a scenario or two under our belt.
Grizzled: A self-recurring skill is just what Wini always wanted. It’s expensive and a bit campaign dependent, but we would at least get both copies of these for 5xp (assuming that we aren’t interested in it without the “Always Prepared” upgrade). I can see this happen after we got our essentials.
So where does this leave us? It seems to me like the selection of skills is not going to be a problem. At level 0, the offer by Mystic and Survivor is a bit meh, but we can prop it up with cards like Glimmer of Hope and some good events with wild icons to have enough for our purpose. And once we get some upgrades in, the deck should improve drastically.
If we get the rest of the deck together in a way that makes sense, that is.
Lucky Cigarette Case
After establishing our pool of skills, the next part i am interested in is the assets. Winifred uses Lucky Cigarette Case as an important part of her engine and we hope to find something similar in Patrice’s pool. Wini also enables her flexing capabilities with weapons and tools such as Thieves Kit or British Bulldog and again we’ll want to find analogues.
And this is where it’s starting to feel a bit less comfortable. Because LCC is really one of a kind and not simply replacable. Unless you want to lean on Drawing Thin, but that’s not a crutch that i want to use – the way i see it, that cards belongs on the Forbidden part of the taboo list. Crystal Pendulum can repeatedly draw, but that seems fringe at best. Madame Labrance can draw when we have nothing in hand, but that hopefully should never happen in the first place. Rabbit’s Foot and upgraded Grisly Totem go against everything i believe as a Wini player, failing tests. So we probably just have to make up for this in other ways. Scavenging could be a thing, but is of course limited to a specific type of test and requires something to recur. Notably, Rabbit’s Foot is an Item with a wild icon, so if we plan on doing Scavenging, that could become a one-off in the deck after all.
But chances are there’s just going to be a singleton Moonstone somewhere in the list to provide lip service to the accessory slot.
Resources
The other immediate thing that one misses when leaving the Rogue pool behind is the easy access to resources. Without Easy Mark, Watch This and Faustians in hand, 3 resources suddenly seem like a lot more than before.
I’ll probably play a pair of ECaches and Voices of Ra just so there is something in addition to the Take Hearts. But mostly that will mean keeping the curve of the deck low. Skills are our main focus and those are already free, but this means that in the assets we probably don’t want too many expensive plays. At least we will have Patrice’s violin! Luckily, Survivor assets are balanced around low income, but there’s still going to be concession to make.
Awww, man. No Sled Dogs? Not fair. We even would have Chance Encounter and Flare for them! Fine… i won’t force them into this one.
In terms of upgraded cards, let’s keep an eye on Hunting Jacket. Not a huge factor for us in how we can build the deck, but a copy or two can be a nice luxury upgrade down the road.
Dark Horse
We are talking about Survivors and having low income, so a quick word about Dark Horse is in order. Long story short, i don’t think that Fire Axe and Mariner’s Compass is the direction i want to go here. I could see this as a variant, but at least for now, i want to give other assets, including the new ones from Drowned City, the nod instead.
Enemy Handling
With the original Wini deck from my Primer article, i had a couple pistols, a big gun and some Backstabs to facilitate her fighting. Also, a copy of Disguise to lock down problematic enemies. Looking at the Survivor pool, the replacements seem obvious enough:
We have the .18 Derringer as a beautiful little pistol, we have TDC’s new Anchor Chain card as a Disguise replacement. Improvised Weapon is a good fighting event. It doesn’t have icons which sucks, but is a great discard to chuck with Gift of Nodens and of course has some Patrice synergy. As a reminder, we also have two fighting options in our skill sortiment, Brute Force and Long Shot. Is there going to be an Anchor Chain for fighting? If so, we might be interested in that. Mystics do add the Enchanted Blade to the pool and that’s a real consideration too. Like the pistol, it has the crucial +2 skill value at level 0, which allows Patrice to actually hit something if she has to.
But speaking of Patrice, these cards don’t help her all nearly as much as they do Wini. She can use the Derringer or EBlade at skill 4, which with a skill on top might be enough to kill a ghoul… maybe that’s enough to bridge the time till she gets to transform into Wini. Or maybe we want to add something like a spell asset or a pair of Razors? That whole balance between the two identities of our investigator will become a major issue when putting together the final deck, i suspect.
For Improvised Weapon, we can even use the upgraded version. The Derringer(2) is going to be an early upgrade too, we would much rather pay 2 resources for 3 ammo than the other way round. Hatchet might be an option as well, depending on the campaign. This leaves us without a replacement for the Beretta and Sled Dogs from the original Wini deck, but our resource situation probably stops us from looking at comparable heavy hitters in Patrice’s pool like the Chainsaw.
Seeking
When looking at investigation options, Survivor has a wealth of options. Cards like Look What I Found and Old Keyring aren’t really Wini’s style, but might be interesting as a filler for Patrice anyways. At least LWIF does have pretty great icons which would make its inclusion have a relatively low opportunity cost.
If we are trying to emulate the usual Wini lists though, we are just looking for replacements for Thieves Kit, Lockpicks and Pilfer and again that is easy enough. I want to try the new Nautical Charts for sure. For events we have Winging It (possibly level 2). Sharp Vision basically is a clue event too, except it gets all our skill synergies.
We should be able to get a good bit of flexing done with these cards. As with the fight options, we might need to find ways to not be dead weight before transforming, so LWIF will be getting a spot for sure. Am i concerned enough to run a Clairvoyance or Read the Signs? Eeh. Maybe. Probably not. Drawn to the Flame has okay icons, maybe that one?
Bridging between the two investigators
There’s a suite of assets that can help us with the problem that i mentioned for both fighting and seeking where those cards are usually good only for one of the two sides. Brand of Cthugha, Divination and Blur are 1xp spells that do not force the user to replace their usual skill with willpower. So Patrice could use a Divination with her willpower, while Wini would just use it with intellect.
This suite of cards seems very useful to us here to make the deck work better, as it gives us something to include for Patrice that won’t be dead weight once we become Winifred. Again, these do require an XP each however.
Card draw
As we’ve seen, there is no replacement for Lucky Cigarette Case in the accessories. However, not only do we have skills that draw cards to make up for it, but events as well. And Scroll of Secrets.
Scroll of Secrets is going to be really good in this deck. Not only is it a way to keep the cards flowing, it also interacts directly with Gift of Nodens. Gift of Nodens puts the recurred skill card under the deck where it’s supposedly out of reach for a long while. Well, Scroll of Secrets peels the card right from under your deck again… and if it’s something like an Unrelenting or Resourceful, then keeping your hand stocked shouldn’t be a problem even if you discard extra cards into Nautical Charts.
At a Crossroads is one of the better card draw events around and can easily be recurred with Resourceful. So that’s definitely making the cut too, joining the ever increasing pile of cards that cost 1xp to add to the deck.
We probably don’t have enough targets for Sacrifice? The ability to turn a spent Scroll of Secrets into cards or money sounds great, but it probably would need more targets. Maybe after we end up throwing Divinations and Brands of Cthughas in the deck? Let’s keep it in mind at least.
Taking stock
We did indeed find rough equivalents for the parts of a stock Winifred list in Patrice’s pool. It’s not exactly 1:1, but close enough that we can make something work. My main concern here is that we are going to go from a 30 card deck to a 42 card deck. So we will need more redundancies than before. The other concern is that most of the interesting cards are xp cards. Almost all of them are level 1, so not expensive to get at all. But our first two scenarios might look a little rough…
I suppose all that’s left to do is throw together a deck and see how it looks?
I meaaaan… that’s kind of almost a deck. Just find the one Transfiguration in your deck and you should make it through scenario 1 well enough!
Some choices and comments: – This looks like a lot of handslots to me at first glance. However, Anchor Chain and Nautical Charm also have modes where they can be played like an event and Scroll of Secrets is used up fairly quick. Add the 42 decksize to the picture and it should probably be fine! – Moonstone is there as just a way to hold the accessory slot warm. It’s +1 for Patrice’s and Wini’s best skill, so that seems like a fine addition. Not at all necessary though and it might turn out that the 3 resources are better spent elsewhere. – For example, you could spend them on a bunch of cats! Miss Doyle is here to help Patrice use some of those skills that have taken over her deck. She is also an insurance against Patrice’s weakness. I don’t really doubt that Wini could just evade the Watcher, but it’s nice to have automatic successes on tap for that as well. – Sparrow Mask again boosts both willpower and agility, something that can be useful in either form. – The number of skills seems low for a Wini deck, especially a 42 card one. But we can treat a lot of the events and extra assets as extra commits. – Speaking of commits… there are 12(!!!!) cards in this deck that don’t have an icon at all which is giving me eye twitches just looking at it. This is going to suck at level 0, but once the Gift of Nodens is in the deck, this is going to start to look a lot better. The Moonstone and the Improvised Events we plan on discarding to Gift or to Nautical Charts/Anchor Chain. Long Shot and Take Heart we just hope to work out in spite of not adding any skill value.
Now, obviously we want to get out of this state ASAP. That means some priority upgrades. My first priority would be the second Transfigure. Then a couple skills and probably a few of the spell assets that can be used with either the original stat or willpower. Then Gift of Nodens and the Derringers. Then the rest of the skills. Eventually, a second copy of Gift of Nodens and/or Grizzled.
What are we looking at here? 2xp for the Transfigure, 5xp for Gift of Nodens. 4xp for four cards out of Divination, Cthugha and Blur. 4xp for the pistols. 15xp for assorted skills and events. That’s 30 in total. Not so bad, that does indeed leave you room for luxury upgrades in many campaigns.
The deck at 10xp
The second Transfigure is now in the deck. I added one each of the spell assets to make being Patrice a bit more bearable. Between those and Doyle she should hopefully find something to do. Unrelenting went into the deck because it’s the most important engine skill next to Resourceful. Brute Force and Sharp Vision fill up the last three slots to further bolster our skill game. To make room for all of this, some cards have to lose their second copy as there are now new ways to find clues and fight enemies available. I cut both of the Mystic cancel events that i only included because they were the nicest wild icons around.
The deck at 20xp
Filling out the rest of the backbone. Gift of Nodens goes in, the Derringer gets upgraded. Brute Force gets its second copy. And two copies of At a Crossroads further help to keep the deck together. With all this added, i feel comfortable removing the Glimmers, hopefully the card draw should be enough now to keep the hand full even if we double commit cards left and right. Now that we are leaning more into skills than events, i also cut one of the ECaches.
The deck at 30xp
Second copy of Gift of Nodens just because i want to get to the point where i can double dip on my skills sooner. Second copy of the Derringer enables me to drop the EBlades. I add two Gumptions and a Persistence. To make room for that, i axe the Take Hearts and final ECache because at this point i feel like i need minimal setup to get me into Winifred skill mode for sure. Instead of the second Gift of Nodens, going for upgrades to Improvised Weapon or Winging It seems good too. Getting a copy of Scavenging(0) for 2xp could also be an option to add some extra quasi-draw on the top.
Well then!
Is this a good idea? A good deck? I have no idea to be honest. Seems fine to me, but i am sure that there will be moments where not drawing Transfig is going to suck as you are stuck with the weirdest and most awkward Patrice deck on the planet :D Is this better than just running Winifred? Haha, no. It may even have a slightly higher ceiling, but the danger of the deck misfiring is notable. But it’s different to a point where it doesn’t really matter which one is better. It’s a matter of me wanting to play this, so i will. Actually, am i going to play this? I think so. If “Transfigure into Winifred” is a suitable gameplan, then i can also think of a bunch of other cards that i would like to see in a Wini deck. Bestow Resolve, for example. Or Astronomical Atlas. Practice makes Perfect? Ancestral Knowledge? All of those together in a Lolafred? Or are these different decks? Plenty more to explore on this end for sure.
For what it’s worth, i am satisfied with the results here. I was fully ready to have this attempt at a weird deck fail spectacularly, but this worked out in the end. Yay \o/
After playtesting and considering heaps of feedback from everyone I got the set of five custom investigators to a point now where I can call them done. I have updated the TTS Workshop mod with all current cards and also have a print and play archive for you:
Oh right, the set also has a name now. After all, “Five Custom Investigators” won’t really do, right. I call these “Arkham’s Finest”, due to most of them having a wealthy or academic background.
[EDIT: Also, <HERE> are the Strange Eons files, in case you want to edit them yourself to tweak, translate, change images, whatever you like. You do of course need the Strange Eons editor to open them.]
There were a good amount of changes since the last time i’ve shown you these, so let me just go over all of them again from the top andpoint out what changed and why:
Benedict Hawthorne – The Heir
Benedict always had money all his life and he is accustomed to throwing it in all directions. Unlike many others in his position, he does however try to use his means to help others, an endeavor that is commendable, but also leads to a foreseeable end to his funds. In game, Benedict has maybe the best setup turns of any investigator. Starting with 20 resources in his pool allows him some ridiculous headstarts, from gearing up with heavy weapons to calling on powerful allies. But as the scenario continues, the fact that his investigator ability doesn’t actually give him additional money will catch up to him. His investigator ability only gave him early access to the money he’d get from upkeep over the course of the game anyways, so the early advantage can seriously peter out over time.
The Heir starts with Charitable Spirit in play, which allows him to share some of his wealth with his teammates and encourages early spending. While spending his cash on his own stuff, he also sets aside some extra resources for use by the team. Since he doesn’t get resources during upkeep, he will want to run some extra cards from the rogue class to give him more income. Be aware however that once his Social Obligations as an upper class person catch up to him, these will further cut into his potential to generate more funds.
Benedict has not seen much of a change since last time we looked at him. His elder sign got a bit more interesting, but otherwise I was very satisfied with him in my test games.
Evelyn Jordan – The Mentor
Evelyn, or “Evie” as she prefers, is even more of a team player than Benedict. Responsible for organization and oversight of expeditions led by the MU, Evie is well versed in keeping a crew of different backgrounds together and working as a unit. Any time one of her own card effects causes another player to draw a card or gain resources, she can increase the amount of resources or cards gained by one. There is no limitation per turn or round on this ability, so she can really get a lot out of all sorts of support cards. She does need to move one of her clues to the investigator who is to benefit from her however, which serves both as a cost to the ability, a motivation for Evie to also do some seeking on her own and as a situational benefit in some scenarios.
As one of the brains of the expedition, she also acts as a capable leader. Once her signature is in play, this gives her another way to support the group, adding movement benefits to the extra cash and cards she can spread across the team. All this leaves its toll eventually and Evie might need a timeout. Depending on how many people depend on her, Weight on Your Shoulders can even cause her to skip her turn completely. It is then that the team will have to take care of her for a change.
Evie got some major changes from when i initially showed her to last time, so there wasn’t much of a need to work on her more for today and she is unchanged since then.
Vivian De Ley – The Exile
Ostracized from her peers for asking too many uncomfortable questions, Vivian went from upper class party girl to self-sufficient survivor. She is able to use the remains of her fortune and her connections to get ahead in most situations, which in gameplay terms means that she can turn any card in her hand into a quasi-Lucky. Relying on this ability too much can quickly drain her resources and hand, but having a safety net for most everything that you do is a very calming thing indeed.
When influence and money don’t speak loud enough for her, Vivian can make use of arguments delivered through her handgun, the “Negotiator”. It’s a solid and unimpressive gun by itself, but when she uses it with her investigator ability, she finds that influencing others with a gun in her hand is a lot easier than without one. Bullets on the Negotiator can be spent for Vivian’s ability and whenever she spends at least one bullet on it, she doesn’t need to discard a card for the ability either. This gives her a way to lean heavier on this ability and also a non-standard reason to play ammo events like Swift Reload or maybe even Contraband. As a woman that relies heavily on her skills to get ahead, the Ostracized weakness hits her fairly hard. Reducing all skills by 1 can make it very difficult for her and forces her to spend extra resources and cards (or bullets) on counteracting it. The only way to get rid of the weakness is succeeding by 0, something she will likely even need to use her ability for… As the final insult, the weakness will even cause that test to fail after all.
Vivian changed significantly since last article. She was several times called out as the most powerful of the five investigators. Simultaneously, her signature was identified as underwhelming. The obvious solution was to move power from her investigator card to her signature. Instead of just conjuring Luckys out of thin air, she now has to discard cards from hand, basically transforming other cards into Lucky. But with the gun in play, she can go back to the initial supercharged design, where using her ability doesn’t impact her hand.
Gideon Lau Chi-Wai – The Ritualist
Gideon Lau Chi-Wai came to Miskatonic University on his quest to learn more about both the Mythos and about the traditional Daoist ways. As someone born in Boston’s Chinatown, he never had a proper way to learn about these traditions, so today he practices a unique blend of both Daoist rituals and whatever he can scrounge together from tomes and scrolls. This proved surprisingly successful, his patience and preparations allow him to achieve feats that were previously thought impossible. His ability allows him to discard a card to play another card with the same name. Not only will this not cost an action, it will also not cost any resources. And he will also draw a card afterwards. So while having to match cards in hand is a condition that does require some active preparation, the payoff for it is adequately high.
Utmost Diligence is the capstone to Gideon Lau’s potential. Many times it will just be discarded for its icons, but the two or three times you will actually play it per campaign will be very memorable. It acts as a limit breaker for Gideon’s ability, allowing him to “go off”, combo-ing cards to his hearts content until the end of his turn. Considering that each activation of the ability draws a card and that he can easily play more card draw or even match card drawing cards to play those for free… this can get quite excessive. Have fun with this one. Gideon Lau is a perfectionist, but as the saying goes, perfect is the enemy of good. If he spends too much time sitting around, crafting his hand and drawing cards, then his weakness will show up again and again to randomly replace cards in his hand with new ones. This will potentially break up existing card matches and waste several draws.
Easily the character i spent the most time on since last check-in with this project, Gideon Lau changed a lot. His old signature got axed, i realized that it was basically just a worse Thorough Inquiry. Instead he now has this limit breaking event that can do some truly outrageous things. The weakness got souped up to ditch 2 cards instead of just 1, but also got a safeguard to only reshuffle when there are at least 5 more cards in the deck. On the investigator himself i slightly reduced the Elder Sign in power, in my test games it proved just a bit too powerful whenever it happened. Well, and i also changed the whole flavor and background of Gideon to bring something more interesting to this character than “guy in a suit reads a book”.
Mara – The Wildling
Mara is a woman of unknown heritage that mostly spends her time away from cities or even villages. Either through delusion or genuine encounter with something paranormal, she believes herself to be a servant of the wood’s guardian spirits. What can not be denied is that she is indeed in tune with the circle of life and that she has a way of making nature provide for her. Mara is basically the gimmick investigator of the set. She doesn’t use a discard pile like other investigators and instead cycles cards through a unique permanent either to the bottom of her deck or shuffles them near the top. While she is not able to pick and choose exactly which card she draws when, she is able to heavily influence which cards she is going to see more often than others.
Her permanent signature, The Circle of Life, mostly acts as a place for the cards to go before they are sent back to the deck by Mara at the start of her turn. It does offer the ability to remove cards under it from the game completely, but don’t overdo it. Should her deck ever be empty, she is immediately defeated. As one would expect, her weakness messes with her ability to curate the top of her deck. Should Mara ever draw a card while the Spirits are still upset with her, she has to shuffle her deck and put the Spirits right on top of the deck again. So she (or a teammate) better deals with this problem before the upkeep phase comes.
For her, the only thing i reviewed this time was the timing points of different parts of her kit. The weakness changed accordingly, to make the pieces fit together better.
Moving forward
I consider the design of these investigators finished now. So if you want to send these off to a printer, you probably don’t need to fear that there’s another version that is wildly different next week again. That being said, if there’s major typos or issues i might collect those and put out one more version to fix those. I’d prefer not to, though.
If you end up trying any of these in your own games, i’d be happy to hear about it!
One year ago, on January 1st 2024, i published a Comprehensive Investigator Power Ranking. That was a truly massive article that honestly probably should have been a series of like 5 articles or something. Opinions were uttered, statements were made. Some of them more controversial than others. In any case, i have been thinking about doing this whole massive thing again… but i don’t think that’s quite warranted. Similarly, half a year ago, I did a ranking by enjoyment. Not quite as overblown of an article as the other one, but still rather huge. Same deal there… i do like the idea of doing this again, but not in full. So what I will do instead is go over the pool of investigators, consider their 2024 rankings in both of last year’s tierlists. And if there is no change or much to talk about, i’ll just quickly move on so I can spend some more time on the parts that are actually interesting. Like, giving my takes on the new investigators from Drowned City which i will do after i went over the investigators that already were on the list last year.
I’ll be referring to my arguments in those previous two articles a lot instead of repeating them here, so feel free to open both in another browser tab for reference. Also, check out the ranks and their criteria in those previous articles as i will just keep using them here.
Oh right, and i won’t be doing the whole Tiermaker.com thing this time around, that was a huge pain to edit into the article for just some visual distraction. I’ll leave that sort of visualization to the Youtubers. While that makes the article less sexy visually, it does shave two hours off of the time i spend doing this, so it just is what it is. Maybe next year i will do the whole thing from the top instead of an update and go the extra mile again. This year you’ll have to be content with just some red and green text color on the ranks that changed compared to last year.
[EDIT: Oops, i forgot about Parallel Jenny. I’ll edit her in later. EDIT#2: Done.]
Anways, with that we are off to Guardian. Roland, you’re first.
Guardian
Roland Banks: B // A Previously ranked at B for power and A for enjoyment. Nothing new on this front, moving on. I played the parallel Roland once, but otherwise i haven’t checked in on him all year.
Zoey Samaras: A // A+ Previously ranked at A+ for power and S for enjoyment. I think i was a bit high on Zoey last year. Ranking her in power right next to heavy weights like Daniela, Agnes or Nathaniel was blatant favoritism for one of my darlings. Speaking of darlings, she earned her S for enjoyment last year pretty much completely on the back of the fact that her deckbuilding and resource advantage enable a great deal of strategies for her. I very much enjoy building decks for her, but that’s of course only one half of the equation and during the game she doesn’t really scream S-tier to me. I’ll put her down a notch on both rankings, but make no mistake, Zoey is still amazing.
Mark Harrigan: S // B+ Previously ranked at S for power and B+ for enjoyment. Yep, that checks out.
Leo Anderson:A+ // A+ Previously ranked at A for power and A for enjoyment. In my 2024 power ranking i said this: “I wavered a lot between awarding Leo the A+ instead of the A, but decided to use the distinction here to put a space between him and Zoey who i believe is just more straightforward and direct.” I am flipping the script on this and will be ranking up Leo while ranking down Zoey. Leo gets more and more great toys, his offclass access gives him more and more powerful stuff. Drowned City will give him even more. I still view him more as “The Firearm Guy” instead of “The Ally guy” but that’s fine. He simply is front of my mind when building decks very often.
Carolyn Fern: B+ // B Previously ranked at B+ for power and B for enjoyment. Sure, that seems fine. I still didn’t revisit her at all and also didn’t feel like wanting to. Maybe that’s a sign that i should drop her down to C in the enjoyment ranking, but i’ll let her coast by this once.
Tommy Muldoon: A // A+ Previously ranked at A for power and A+ for enjoyment. I like this guy. Unchanged.
Sister Mary:D // D Previously ranked at C for power and D for enjoyment. I think it’s time to acknowledge that every other bless focused investigator does her thing better, with better abilities and cardpools. Hell, there are non-bless investigators like Tommy that do Bless decks better than her. Down to D.
Lily Chen: A // A Previously ranked at A for power and A for enjoyment. Lily is constantly just a little bit away from me wanting to give her the A+ in enjoyment. The thing that is missing is mostly something more compelling to put into her level 0 deck. Level 0 Mystic is just so awkward for her and i am never really happy with anything i put together there. Still, i like her and i like her unique journey over the course of a campaign. No changes.
Carson Sinclair:B // D Previously Unranked for power, with a D for enjoyment. Oh no. I forgot about this when i started this article. I weaseled myself out of giving ranks for Carson and Amina last time, but i suppose i have to cough up my take now, huh. Fine. I despise this one and how he somehow communicates that playing support means letting other people play instead of you. There are so many more interesting and interactive ways of supporting other players that still let you play your own game, too. He gives an action and thus i won’t be able to justify putting him below an upper B for power, no matter how much i want to.
Wilson Richards:B // C Previously ranked at a speculative B+ for power and C for enjoyment. He’s fine. I like that he does a solid job of being a seeker in the Guardian class. Kind of one-dimensional though and after doing his thing once or twice, i find myself less compelled to do it again. I ranked him at a speculative B+ last year (he wasn’t released yet) and i’ll slightly notch that down to a B. He’s just fine, nothing more, nothing less.
Nathaniel Cho: A+ // A Previously ranked at A+ for power and A for enjoyment. Similarly one-dimensional, but unlike Wilson he packs a punch. Literally. His gameplay is also more dynamic and fun to execute than Wilson’s which is enough to let him stick around in the upper tiers. Unchanged.
Parallel Roland Banks:A // A Previously Unranked for power, with a speculative A for enjoyment. Over the course of the last year, i actually got to play this dude. Not for a full campaign, because Darkham kicked my ass… But enough to get a better understanding of him. He’s good. Better than base Roland, i think. The Directives are powerful and not that difficult to work around, giving him a more consistent payoff than base Roland’s reliance on an enemy to get his free clue (at least in 2p). I liked it. Probably not going to play him too often anyways, but that’s mostly anti-parallel bias on my end.
Parallel Zoey:(A?) // (B?) Previously unranked for power, with a speculative B for enjoyment. Still didn’t play her, Kohaku has given me an outlet for all the bless and curse shenanigans i could wish for. I think my reasoning for a speculative A on the power scale still checks out, so i’ll just keep these rankings unchanged.
Seeker
Daisy Walker: S // A+ Previously ranked at S for power and A+ for enjoyment. God, i love Daisy. Unchanged.
Rex Murphy: A+ // B+ Previously ranked at A+ for power and B+ for enjoyment. I got some snark for not putting him in S like the tradition commands, but I stand by this one. Actually i even feel like i am being a bit generous towards Rex here by squeezing him in at the lower ranks of A+. At the end of the day, a clue is nothing special for a Seeker, we all assume that we can pick those up for an action anyways. Considering that Rex also has to put some effort into getting to the point where he oversucceeds consistently, his investigator ability is outpaced by several others that give something close to an action. With how many “card for a clue” cards are out there these days, you can even argue that the Seekers that gain an extra card per turn can outpace or at least match Rex if they want. On the enjoyment side, a big part of his draw for me is that he can play green cards. Now that we are getting the official 5-2 Seeker-rogue in the next set, that will likely eat into his appeal for me. Unchanged for now, though.
Minh Thi Phan: A+ // C Previously ranked at A+ for power and C for enjoyment. I am not sure i have even thought about this investigator once during the last year. Unchanged.
Ursula Downs: C // C Previously ranked at C for power and B for enjoyment. The space for investigators that gain clues and evade enemies is getting crowded and Uschi just isn’t on the same level as the rest of them. Lucius is yet another one that is out for her lunch money and she barely has any left in the first place.
Joe Diamond: B+ // S Previously ranked at B+ for power and S for enjoyment. No changes here. Love this guy. Played him with Tony through a Return to TFA run which was a riot. Watching two investigators get bullied by the encounter deck nonstop never gets old.
Mandy Thompson: A+ // B Previously ranked at A+ for power and B for enjoyment. Another one i may not have thought about all year. Sure, seems fine.
Amanda Sharpe: A // B+ Previously ranked at A for power and B+ for enjoyment. This is a ranking that i have gotten some side eye for, as Amanda is often considered to be one of the best investigators in the game. And while i do agree that her highs are really high, i think she is definitely kept back by the times when she sets herself up. It’s all hills and valleys with her. The turns where she draws six cards or picks up six clues off the back of Perceptions and Deductions are super impressive, but when you average them out with the turns where she walks around as a 2/2/2/2 with some random card tucked under her that gives her a will icon or something, then it starts looking a lot more fair. Fwiw, i put her on the higher end of A, but i don’t think she’s an A+ or even an S.
Monterey Jack: A // A Previously ranked at A for power and A for enjoyment. Hangs in a similarly crowded space as Ursula does. His yellow/green card access that was able to stand in for the missing Seeker-rogue was a major selling point for me, too. I suspect that Lucius is going to push Jack down a tier next year, but for now i will let him stay unchanged.
Vincent Lee: B+ // B Previously ranked at B+ for power and B for enjoyment. Sure. No new thoughts on this one.
Kate Winthrop: A // B+ Previously ranked at speculative A for power and a C for enjoyment. Pretty neat. A unique twist on the evadey seeker, with solid hooks into other Seeker archetypes as well. I liked my campaign with her well enough and since then i pulled her investigator cards out several times during deckbuilding as a consideration. I also want to take a second here to apologize for my absolutely unhinged reading of her during the power rankings, i have no idea what sort of short circuit i was having in my brain when i penned that deranged rambling passage.
Harvey Walters: A+ // C Previously ranked at A+ for power and C for enjoyment. Boring, but powerful. No changes. Really the only reason i don’t give him the S for the power rankings is because i don’t want him on a level with Daisy who is just superior in almost every way.
Parallel Daisy: C // D Previously ranked at C for power and D for enjoyment. Oh right, that one exists. Still not sure why.
Parallel Rex:(A?) // (A?) Previously unranked for power, with a speculative A for enjoyment. I didn’t get around to play him yet, but his gimmick still reads interesting to me. Cluedrop is a powerful archetype, he gets to cheat at that… i think that’s enough to give him a speculative A for power? Sure, seems fine.
Rogue
Skids O’Toole:B // A Previously ranked at D for power and A for enjoyment. Now, this guy here. There is a distinct difference between pre-Hemlock and post-Hemlock Skids. The previous rankings actually reflect that. The power rankings were done before i got to play Skids with today’s card pool. The enjoyment ranking reflects how pleased i was playing him now. I have spent a considerable amount of time building for and playing with Skids this year, more than in the four years before together. The enjoyment ranking stays, but I am shooting him in the power rankings all the way up from D to B. I have absolutely no reservations putting him next to or even a bit ahead of Roland.
Jenny Barnes: C // C Previously ranked at C for power and C for enjoyment. She’s certainly not moving up. And i don’t think i feel about her strongly enough to rank her down to D. Fine, unchanged.
Sefina Russeau: B // S Previously ranked at B for power and S for enjoyment. Will Transfiguration be good enough for her to elevate her a tier in the power rankings next year? We’ll see next year, i guess. This year nothing has changed. She’s still solid but not super good and she’s still an absolute delight.
Finn Edwards: A // B+ Previously ranked at A for power and B+ for enjoyment. Honestly, i didn’t really think much about him this year. Kate and Alessandra have sort of filled his role when i was looking for it. And Skids. So much Skids gaming this year Oo No changes.
Preston Fairmont: B+ // A+ Previously ranked at B+ for power and A+ for enjoyment. No notes on Preston this year.
Tony Morgan: S // A+ Previously ranked at S for power and A+ for enjoyment. Is it weird that Skids is starting to see play for me for things that i would have done with Tony before? It’s not enough for me give Tony a full rank down to A in the enjoyment rankings, however. No changes.
Trish Scarborough: A+ // B+ Previously ranked at A+ for power and B+ for enjoyment. I am afraid Alessandra ate her lunch this year because she was the hot new thing. With Lucius coming up this may be another rough year for Trish coming up, too. Unchanged for now.
Bob Jenkins: A // A Previously ranked at A for power and A for enjoyment. I cannot wait for pulling out the Gatling Gun with Bob. It’s going to be glorious. Over the course of the previous year, i considered him during deckbuilding a few times, but he didn’t see actual play. Fair enough. Unchanged.
Kymani Jones: B // C Previously ranked at B for power and C for enjoyment. I am having troubles coming up with situations where I’d want to play them. Maybe Nose to the Grindstone will help, but tbh i doubt it. No changes.
Alessandra Zorzi:A+ // A+ Previously ranked at a speculative A for power, with A+ for enjoyment. I think she deserves that A+ in power, that extra action does a lot of work. And since she can play a decent amount of good Parley in her deck, she isn’t even depending on the campaign for that. Trish probably edges her out in power just a bit, but she is a lot more interesting to play and build decks for in my opinion.
Winifred Habbamock: S // S Previously ranked at S for power and S for enjoyment. I do not have a S+ tier and until i do there will be no changes with Winifred.
Parallel Skids: B+ // B+ Previously ranked at a speculative B+ for power and another speculative B+ for enjoyment. Another previously unplayed Parallel investigator that i managed to finally give a play this year. The B+ in both lists seem right to me. He was fine, but i didn’t particularly enjoy him. He was solidly capable, but not really in a way that made him stick out to me.
Parallel Monterey:(B+?) // (B+?) Previously unranked for power, with a speculative B+ for enjoyment. Didn’t get around to this one. To come up with a speculative power ranking for him, i’d say that his ability is quite a bit worse than the consistent income of cash and cards of his canon version which i rated at A. Soo… let’s just call this a B+?
Mystic
Agnes Baker: A+ // A Previously ranked at A+ for power and A for enjoyment. This seems right to me. No changes.
Jim Culver: D // D Previously ranked at D for power and D for enjoyment. *shrug* No changes.
Akachi Onyele: A // A Previously ranked at A for power and A for enjoyment. The problem with these investigators that are basically centered on a stale part of the card pool (the spell assets) is that it would take one remarkable shake-up in the card pool for me to re-evaluate them. Unchanged.
Father Mateo: C // D Previously ranked at C for power and D for enjoyment. For now unchanged, but there is some potentially game changing stuff for him on the card spoiler for Drowned City right now. I am as tickled by the thought of using his 5XP to buy Memories of Another Life to fix his card access as i am by the one of changing him to another investigator once i used his autofail negation with Transfiguration. This year, no changes though.
Diana Stanley: B+ // A Previously ranked at B+ for power and A+ for enjoyment. I didn’t play her in a while and also didn’t seriously consider it all year. I feel like that’d be a requirement to hold that A+ enjoyment tier. Down to the top of A with her for now.
Marie Lambeau:A // A Previously ranked at A+ for power and A for enjoyment. I think i slightly overvalued her last year, which i also confirmed by playing her through a campaign. She is great when she gets to do her thing, that free action is really nice. But some scenarios simply do not allow for doom play and that leaves you a bit behind other mystics. I want to knock her down just a bit from the low A+ i gave her to a high A.
Luke Robinson: A+ // A Previously ranked at A+ for power and A for enjoyment. Checks out. Unchanged.
Dexter Drake:A+ // A+ Previously ranked at A for power and A+ for enjoyment. Dexter was robbed last year when i only put him in A. Granted, it was the top spot of A, but still. The man deserves his A+, he has so many shenanigans in addition to the usual just raw power of mystics with 5 will.
Norman Withers: A+ // A+ Previously ranked at A+ for power and A+ for enjoyment. Unchanged. Just a really excellent investigator.
Amina Zidane: D // D Previously ranked at a speculative D for power and D for enjoyment. Amina has one really amazing trick and that is using her ability in the first two turns to set up with 11 resources at her disposal (12 if you count the one from the first upkeep). Beyond that it looks rather grim, but that one trick is good enough that i am tempted to lift her up to C just on the back of that. Sadly her combination of bad statline with bad deckbuilding prevents her from doing anything nice with that fantastic setup though. Any tempo you win there you have to spend on making up for her shortcomings on other ends. Add on top that some scenarios simply don’t afford you the luxury of adding doom yourself and it all just doesn’t come together.
Kohaku Narukami: A // S Previously ranked at a speculative A for power and a definite S for enjoyment. There’s an argument to be made for A+ power on him for all the shenanigans he can get up to, but i think he’s fine in A. He requires his ramp up time and assembly to get going and often hinges on some key assets that he’ll have to find.
Gloria Goldberg: S // D Previously ranked at S for power and D for enjoyment. Her canon version hasn’t been released yet, so no changes here. I doubt that the new version is going to impact my views on her next year, though.
Jacqueline Fine: A // C Previously ranked at A for power and C for enjoyment. No changes, i barely think about this investigator.
Parallel Agnes: S // A+ Previously ranked at S for power and A+ for enjoyment. The only parallel investigator where i wish it was a canon character. Such a good design. No changes, she rocks.
Parallel Jim:B+ // C Previously ranked at a speculative B for power and B+ for enjoyment. Gave him a short spin, too. Not a full campaign, but three scenarios just to see how he works. I had the impression that he was quite powerful. I estimated him at a B last year just from reading him, but both the charge replenishment and the spirit gimmick are significant sources of value that prop up the rest of him. I am not ready to accept him in the same rank as Akachi or Jaqueline, so B+ it is. As with many parallels, the sheer mess of his design takes away a lot of my enjoyment here. It’s all so unfocused and mashed together. I didn’t have an awful time, but i also have no desire to play him again soon. Low C.
Survivor
Wendy Adams: A // A+ Previously ranked at A for power and A+ for enjoyment. No changes.
Ashcan Pete: A // B+ Previously ranked at A for power and B+ for enjoyment. That seems right to me. No notes.
William Yorrick: A+ // S Previously ranked at A+ for power and S for enjoyment. Again, this looks good. He’s a beast.
Calvin Wright: C // D Previously ranked at C for power and D for enjoyment. Didn’t think about this guy all year except when musing about Hank stealing most of his reasons to exist.
Rita Young:A // A+ Previously ranked at B for power and A for enjoyment. Let’s just give her that A. Why not. Make her skip over B+ and right up there. She has been doing nothing but winning for the last years, with one significant card after the next that seemed tailor made to turn her into a fighter-evader powerhouse. She has no business being down there on a level with Kymani who wishes they were as good at their job as Rita is. And you know what else, i’ll also rank her up from A to A+ for enjoyment. She has been a blast to play and i actually put her through two campaigns this year because of that.
Patrice Hathaway:C // A Previously ranked at D for power and A for enjoyment. There were a lot of contentious takes in my 2024 article and i got plenty of feedback on many of them, but nothing generated as many outcries as the D for Patrice. So i ended up playing her again of course. And sure, the D was probably a bit much. That being said, she depends a lot on some specific cards to do well and is prone enough to stalling out a bit that a C is really all i can justify here. I very much do enjoy the Erestor playstyle still though.
Silas Marsh: B+ // C Previously ranked at B+ for power and C for enjoyment. This is another one that didn’t appear on my radar all year.
Daniela Reyes: A+ // A Previously ranked at A+ for power and A for enjoyment. One of the best fighters in the game, this checks out. No notes.
Darrell Simmons: S // D Previously ranked at S for power and D for enjoyment. I do not care about Darrell. No changes.
Hank Samson: A // D Previously ranked a speculative A for power and a C for enjoyment. After playing him, i think my initial estimation was correct. That being said, he’s a 5 fight with little else attached. I don’t see much of a reason for him to be around when Daniela exists.
Stella Clark: A+ // B+ Previously ranked at A+ for power and B+ for enjoyment. Didn’t revisit her, but at least considered it. Still, no changes.
Parallel Wendy: (???) // D Previously unranked for power, with a D for enjoyment. Completely uninterested in this heap of unconnected sentences that somehow make up an investigator. I am not even going to do a speculative power ranking here.
Parallel Ashcan: B // A Previously ranked at a speculative B for power and A for enjoyment. Didn’t get around to playing this one, so I’ll stick to last year’s speculation.
Neutral
Lola Hayes: C // B Previously ranked at C for power and B for enjoyment. No Lola for me this year, but the amount of shenanigans that one can do with Transfiguration already has me giddy. I predict some Lola decks this year. I mean, how can i not play Lolafred Habbamayes at least once this year? Until then, unchanged.
Charlie Kane: A // S Previously ranked at A for power and S for enjoyment. Yep, Charlie is still a blast to play. No changes.
Subject 5U-21:B+ // C Previously ranked at a speculative A for power and C for enjoyment. I tried this for a full campaign, didn’t care for it. Too unfocused, too big of a deck to do the interesting things and just kinda didn’t deliver anything for me that’d justify all the gimmickry. I liked the gameplay around the waxing and waning statline, but it wasn’t enough for me to want to return to playing the slime lady.
New entries!
That was all of the investigators mentioned in the ’24 rankings, but we have of course gotten some fresh blood since then. Actually it’s not that many, but we did get a new parallel investigator and of course i want to take a first look at the investigators of The Drowned City, now that we know all of them. For that, i will be switching back to the full evaluation format that i used in the Comprehensive Power Rankings and the Enjoyment Rankings. These rankings are all speculative, i have not played any of these characters yet.
[EDIT: I forgot all about Parallel Jenny initially. Foreshadowing? Anyways, here she is now.]
Parallel Jenny: B // B Statline and Soak: Same as regular Jenny, so decidedly meh. Investigator ability: Leo’s ability, but for Talents instead of allies. Kinda weird, Talent doesn’t really strike me as a build-around trait, but if that’s what you got going on then the ability isn’t bad. It’s hard to argue against a free action and a buck, after all. She also gets to throw away Talents for money when she doesn’t need them anymore. That’s fine but not super useful, i would think that i’d plan on keeping my Talents around. You can play a talent for 1 cheaper, then chuck it for its full price, netting you a resource. But that’s just “Jenny with extra steps”, which is an awkward position to be in when you are a Jenny yourself. Signature and Weakness: Without the steady extra income that her canon version has, the Twin Pistols are a bit out of place. At the same time, her new abilities don’t help her a lot with mitigating her notoriously awful weakness. Card access: This is where Parallel Jenny gets most of her juice. There are some neat Talents outside of Rogue available. Some of them help with movement, like Safeguard and Pathfinder. She might even go for some Scavenging. Most of them do of course hand out skill boosts of all kinds and the tri-class Talents allow her to specialize in whatever trait she wants. Is all of that better than level 0 of all classes? I’d call it about equal. Some real power available here, but more boxed into her specific gimmick.
The thing i will say about parallel Jenny is that she at least doesn’t get obsoleted by the many other investigators that also gain money as their gimmick. And if you really find a reason to go all in on that Talent trait, then her investigator ability does give you some decent returns. For that, i feel comfortable in raising her in rank into B on both sides. I still don’t find her particularly powerful or exciting, Talent as a trait is riddled with redundancies (many cards that effectively do the same thing, so getting access to all of them doesn’t matter too much) and lack of internal synergy so you don’t get much here that really rewards you in a way that stands out.
Parallel Mateo: A // C Statline and Soak: Same as the real version’s. Typical Mystic soak, but a rather flat spread of stats. He is more capable of making this work than his mainline version thanks to being able to count on the +2 from blesses. Investigator ability: He can use investigators at his location, including himself of course, as batteries for Bless tokens and conjure those at will back from them. That makes any sort of bless interaction from assets or events incredibly consistent, almost completely removing the random element out of it. This is very strong of course. Even at a worst case, the innate +2 of a bless token can bolster his tests and let him succeed at a staggering amount of things that would leave regular Mateo scrambling for answers. In exchange for having a proper investigator ability now, he gives up that build-around of an Elder Sign, but that’s a very good trade. Signature and Weakness: These both care about sealing the Elder Sign, something that Parallel Mateo cares a lot less about than regular one. This simultanously makes his signature easier to play and his weakness even less relevant. I don’t think either really matters much in the big picture, though. Card access: Clips off the top end of Mystic, but gives him the unrestricted access to Bless he should have had from the start. A much better card pool, but you do pay for it by losing out on the 5XP headstart that Mateo gets in the sacred timeline.
Getting to run all Blessed cards and getting to profit off of their triggers with near-perfect consistency is incredibly powerful. Most notably, the red Covenant is pretty much broken by him and lets him just pass tests at will and actually works his flat statline in his favor. Other investigators get to do similar things, but Parallel Mateo does it by combining an investigator ability with a low XP permanent. So it’s online from turn 1, action 1, no setup required aside from tossing a bless into the bag. Doesn’t even need to be a lot of them, just one is enough because the ability does even return that bless to the bag. I’ve not played him myself yet, but i’d put him into high A, possibly low A+ for power. Do i see him on a tier with Luke and Agnes? Eeeeh. Let’s got with an A for now. I also feel like even if he were to get A+, that’d be mostly a ranking for the Covenant and not actually for the investigator. On the enjoyment side, there’s not much here for me to care about if i am honest. He’s a Bless investigator. And while there’s nothing wrong with that, there’s like a dozen of those now. I’m over it. C.
Marion Tavares: A // S Statline andSoak: Very flat stats. Notably the first non-Carson Guardian with bad willpower, which is a dangerous combination with her 6 sanity. We are in Skids territory here. Investigator ability: Very good. The potential payoff of a card and an action every turn is fantastic and well worth losing a handslot for. It requires building your deck a certain way, but that’s something we can handle. Signature: Her two skill cards do help with her flat stats a lot. These are quite good, i think. Weakness: This eats up a lot of draws when you get rid of it. This is a scary weakness that you can not ignore because that horror is going to eat you up otherwise. Thankfully her ability generates so much momentum that this should be fine to just take on the chin. Drawing it very early could be an issue because it could just make you fizzle out on the crucial first turns and prevent you from gaining the momentum you’d need to just plow past it later on. Card access: Bit of a weird one. Guardian 0-5 plus a choice of either Improvised, Fortune or Gambit 0-2. And Survivor level 0. Notably that Survivor access is not restricted to Events and Skills as it so often is on other investigators. That all sounds good to me, each of the traits has some spicy stuff to add to the mix.
She’s Winifred for events. How can i not absolutely adore this investigator? I’ll just throw that S for enjoyment up there without further justification beyond that. On the power side, she doesn’t remotely reach Winifred of course. She’s still doing ultimately very fair things, but she does it while picking up a lot of raw value from her investigator ability. She’ll be able to put out some high impact turns and won’t even need a whole lot of time to reload for the next one. I see her as a low A for now, but i could see her move up if it turns out that she can indeed get that bonus every turn. An A+ is not impossible in the future, but let’s approach this more cautiously and not get tangled up in hype and hope.
Lucius Galloway: A // B+ Statline andSoak: His statline is very optimized towards both of his classes. His 8/6 distribution for health and sanity is a bit unusual. Like Marion, he is 2 willpower with 6 sanity which needs some attention. Investigator ability: Not bad, not great. Sort of like Roland, except that Lucius likely has an easier time picking up that clue without the ability anyways. Not really much to write home about, but a few extra clues never hurt anyone of course. Signature: This thing is really good, right? Getting +1 to a test each turn (provided you find a clue each turn, which is not a huge barrier) is great and if you manage to turn a fail by 1 into a success by 0 this way, you even get to draw a card. Takes no slot either. Just a really good card that also interacts with a couple Seeker and Rogue archetypes. Weakness: We already established horror as a potential weakpoint for Lucius and this applies additional pressure in exactly that spot. You probably don’t want to just stop discovering clues, so you will need to find a way to heal or soak. Even then, this reshuffles to eat further draws. Yuck. Card access: Seeker with subclass Rogue is obviously a strong combination. There are some that are stronger, but there’s no doubt that Lucius can build some disgustingly powerful stuff from that pool.
A rather generic package overall, which should make it easy-ish to find references in the existing pool of investigators to give Lucius a first appraisal. I already compared his investigator ability to Roland’s. But the first thing that crosses my mind here is how he compares to his Rogue-seeker counterpart, Trish. She plays a very similar clue/evasion game with a similar card pool, after all. I don’t think Lucius reaches Trish. Her automatic successes from her investigator ability that can be channeled into either clues or evades are just on a different level than Lucius’ more limited “when you oversucceed” clue. Five agility and a cool signature do make a difference, but not enough to catch up to her in that department. I think I’ll put him in A for now, together with Finn and the cheese man. For enjoyment… i don’t know. B? Maybe B+ thanks to his card pool? Let’s go with B+, that’s where Trish is as well and that seems about right to me. Ultimately he seems very redundant to me, so I am prepared to rank him down next year.
Agatha Crane (both versions): A // A Statline andSoak: A good and open-ended statline, as long as you can make use of the options unlocked by them. Worst case, she has good Intellect paired with good encounter protection. Investigator ability: Like Marion, she gets the equivalent of an action and a card when her ability triggers. It’s a good deal harder to trigger however and comes with additional timing restrictions, so it’s overall a notch or two weaker. Still, the raw value is there, you just need to commit to collect on it. Signature: Phenomenal enabler for her ability and also a great tool just to pass tests. This is a premium signature asset that you will want to dig out of your deck. Weakness: A weakness that shuffles back, eats up draws and actions and makes your tests worse. This is rather horrid and provides a counter-balance to the signature. Card access (Seeker): Not bad at all. Daisy’s pool is better, but Agatha is better set up to actually use the mystic cards she can take. Insight 0-3 is not a huge pool of out-of-class events, but there are some real gems in there that do matter. Like with Daniela, there is a lot of “What if” whinging around her deckbuilding and how it could be “better”, but like with Daniela that seems largely unjustified to me. Card access (Mystic): Probably a bit better than the Seeker version. While the Spells trait doesn’t yield a lot of particularly great options out of the Mystic class, the Seeker level 0 is notoriously stacked with fantastic cards. More importantly, the Mystic main class has some really good options for Agatha to get her investigator ability to fire.
Like Marion, i see Agatha as an A for power initially. A lot of how that shakes out with either investigator is going to depend on how reliably that ability is going to trigger. For that reason, i am trending upwards with Marion (high A, possibly A+) while i am more sceptical of Agatha and could see her trend downwards (low A, possibly B+). Especially her Seeker side has to rely heavily on her signature to get the necessary trigger each turn to cash in on her promise. It’s always possible that Drowned City serves us another great Seeker enabler for her, but all we got so far is the Researched card. And while that one is solid, it’s a one-off so hardly reliable. I am looking forward to trying her out. Event based play is a favorite of mine and getting her ability to pop off is a neat challenge. She also directs me to play some cards that i usually wouldn’t include, so that’s a plus. I’ll call that an A as well.
Michael McGlen: A+ // B+ Statline andSoak: Very optimized statline for a fighter. 5 combat and both defensive stats at 3 makes McGlen as resilient against the encounter deck as most survivors. Investigator ability: That’s Jenny with extra steps, so not that great? A resource per turn is what Jenny gets and Michael has the condition of having to have an enemy to fight to get that resource. If he has multiple firearms out, he can get 2 resources (or, in magical christmas land, 3 or even 4 resources) but i’d weigh that against the dead turns where he gets nothing and just call this Jenny’s ability in total. Maybe slightly above it, depending on player (and thus enemy) count. Which is fiiiiine… The resources are key to getting your firearms out of course, so it’s a relevant ability for sure, even if the raw value is not quite up where we’ve come to expect it. Signature: You can’t run Bandolier and the Quickdraw Holster is somewhat questionable in quality, so the signature jumps in to fulfill your dreams of holding four guns at the same time. It does void the accessory slot, so get those Relic Hunters ready if you also want piano wires or cigarette cases. But the signature does play well with the investigator ability for sure. The built-in Prepared for the Worst on playing the sig is also definitely relevant. So this should work out fine. Weakness: Getting all your guns confiscated will randomly hose you in a similar way to Pete or Charlie when they have to exhaust all their stuff while in danger. Overall, this weakness seems fine, but a bit swingy. Sometimes you are staring down an enemy and taking attacks of opportunity to get a gun out again. Other times you are clapping excitedly because the police takes away your empty guns and shuffles full guns into your deck. Card access: Very specialized. The ability to take all guns and gun related cards gives him all the firepower he could possibly need. This enables him to serve the specific fantasy behind his character very well, but at the same time puts him into a fairly constrained box. I would compare this to Nathaniel, who similarly does only one thing, but does that thing very well.
What did i give Nathaniel for power? A+? Do i see Michael in the same tier as him? They certainly share a lot of DNA in that they are both one-minded fighters with 5 combat, a card pool that gets them exactly what they want, a signature that tutors up what they need and a weakness that hoses them to a point. I suppose it’s as good a starting point as any. Let’s call it a low A+. For his other rank, i am looking forward to playing the “one million tiny pistols” build with him that plays Derringers (both .18 and .41), Lugers and upgraded Bulldogs and gets more money for emptying those back than he spent for them initially. I am not super high on him because i don’t really expect any big surprises or new insights from playing him, but it should be a good time. B+, but a higher B+ than Lucius got.
George Barnaby: A+ // A+ Statline andSoak: I actually really like the flat statline here, Survivor can make that work very easily and George in particular strikes me as an investigator that wants to do multiple jobs at the same time. Investigator ability: What initially looks like an ability that offers fair exchanges of a card for a card is really easy to unhinge with a plethora of cards from the Survivor pool. Anything that discards for value or as a cost immediately shoots up in playability when George holds them. And many of those cards are already good by themselves. Signature: Depending on how you use the cards he has stored, the signature will fluctuate in value. I suspect that it will mostly end up being not all that great, at least not to the extent that you’d welcome having three of them in your deck. But there are some fun tricks to be had with it at least. Weakness: Not as bad as it looks, but still plenty bad. Assuming you draw it during your upkeep, you will lose your hand, but get to put one of them under you straight away and also draw a replacement card. So it won’t leave you completely unable to do something. That being said, you do want to be able to recover from this, either by having cards to play from the discard or some sort of card draw that can kickstart you forwards again. Card access: I like this new type of deckbuilding and could see it become something that gets used more often in the future. Full level 0 splash from two subclasses without limiting it to non-assets or something like that is pretty good and the limit of 10 cards is generous enough to do most shenanigans you are thinking of. George in particular has access to the level 0 cards of the second best and third best class in the game while being main in the best class… so that’s just an incredibly powerful pool overall.
This man draws so many cards in such a stacked card pool that i find it hard to imagine him being anything less than an A+ for power. He is very capable of using pretty much every Survivor archetype under the sun and his churn through the deck will make all of that very consistent. This use of a second hand where he an store cards for later is very appealing to me. A skill-based deck that mostly ignores the signature and just plans on discarding cards that want to be committed anyways is likely the best approach to him, but i definitely want to experiment with building around the concept of a second hand that you can swap to with the signature as well. There is a lot of meat to the deckbuilding options, so George could end up becoming one of the Survivor investigators that i return to often. I am going with an A+ on that side.
Doppelgänger and Hardboiled were previewed by Arkham Memes on their Instagram. Michael McGlen was previewed by Discipulos de Armitage on their YouTube Quickshot and Dakota Garofalo were previewed by Valentin1331 on ArkhamDB
Guardian
Not great, not terrible. This is one of those cards that get better the longer you look at it. At first glance, this is a ball of nothing. But the fact that it looks back at the whole round, not just at the current turn, gives this some real nice use cases. It’s not too unusual for a Guardian to spend two or three of their actions fighting. If they do, they can use Hardboiled on a test of another investigator during their turn to add three or four wild icons. If that test happens to also be a combat test, it’s even six or eight icons. That’s not a very uncommon situation and quite the huge boost to get from a level 0 card. If you want to commit it to your own tests, there is some potential for this to be good if you care about oversuccess or have more actions than usual, both things that point towards the Guardian/Rogue hybrids, in particular Tony and Skids (Leo doesn’t really concern himself with those rogue themes). Oversuccess in class is not super common, but Breach the Door is a good one. Fight two times to kill something at your location, then throw six icons at a Breach the Door test? Sounds good. One of my current favorite Guardian toys, Bestow Resolve, also exists to wash these combat icons into something more useful, drastically improving either usecase. Seems like a nice skill for level 0… but to be fair, Guardian skills level 0 and 1 is pretty stacked with cards that are better than just “nice”. So this might not stay in the deck for long as an XP or two can get you Defensive Stance or Leadership(2). Of course that’s perfectly fine, we shouldn’t approach level 0 cards with the expectation that they make it through to scenario 8. This card gets some shit flung at it in discussions elsewhere right now, but i think this is actually quite good. Obviously it’s no Promise of Power, but again that shouldn’t be the expectation.
First things first, that is the sickest artwork ever. We finally got the shotgun nun on the motorbike. With that out of the system, to the card. A fast 1 damage for 2 resources is almost fine, as long as it saves an action that is. Nathaniel can even deal 2 damage with it, but of course his ability is once per phase and Quick Shot is limited to the investigator phase, so maybe that’s not as relevant as it appears at first glance. That being said, this gets played for completely free if you draw it during your turn and if you play this card, that’s something you want to at least be able to happen. Now, Guardian isn’t exactly know for its stellar card draw, but there are some factors to consider here. It’s a Spirit card, which means it can be picked up by Boxing Gloves [EDIT: Boxing Gloves don’t draw, they “add to hand”. So that doesn’t work unfortunately. Bit silly, but it is what it is.] Marion is probably going to draw a decent amount… and even if she doesn’t, then she can still use this to tack other events onto it and make those Fast in the process. There are also some other neat tricks that can be played here, as there is a bunch of cards that put cards into your hand that actually count as draw, like Eureka or Hunting Jacket. Discard this to Hunting Jacket for money and when the Jacket discards to an attack of opportunity, you throw the Quick Shot(s) under it at your attacker? Sounds neat. Or weaponize your Old Book of Lore with it :D It’s three XP, but you do get all three copies for the price. That does however also mean that i would only buy this if i plan on indeed running all three copies. Cute card, i think i will want to try it in Marion at the very least. In other contexts, you will have to weigh this against some of the other ways to get that additional damage in, like Vicious Blow, Strong-Armed or this set’s Hunter’s Mark. The neat thing about Quick Shot compared to those is that it does something without needing an additional attack, so you can use it to just wipe cultists off the board. I could see that being good enough to be worth it.
Rogue
Here’s Gun McGun, our final investigator for this cycle and the final one from the legacy Arkham Files roster. His shtick is using guns, lots of guns. His statline is that of a hyperoptimized fighter, with combat 5 and good defensive attributes. Intellect is his dumb dump stat. Those are very good numbers obviously. His deckbuilding is rather simple: Is it a Firearm or does it mention Firearms anywhere on its card text? Michael can play it. He pays for this privilege by being limited to Rogue 0-3, but let’s be real here… with Michael we were looking to spend our big ticket XP cards on firearms anyways. Access to all of Guardian’s and Rogue’s firearms is really quite powerful and one of those things that gets new toys all the time, so that should be good and stay good. Actually, the ability to run Survivor’s .18 Derringers is not to be underestimated either, those are a great throwaway gun that pays for itself through Michael’s ability. His deck options also include Extra Ammo, Custom Mods, and Marksmanship as highlights from the out-of-class cards related to Firearms. Also, the new Locked and Loaded permanent suits him remarkably well if he goes for a range of pistols instead of large guns. As an investigator that wants to play firearms, use them and play more firearms once the old ones are empty, he will need a lot of money to pay for them. His investigator ability helps with that by giving him resources for shooting. If he shoots multiple different guns per round, he can even get multiple resources out of it. Overall this probably isn’t a super strong deal (it’s basically Jenny with extra steps, but a higher ceiling once you have multiple guns in play) in terms of raw value, but it will help him immensely to get his guns on the table and thus play an important role. The signature occupies the accessory slot and gives him two more hand slots instead, seriously upgrading the amount of firepower that McGlen can have prepared. On play it even tutors up a Firearm to replace itself. A solid signature, but that accessory slot requirement hurts. I expect to play Relic Hunter a lot with Michael. The weakness reloads all your guns and shuffles them back into your deck. Okay, that reload part is a bit tongue in cheek, you likely won’t be able to time your weakness in a way that you feel happy to see it. But it could happen, right? Much more likely to happen is that you are left without a weapon unless you sandbagged something in your hand. Even then, the weakness will eat up some of your resources and an action. I think this is overall fine.
McGlen caters to a very specific fantasy. Access to all firearms across the board is a fun thing to have. He does his thing, he does it well. I’ve read people comparing him to Tony, but i think the better comparison is Leo. Michael is finally the investigator that gets to use the big blue guns with the good green cards with more synergy to show for it than showing up with the correct card pool. Anyone who can Swift Reload a BAR is a winner in my book.
Rita just can’t stop winning, can she? As far as trap style cards go, this is pretty good. This can keep Hunters in check really well and do some fancy movement tricks, too. Since it’s fast, it also doesn’t waste your time on preparing a card that might never actually trigger which has been an issue with Trap cards before. If you lean on this too hard, it will rapidly burn through your resources however. Rogues do have resources, but it’s not like they would mind spending it on other things too. So while this can lock down an enemy per turn, paying the upkeep on that is not completely without issues. It’s balanced fairly well by its resource cost, but as a spell there are actually some cards around that make it cheaper. You will probably not line this up in a deck with Mortar and Pestle… but if you plan on going deep on Doppelgänger, then acquiring a Robe of Endless Night (either because you can already play it, Versatile, Memories or shenanigans) could pay off really really well. If you happen to be able to run Prophetic, that can pay for one play of Doppelgänger per turn on it’s own. Do i smell a Sefina deck? Actually, Chuck Fergus can make Doppelgänger free as well and you don’t even need the level 5 version. The thing that immediately jumps at me here is the lack of the word “non-Elite” anywhere on the card. Remote evades against Elites are really good, especially when you have knowledge of the scenario and know in advance where they appear, for example before advancing an act or agenda. As just a random example off the top of my head, Doppelgänger makes escaping from the Organist in Path to Carcosa almost trivial. All that being said, with this card returning itself to hand on triggering, do i really want to play three? I see this more as a one-of or two-of in my deck, but it’s of course nice to have the option. If nothing else, Myriad allows me to buy my two copies for 1XP total. That being said, being able to carpet a scenario with three of these can be a way to go as well (again, as long as you have the resources), like maybe dropping one on each location when doing Horror in High Gear to remote evade those chasing cars. The final thing i want to point out is that it also triggers when the enemy leaves the location. That means that you can drop this on a Hunter enemy at your location that you just evaded and know that you can move on while still keeping it down for another turn after it got up. Good card with lots of scenario dependent uses, but at the same time avoids being too niche for general use.
Oh, how i could have used Dakota during the previous campaign, to run after those annoying Elusive enemies! If Elusive ends up becoming an evergreen like Hunter or Retaliate, then Dakota will definitely be able to earn her keep. But even if not, the ability to engage as a free trigger bypasses Aloof and helps with enemy management in multiplayer. If you get the occasional move out of it, even better. She also gives a stat boost while at the same location as a creature or monster, something that i think is pretty much expected from a 4-cost ally. She seems pretty good, especially for investigators that don’t have many other movement options available. Does she play in a class with level 3 rogue allies? Probably not, although i could see a world where a Tony or Michael takes Dakota instead of Delilah to save on actions and resources. The most immediate home i can see for her is one of the Guardians who have a notoriously hard time with extra actions and bonus movement. Getting to stay right on top of enemies while being able to ignore pesky stuff like Aloof might just be more valuable to them than a Beat Cop. You know how Runic Axe got specifically its movement upgrade taboo’d because it was too powerful? You can get it back here. As alluded to earlier, the value of this ally shoots up if you are gearing up to play Hemlock Vale. Or, if Elusive stays around, even beyond Hemlock.
Transfiguration and Library Pass(5) were previewed by Restricted Collection on their podcast Where’s The Party and Anchor Chain were previewed by El Mito Del Caos on Xitter. Short Rest and Mauser Tankgewehr M1918 were previewed by Quick Learner on their Youtube
Rogue
I’m surprised to see this be level 0, it reads like an upgraded card. Pretty stacked package for that, especially when we hold it next to Kicking the Hornet’s Nest. The ability to just search everything instead of only the top 9, and even dig into the encounter discard makes finding what you are looking for as consistent as it can be. No matter if you are looking for Victory points, something that draws you 3+ cards, a parley target or just a body that you can defeat to trigger some stuff, this card fetches up what you need. There’s a lot of applications for this card, even beyond just the Parley stuff that is implied on the card through the artwork (featuring Aly) and it’s own Parley keyword. Is it better overall than Hornet’s Nest? I am honestly not sure, i really like getting free clues with my Rogue investigators. Obviously, there is never a point where i mind drawing some cards either… but i can do that easier without having to conjure up an enemy. I read some initial reactions that suggest this outclasses Hornet’s Nest in every way or that it’d even be powerful enough for a taboo… but i think this is just a perfectly fine card, nothing more.
Mystic
Ah, that’s the stuff. We basically get to swap our investigator card with a different one which can do a lot of funky stuff. This is particularly exciting for any investigator that doesn’t have an investigator ability or one that gets weaker over the course of the game. Sefina, once she uses up the events beneath her she can just hop into a different body and gain a new ability. Mateo might do the same once he turned an outfail away. Lola is of course the biggest winner here and suddenly becomes actually able to use combos that her original investigator ability would otherwise prevent. The sky is pretty much the limit here, the interactions are numerous, rule-breaking shenanigans are bound to pop up left and right. I am very happy that the design team doesn’t let that stop them from putting fun cards like this into our hands. Now, let me just compile the best skills for a Lolafred Habbamayes deck…
Survivor
That is quite good! Disguise is still a staple rogue card for that i put into all sorts of decks as a one-off. Now Survivor has one as well. Disguise is a lot better thanks to +2 skill, not needing to discard something and also being slotless. But as soon as you can turn that discard into something you either don’t mind or even get value out of, Anchor Chain can go up in value dramatically. Since Anchor Chain can be used like an event, it can also do a solid impression of Rogue’s Slip Away and i think that might actually end up being the more common use for it. In any case, super-evading an enemy is a powerful move and having a more than solid option for it in Survivor is welcome.
Neutral
Oh, an actual Neutral card, something that everyone can take. Do they want to? I am sceptical. I do like including some healing in my decks, but dedicating three deckslots towards it seems steep. You can of course opt to run only one or two and to be honest i think that’s going to be the more likely play. Now, of course you can go into the full other direction with it and use it on everyone on your team and have big chains go off… but that’d be 12 deckslots across a 4-player team. I appreciate the meme, but i don’t think that’s particularly good. That being said, this definitely has a niche, thanks to Short Rest being super flexible in what it can heal. Both damage or horror can be removed. And it can even heal allies, which is an effect that is still in short supply. Especially if want to heal horror from allies, like for example a Field Agent, this is one of the very few cards that gets you there. You can also just put one into your initial deck as a reassurance against the random basic weaknesses that need to be healed. Don’t need them? Upgrade them out later. So yeah, nothing earth shattering here, but it’s an okay card with a purpose.
We have already seen a level 1 version of this in the initial announcement, a card that did turn some heads. With this level 5 variant we can use that card as our deck’s centerpiece, having it always available thanks to Permanent. Furthermore, the upgrade allows us to pay overdraft fees to keep the borrowed book in play for more than a turn. I like this a lot as a way to enable Tome shenanigans outside of Daisy. Clearly this is a powerful card worth the XP.
Something else i am realizing right now: Looking at the card numbers, 117 (Archibald) to 125 (Memories of Another Life) are all going to be Level 5 Specialist cards. That’s a lot of level 5 cards. Expect some more heavy hitters to come Oo
And here’s one of those heavy hitters, #119. When you absolutely positively need to one-tap a non-Elite, an anti-tank rifle might just do the trick. This thing has a lot in common with the Ornate Bow, but cranks up the numbers up another notch. At +5 combat we can expect to hit what we target and with 4 damage, most things will go down, too. Like the bow, it needs to be reloaded after each shot, bringing its average damage output back to a reasonable 2 damage per action. Unlike the bow, it won’t allow you cheating with Venturer or Cleaning Kit either, due to its unique type of uses. I think this is a good call, cheesing the Tankgewehr with Cleaning Kit would have been a bit too easy. Looking at the pool of investigators that can use it, there are two and a half things i can see this being used for. Either this enables fighting on someone who traditionally couldn’t (similar to how the Bow and Beretta do that for a bunch of rogues), in this case Dexter and Mateo. The thought of having Dexter pull this thing out of his hat in an emergency is somewhat appealing! The other usecase is as a base for a deck that piles Upgrades on the card to make it shoot into connecting locations, gives it even more damage and other shenanigans. Finally, there might be a William deck interested in playing this and circumventing the reload by replaying it from the discard after an Act of Desperation or similar?
I posted a first version of five new custom investigators a few days ago that i am currently working on finishing up. I got a ton of great feedback from all over, so i went back and incorporated much of it in the designs. I also started to swap out some of the images (mostly to get rid of mangled AI hands), but didn’t get to do the subtitles and other flavor bits yet.
So here’s version 2. Still not the final one, but i feel like the changes from last week to today made a large step towards getting this ready for the “release” as print and play.
I wanted to get this little update out before we head into the next stint of Drowned City previews. At the time of writing, i didn’t get around to update the Workshop mod yet. I will hopefully get that done over the weekend.
Benedict himself didn’t change, but i redesigned his signature and made a tweak to the weakness. The signature is now a Permanent that collects some of the money that Benedict spends. He can’t access it for himself, but it can pay for his teammates stuff, playing up his charitable side and giving him at least a minor gimmick that is active during the game. For the weakness, it was remarked that it would be too easy to ignore once you’d be set up. So i gave it a Forced effect that makes sure that you can’t run away from your Obligations. If you end the scenario with the weakness in play, you will have to pay for it with a part of your starting resources in the next one.
Evie got some major changes, leaving none of her cards untouched. First off, since she is supposed to be the support seeker, i wanted her investigator ability to put a support payoff front and center and not just an enabler. She now can hand out extra cards or resources with cards that do so. This still “costs” her clues to do, which i think is a fun limitation and a sidebenefit in some scenarios at the same time. The souped up Safeguard ability that she had on her investigator front moved to her signature instead. This replaces the wildly swingy Team Spirit event that i had before that could just randomly hand out 15 resources to the team or draw 9 cards. Or more. Finally, her weakness no longer affects other investigators at her locations. Instead she loses the actions, but this scales with investigator count around her.
With Vivian i am still tinkering and i plan on doing a few plays with her to figure out just how powerful she really is. Feedback seems to indicate that despite already thinking that her front ability is very good, i am even underestimating it still. The one change i did to her so far is putting a different discard trigger on her weakness. The previous one that cared about allies was rooted in her backstory, but had no mechanical consistency with the rest of her kit. This new one instead directly plays into it.
Gideon got his wording cleared up a bit and clarified that he is only supposed to use his ability on his turn. Basically like Dexter does it. More importantly however he got a new weakness because the previous one was just all kinds of weird and swingy. It’s an annoying card that when drawn will mess with his hand of cards. It shuffles back, but i expect that Gideon runs a lot of draw and/or card selection to make that not as much of an issue as it is on some official investigators.
Mara is the one i spent the most time on, giving her a complete overhaul. She still doesn’t use a discard pile, instead cards go under a Permanent signature when ever they are discarded. At the start of her turn, Mara can put any number of those cards under her deck and shuffle the rest in the top 6 cards. She thus gets an immediate deck manipulation ability that pays off far sooner than what i had previously. Her signature now mostly exists as a place where the discarded cards go, but it also has an ability to remove a card per turn. This can potentially be used to trim her deck down to very little, however there is some scary text on this signature that prevents Mara from just doing stupid deck cycling shenanigans. Her weakness is still an annoying prick that shows up, wastes a draw, then disappears again. However, if it does indeed disappear because you ignored it, then it will shuffle your deck and mess up what you did to set up your deck.
