After building some solid decks for Lucius and Michael, I got asked about options for bigger groups to expand on this. Now, i personally don’t have any hands-on experience with playing anything else but two-handed solo, but i think that’s still something that is worth taking some time exploring.
What are we looking for?
When increasing the number of players, we are also increasing the workload for our investigators. There’s more clues to collect and more enemies to fight. Typically, other related thresholds that a scenario asks us to meet (like for example the number successful parley actions to sway a story ally to our side) also scale with player count. If i had to make a guess, I’d say that Michael is likely able to take on a few extra enemies. In fact, he might even thrive in a target rich environment that lets him shoot multiple guns per turn to cash in on his investigator ability. Lucius however is going to need some help in the clue department. Picking up clues one by one is good enough in two-player games, but once you start adding a third or even fourth, that’s no longer going to be good enough. So whoever we add, should definitely be able to contribute to the clue effort in a meaningful way. It doesn’t have to be a full-scale seeker, but they need to at least make up for the added requirement to the clue thresholds that comes from adding a player.
Considering that our two first investigators share a weakness in sanity and willpower, it would also be nice if our addition(s) to the team bring at least a solid willpower to the table – just in case there are any campaign relevant willpower tests that are required to progress smoothly.
One huge advantage that we have due to our selection of Lucius and Michael for players 1 and 2 is that these two basically only use the green and yellow cards (with just a slight dash of blue ones in the Michael deck). So for whoever we pick to add to the team, we have the full range of Guardian, Mystic and Survivor to work with. We did pick the Rogue and Seeker cardpool pretty clean, though. If we’d want to use any of the investigators that also use that, we’d have to compromise more than is comfortable. I’d try to get by without having to do that.
Which investigators are a possibility?
The Core has 5 investigators, Drowned City another 6. Two of those are already in use, which means we have another nine investigators to look at in total. Let’s do that real quick and give everyone a quick Yes/No/Maybe.
Roland: Shares Seeker with Lucius. His brand of seeking requires enemies to be around which isn’t really what i’d be going for. Can probably be made to work as just a generic Guardian, ignoring most of his yellow card access. -> Maybe Daisy: Shares Seeker with Lucius. Would require some compromising between the two, but she’s generically powerful enough that she doesn’t actually require that much support. There’s not a whole lot of Tome action for her to gain from TDC, but refilling an Old Book of Lore(2) with Enraptured(2) sounds pretty sexy. Still, the seeker pool at level 0 is rough for two primary seekers… there might just literally not be enough cards to stretch ourselves that thin -> No Skids: Even more than with the yellow cards, we drained the Rogue card pool down to the bone. -> No Agnes: Agnes is an allrounder that can use her spells to fill several roles. The spell assets provided by the Core Set are rather yikes, but as long as we don’t expect her to be our primary enemy handler or clue getter, i think we can make this work very well. -> Yes Wendy: There is not a whole lot of rogue card pool left, but Wendy doesn’t need too much from there to work out. A couple Backstabs, maybe yoink the Lockpicks from Lucius and then we can get there. She does overlap with Lucius in much of her role as well though – one is an evadey seeker, the other one a seekery evader. We could probably pull this off, but I think George is looking a lot better if we want to reach into the red cards -> No
Marion: We have a nearly untouched Guardian pool and her trait based access mostly reaches into Survivor. I could see her scrounge together a solid deck that leans towards clue discovery, but still leaves her able to defend herself. However i am worried about how consistently she’ll be able to pull off her main gimmick without better card draw. -> Maybe Agatha: The Drowned City card pool has a lot of ways to trigger her ability with various token shenanigans, so that’s promising. She doesn’t have a whole lot of Insights and Spells worth recurring, though. I could see this happen, but she’s not on front of my mind for this -> Maybe Gloria: We could cobble something together from the Mystic pool, but Agnes is just a straight up superior choice to Gloria thanks to a much stronger sideclass. The cardpool is also made up in a way that i would even look at Mystic Agatha before using Gloria as just a generic Willpower vessel. -> No George: His sideclass access is exactly the two classes we did plunder for Lucius and Michael. That being said, if we do want to use a Survivor, then he seems like a superior option to Wendy. He really did get a lot of specific support in Drowned City and even just adding Artistic Inspiration from the seeker pool will make him look quite good. -> Yes
So, to sum up: We have Agnes and George on the forefront, with nods to Agatha, Marion and Roland as possible. We’ll exclude Gloria and Wendy due to preferable options in the other investigators and also Daisy and Skids because the card pool won’t allow for a second main rogue or seeker.
Looking at the unclaimed card pool, there is one chunk of cards that i definitely want to take advantage of. Survivor has a lot of really good cards that let them pick up clues. Not making use of that would be criminal. George would be the obvious home for them and i think that’s where i want to start for our player 3. That would leave Agnes or possibly one of the Guardians for player 4.
This is what a deck for George could look like at 15xp. Mostly focused on gaining clues. Took care to get some good icons on his cards so he always has something worth discarding and committing later. You’ll usually be able to trigger the ability during the investigator phase and/or during the upkeep phase which gives a solid boost to your card draw, easily enough to let you use your Nautical Charts and other clue options to do a seeker’s job. Artistic Inspiration can trigger your ability in any phase, so that’s a nice thing to keep in mind: You don’t need to use its ability to refill its use during the investigator phase, you can do it in any player window. There is a good amount of wild icons all over these cards, so you should be able to keep committing cards you put under George and not get anything stuck there. It should also allow you to pass any critical Willpower tests that come up. One thing to note is that i put two Unexpected Courage in here. There are four of them in the Revised Core, which we used for Michael and Lucius already. I think they are quite important for George, so if you add this deck to the lineup, remove the two Courages from Lucius’ level 0 deck and replace them either with Guts or Working a Hunch.
And that’s a suggestion for an Agnes Baker with about 3 scenarios worth of xp in her deck. This runs a range of assets that can be used for investigating or enemy handling. Fighting isn’t her strongest suit, but especially when you are able to trigger her investigator ability through Ward of Protection or Forbidden Knowledge, you can often finish off an enemy with the Sword Cane or Shrivelling. The combat options for Mystics are very limited in the Core Set, the lack of an upgraded Shrivelling is going to make itself known rather severely. Still, with a Rosary on the table, you can use it to attack at 6 base value for 2 damage which is enough to at least get small critters off your back. For anything bigger, Michael is hopefully able to pull through. This deck is rather light on skills, due to running out of Core Set cards. I think this should still work out. Many of your cards are cheap(ish) and you do have some additional resource income from the Forbidden Knowledges, too.
You know what, this looks pretty good
Considering that we are working on the smallest of card pools here and building decks for a full team of four from one collection, this all seems surprisingly solid. Not a whole lot of filler in these decks, these are all cards that i am perfectly fine playing. We didn’t have to reach for Knives to fill up deck slots or similar junk that’s in the official preconstructed decks.
The one glaring weakness that this card pool has is economy. Usually we’d at least expect the Rogue cards to have something that can give us some resources beyond Emergency Cache. The Core Set only has Hot Streak(4)… which we can’t use in Michael because he only gets up to level 3 Rogue cards. There’s Watch This(3), i guess. And Agnes gets to use Forbidden Knowledge.
So if you have any additional cards available, that’s probably where you’d get the best improvements to these decks. If you have the Investigator Starter Decks for example, you have additional resource events like Sneak By and Voice of Ra in each of the classes. The other set that i usually recommend for new players, Edge of the Earth, also has some really nice pieces to help with resources, like the tri-class Talents.
But overall i think this has shown pretty well that there is a lot of play in a small card pool already. I am very pleased with this result. I expected to get something that is barely fine, but this seems better than just fine to me.
In part I, we took a detailed look at Lucius Galloway and how he can be built on just a Core Set and the Drowned City Investigator Expansion. This turned out rather well. Today, we hopefully can do the same (or at least a suitable job) for Michael McGlen as well, as that would mean that the TDC box comes with a nice and simple seeker/fighter pairing that can be assembled from even the smallest of card pools. As with part I, i will try to go into a bit more detail about game concepts, card choices and the like because i want this to be useful for new players too.
Michael McGlen
Michael’s role is pretty clear, he shoots enemies. Enemy handling is of course an important part of winning scenarios, with multiple different approaches to it. Defeating enemies is simply the most straightforward one and while not always the most action efficient way to do things, it will almost always be able to solve the problem. The special flavor that Michael comes with is a focus on Firearms. Firearms typically are weighed down by two things: One, they tend to be fairly expensive. Looking at the Core Set, you see Machete next to the .45 Automatic and the pistol costs more than the blade. At the same time, guns use ammo, so after a set number of shots they are spent and need to either be reloaded or replaced which is something the melee weapons don’t do. This compounds with their costs into a considerable strain on resources that isn’t present when using melee weapons. The investigator ability of Michael aims to solve or at least mitigate exactly this issue. By earning money for spending ammo, he can recoup the costs of his guns, making it easier to keep investing into more of them. If things go right for him, he can even make more money back than he put into the guns. He has 5 combat, which is especially important for gun users: Failing attack tests with firearms not only costs an action, but also wastes ammo. So while a knife user might just take some risky attacks, fully aware that they can just try again when they miss, you will want to make sure that your attacks with a firearm actually does hit. Spray and Pray isn’t really a thing in this game. Michael shares a weakness in sanity with Lucius. In fact, he even has one less point of sanity, which we will need to address. Making up for this in part are solid willpower and agility scores which give Michael at least a fighting chance against most treacheries. Especially for a rogue, this is actually quite unusual and a strength that we will want to build on with our deck.
At level 0
Just like in part I, i will just open the discussion with a decklist that i came up with and then discuss it. Remember, this is just TDC + Core:
With a card pool this small, the deck pretty much builds itself due to a lack of sensible options. Still, this can work as long as we get to pick up some juice with our upgrades later on. But first, the card-by-card.
We are running every firearm we can get our hands on, that is the central gimmick of our investigator after all. .41 Derringer: The weakest of the bunch, but for someone with 5 base combat, we can make this work. The requirement for oversuccess is pretty rough, but at least the pistol is fairly cheap. Luger P08: The workhorse of the Level 0 deck and makes sure that we will always have at least some sort of gun to shoot since it doesn’t run out of ammo permanently. This is a potent little gun and perfect to hold together with one of the others to make short work of enemies while getting your resources back and then some. .45 Automatic: The most boring of firearms, but it does more or less set the standard. With 4 ammo and no restriction on use (no oversuccess, exhaust, etc) it does its job just fine. Remington 1858: 3 attacks for 3 resources, but the final one is both awkward to trigger and also doesn’t work with our investigator ability. Honestly not a great pistol for us, but serviceable. Ultimately, we need more guns, this is a gun, so into the deck it goes!
Funfact, the rogue card pool for Core + TDC at level 0 doesn’t even have an accessory, so it’s just the signature here. Viola Case: Not terribly important at level 0. Will get more interesting once we pick up a two-handed weapon or two. Until then, this commits for two willpower icons which is actually really nice.
The ally choice is also fairly easy. Robert Castaigne: Getting a +1 to your primary skill is definitely worth it. I don’t expect to need the activated ability all that often, but just the fact that we are now shooting our guns at 7 or 8 skill before even tossing a skill in there is invaluable. Due to our low sanity, we may need to accept that Robert might not see the end of the scenario as he might at some point need to take a hit for us.
Finally, i am putting a lone one-off asset in there. Hard Knocks: Just in case we end up in a situation where we are swimming in money, we can channel that cash into skill bonuses. If you draw this early on while you are still getting set up, don’t hesitate to just throw this into a skill test instead of spending 2 resources on it.
The assets are where we aim to spend our resources on, meaning that we want our events to be cheap. Actually, we even want our events to give us resources… but as we’ve already seen when we looked at the rogue card pool for Lucius, this specific Rogue pool is missing that otherwise rather prominent facet of the class. Emergency Cache: It does its job just fine. ECache is crucial if we want to setup fast with Robert and two guns, without having to take some resource actions. Primed for Action: Ignore all that talk on the card about upgrade events, we are only here for the first sentence and will ignore the rest. What this does is give us 2 resources to spend on a gun without having to spend an action on them like we’d have to for ECache. This is actually pretty fantastic for us, despite using the card only to like 70% of the potential it has in a full card pool. Where’s The Party: This is a way to find an enemy and kill it on your own terms. A very flexible card that can do a lot for you, depending on how and when you use it. Fishing for enemies with Victory points is useful, pulling a strong enemy you want a headstart on can also be a thing as it will give you two turns to defeat it after it enters play exhausted, making sure it won’t pop up later when it’s more inconvenient. There’s some card draw sprinkled on top as well. Just an all-around good card that you can use in turns where you don’t have anything else to defeat on the board and don’t need to move around or play assets either. Intimidation: Allows getting rid of a high value target in one go. This does require passing a combat test and spending 3 resources, but if you can nail an enemy with 5 health with it, this will translate into saving a lot of actions and ammo. I put only one of these in the deck because they are a bit expensive and situational. You probably want an Overpower or Unexpected Courage ready to get your combat to comfortable levels, too. But ditching the Hard Knocks for a second copy of Intimidation is entirely reasonable, if you prefer that. You’ve Had Worse: We don’t *want* to play this. We don’t *want* to spend 3 resources on something that doesn’t help us kill enemies. But if the choice is between spending 3 resources and losing more than half our starting sanity from a botched treachery test, then we will be glad to have this option up our sleeve. As we’ve talked about with Lucius, it’s important to recognize the achilles heels of our investigator and, if necessary, concede to some compromises to mitigate them. This is one such concession. What saves this card are the icons which allow using the event as a quasi-Manual Dexterity as an alternative to its other uses.
And finally, again mirroring what we did for Lucius, we are putting a hefty dose of skills into the deck. This helps us find the assets our strategy depends on because many of those skills draw a card. At the same time, they offer us protection from the mythos and secure our clutch combat tests when necessary – and all of that without taking up any resources. Overpower: Straight-forward way to make a difficult shot find its target. Also a good way to get more out of Intimidation. I suggest not being too precious with these, we do want the card draw from them rather sooner than later. Crack Shot: Not as flexible as Overpower and without the card draw either. That being said, it takes you from 5 to 8 skill on its own, which with the added +1 or +2 from the gun will often put you straight into “everything but the autofail” territory for your skill test. The Derringer which relies on oversuccess to deal its extra damage will also be a lot more reliable with this available. Guts: Our low sanity needs to be protected and passing willpower tests on the likes of Rotting Remains is our first line of defense. Luckily, Michael has high willpower for a rogue so Guts actually takes us into skill levels where we can expect to pass most tests. These two Guts we have are absolute life-savers – while cashing in the Overpowers for a card is something to do whenever the opportunity is there, you should be more conscious of how you are spending these. Manual Dexterity: Passing agility tests isn’t as much of a life-threatening situation for Michael as it is with willpower tests. But still, the encounter deck often has all sorts of nastiness for you that can be avoided with agility and since we already start with a decent three, we can and should build on that. Agility can also be used to evade enemies. While we are the gun specialist that wants to keep nothing alive, this option is not to underestimate. Especially when facing massive Elites that don’t go down in a turn, evading the enemy can prevent a lot of incoming damage or horror because that enemy now no longer gets to attack. Evasion can also turn off the threat from a high-combat enemy with Retaliate. So you’ll often find good uses for this. Unexpected Courage: Can go into any test and with a well-rounded skill line like Michael’s, this flexibility is definitely welcome. That being said, I would start under the assumption that I’d want to use UC to pass willpower tests. Getting crippled by a Frozen in Fear or just straight up knocked out by horror is the worst thing the encounter deck can do to us, so that’s what we should build our defenses against. This includes hoarding some willpower icons in our hand for an emergency as the scenario goes on.
Options at level 0
Very few. This card pool only has 32 cards in total, half of which are already in the deck… so we can be happy that what we cobbled together looks as functional as it does. That being said, here are some ideas:
-1 Hard Knocks: It’s really not that great of a card. I like having an outlet for stacks of money that pile up near the end of a scenario, but if you want to include something different in your deck, this is very likely the first one to go.
Bum’s Rush: An alternative to Intimidation that can also get rid of an enemy. The test is easier, the cost in resources is lower. But if the enemy has Hunter (and most do), then shuffling the thing into the deck just seems like a better solution. And i think that Michael can get that combat test on Intimidation done, even on an enemy with 5 or 6 health.
Sneak Attack: Since we are pairing up with Lucius, we can probably expect to see exhausted enemies regularly. Still, this is only 2 damage, something that every of our guns can do. It skips the test, but we are good at those. So i don’t see this in Michael’s deck. If anything, this would go into Lucius’ deck.
Short Rest: I believe this card is overall pretty awful, but it is a way to heal horror. The only way in this card pool. Just … ugh. This is so bad. I don’t wanna.
Alright, as you can see I am scraping the barrel pretty hard here. Nobody wants to hear me talk about Knife and Flashlight next, so let’s quickly count our blessings that we built something that works and move on!
Upgrading
With Lucius, we were fully able to exploit the fact that Seekers don’t experience much pressure towards upgrading their tools. We won’t be as lucky with Michael. Upgrading the guns is going to be incredibly important to keep on par with what the encounter deck is throwing at us. Meanwhile, we do however still need to also plug our horror issues. This is going to put a much higher strain on our XP. That being said, it will also feel more rewarding to see the capabilities of your investigator make sizeable jumps with each new thing you get. What we are looking for in the upgrades is money, firepower and sanity protection.
The amount of options in this small pool is actually staggering, i was hard pressed to push this down to just 25xp for the list above. I’d have little trouble throwing 50xp at this deck. That’s great! It means that we are able to constantly get more and more powerful as the campaign goes on. While Lucius mostly is going to have similar capabilities in scenario 1, 4 and 8, Michael will be able to really feel some of these upgrades and enjoy some nice power spikes. It also means that we’ll have a good deal of options to talk about once we went through what i did here. This wealth of of options more than makes up for how limited we were in building the initial deck.
+2 .41 Derringer – 2xp each: I consider this a priority upgrade, the card gets an incredible glowup. Not only does it get easier to gain that extra damage, but you can also gain extra actions from the Derringer now. This turns it from one of our worst cards in the deck that we just run to fill up our numbers to a very potent gun that we are actively happy to see. +2 Remington – 4xp each: Another huge glowup, taking the gun from 3 shots for 3 resources to 5 shots for 2 resources. It’s an expensive upgrade, but you do get your xp’s worth here. With Lucius around, chances are you will find exhausted enemies to use the “enters play” trigger against without having to take an attack of opportunity. +1 Locked and Loaded – 3xp: Makes each of our guns just a little bit more efficient. Basically, you spend 3xp to upgrade eight cards in your deck. Suddenly the Remington(4) offers six attacks for 2 resources. The Derringer can be squeezed for another bonus action. The Luger is immediately resource positive too, even if its reload ability is not affected by L&L, only the initial ammo. Even the .45 looks a bit better with 5 ammo on it. As a permanent, this asks very little of you, and the subtle gains do stack up quickly. +1 Robert Castaigne – 4xp: Yet another incredible glowup. As long as you keep a gun in your hand, he’ll just shoot it for you once per turn, completely for free. If it’s a Derringer, you can even get yet another free action from it. You’ll often want to keep the gun in hand for next turn’s activation, but of course you can use Robert to play your guns as well. This again saves actions and allows you to use the “enters play” trigger of the Remington without having to invite an attack of opportunity. One small thing to note however is that the free trigger attack from Robert does not use ammo, so it won’t give us resources either. +2 Watch This! – 3xp each: This is a godsend for us. Not only is it extra money, but it’s three wild icons. That’s the treachery protection we were looking for. Testing willpower at skill 6 is a very rare thing for Rogues to do and we should gladly take the opportunity for it here. Getting economy and mythos protection rolled into one card is a huge deal.
Deciding on what to cut for these cards was trivial. Most of them are upgrades to cards that were in the deck before. Locked and Loaded is a Permanent. That only leaves Watch This, which neatly replaces Crack Shot.
Priorities should be the Derringers and Robert. Then a Remington. After that, L&L, the extra Remington and the Watch This in whatever order makes sense to you.
Options for upgrades
Alright then, let’s talk options. Robert Castaigne: I think you want also the second one to be upgraded eventually. He is just that good and having a second copy in hand can give you the freedom to use the first to catch some horror for you. Elder Sign Amulet: I thought about including this one to really shore up the weakness to horror, just like i did in the Lucius deck. I decided that the Watch This get me to a point where i am more comfortable leaving it out, but the more prudent approach is surely to get an ESA early. As it is, this deck doesn’t really depend on the Viola case to do its thing and it keeps Robert out of danger. Keep this option in your mind for sure if you are forced to pick up early mental trauma (either through defeat or just campaign mandated trauma). This is your safety net when things go south and you have to go into the next scenario with 2 horror already on you and no way to heal. A Big Gun: Shotgun and Gatling Gun are both very tempting. As it is, the deck is not capable of doing more than 2 damage per shot, which can be a bit annoying and will have to be compensated for with extra actions and extra attacks from the Derringer and Robert. The alternative would be whipping out one of the big boom-booms and go to town. This would make us more dependent on the Viola Case however and i am not sure how much i like that. That being said, buying a Shotgun instead of the second Remington(4) is definitely an option worth thinking about and might very well turn out to be the correct play. Extra Ammunition: It’s kind of like playing a gun with 3 attacks for 2 resources, just as long as we already have a gun. Due to how Michael’s ability works, we’d rather have a second gun though. But still, for just 1xp these can do some work for us. Especially if we do end up with a Shotgun in our deck. Dakota Garofalo: You do want Robert, i am sure of that. But you can absolutely consider playing Charisma and include both a copy of Robert(4) and Dakota. The whole package cost 10xp and would give you a really nice power spike once both are in play. On Their Heels: Unlike most other fighters, Michael doesn’t get a single one of the many Vicious Blow look-alikes that are in the game by now. And certainly not at our limited card pool. So unless he goes for the Shotgun or Chaingun, he will be tied to the baseline of 2 damage per attack. On Their Heels can potentially give the third point of damage in some cases, but it’s a) a bit too conditional for comfort and b) probably not quite enough for 5xp here, considering that we are already flush with ways to spend them. Double Down and Sure Gamble: If you really want to make sure that you aren’t caught blindsided by treachery tests, then this allows you to nuke a test by throwing a card and money at the problem. Not bad at all, but a bit of a luxury purchase. I think Sure Gamble is better than Double Down here due to being reactive, but of course it’s also an XP more.
The deck at 50XP
This wealth of upgrades made me wonder how the deck would look like if we threw 50xp at it.
It’s neat that we have this much room to grow even on the smallest of card pools.
Verdict
I have to admit, i was going into this article with a feeling that i’d be a bit disappointed by Michael’s options. Mostly, i was dreading the resource situation and having to do things like play an unupgraded .45 until the end of the campaign. But honestly, i think this works out better than i expected. The level 0 is definitely not as well-rounded as the one for Lucius, but the range of high-quality upgrades is really remarkable. Some of these cards get incredible glowups. And while i have not actually played him yet, i believe that Michael’s ability should be able to wring enough resources out of the game that he can afford his stuff.
Soooo… yes, i stand by what i said in the Expansion Review. Looks like two newbie friendly and well supported investigators to me. Yay \o/ Well done, designers.
I am not sure yet if this series of articles is getting a part 3. Anything you’d like me to talk about with regards to these two decks, like checking out how the options open up if we also pull the investigator starters and/or Hemlock Vale into the card pool? Or something else? Let me know.
There is also a real possibility that i might take these two decks and use them for my blind playthrough of the Drowned City campaign once it’s out. Would there be interest in a write-up of that?
A month ago, I wrote a bit about a deck idea that i was working on for a Patrice deck that uses Transfigure to turn into Winifred, resulting in my favorite investigator using red skills instead of the usual green ones. Since then, the Investigator box has been released, we have learned what else is in the set and i even got my hands on them to try them out. So obviously, the first thing i did was start a new campaign, two-handed, with Patriciafred as one of the hands. The other hand would play Lucius, to give the pair a solid baseline for investigation and enemy handling capabilities. As the campaign to play i choise Edge of the Earth, simply because that’s the one i had not played for the longest time. Here’s what I played and what I learned with regards to Patriciafred’s capabilities.
What i started with
This is the deck as it went into Ice & Death, part I:
There are some things here that i did differently than anticipated, but again overall this is at least similar to what i had planned. Some notable differences:
I simply dropped the Moonstone without replacement. Meant that the accessory slot was empty, but i didn’t see anything that i really wanted there. To keep my resource costs down to the point where i could cut all of my econ cards (ECache, Voice of Ra, Take Heart), i simply ditched it.
When i made the original plan, we didn’t yet know about Glimmer of Hope(2). With the upgrade, they are actually useful commits. So instead of cutting the Glimmers, i upgraded them and kept them in the deck. They were very good for multiple reasons.
Astral Mirror was an outside-the-box pick. Usually, i’d want to use my handslots for a Derringer and a Nautical Charts, which meant that the Violin and the Scroll of Secrets were dead at that point. With Mirror, i could instead keep gaining value from the Violin and gain some extra draw with the Scroll. Good one-off to raise the late-game ceiling a bit more. Not important to the deck at all, but i’d probably run it again.
I somehow completely forgot about Eucatastrophe. Usually, the only thing that Winifred fears is the autofail. With Euca in hand, you can shed that fear and actually look forward to it as it will turn into your amazing Elder Sign instead. I thought of this way too late, somehow i only stumbled over this by the time i was past the City of Elder Things. I should have run two.
I didn’t find room for Brute Forces, but i also never missed them. Might be Edge of the Earth specific, but my team of two evaders instead danced around most enemies and that went great.
Dreams of the Clay was great as a way to give a cancel to Winifred. You throw this into whatever treachery test you are sure to pass (some agility test with Wini, or willpower if you are still Patrice) then keep it on the board to protect Wini from willpower treacheries. Worked quite well.
I didn’t end up playing any of the hybrid spells (Divination, Cthuga, Blur) that i considered in the first article. Just didn’t seem necessary, even as Patrice i usually was able to pass a couple tests thanks to the skill heavy nature of the deck.
What I Learned
Here are, in no particular order, some experiences with the deck:
There is a lot fewer icons on these red cards than on the green ones i am used to. This is a major factor in why this deck felt weaker than a regular Winifred. When the green deck would be testing at something like 7 or 8 skill, the red skills often just got you to 5 or 6 skill.
I was also missing both Wini’s signature and Savant a lot, in turn passing willpower tests was often an ordeal with this deck. Turns out there are a lot of willpower tests in EotE, too…
The absence of good economy cards also forced some compromises. Luckily Survivor is in general built to be less intense on resources than Rogue is.
Before you get some XP into your deck, you are weaker than you’d be with a non-gimmicky deck. Especially while the core skills are missing, your deck has a lot fewer wild icons than i would like. There is even a decent amount of cards without an icon at all and that can lead you to situations where you are stalling out with 6 cards in hand, but only one that can go into your current test. This problem goes away very fast as you throw XP at the problem though.
The pure Wini deck can get some consistent amount of rewards from oversucceeding and using this to trigger all sorts of things. This version doesn’t have that, because it tests lower and Survivor doesn’t offer oversuccess rewards in the first place.
That being said, the trio of Unrelenting, Resourceful and Persistence does a great job of keeping your handsize up while still double committing to most tests.
Gift of Nodens is also a really great substitute for the oversuccess payoffs, using the recursion on Unrelenting or Resourceful is great. Turning excess cards into clues through Contemplative or Sharp Vision is also good, as is knowing that you pretty much always have a Gumption ready to go with your Winging It. Persistence triggers a deck shuffle when played from the discard which synergizes amazingly well with Gift of Nodens. That’s a very attractive and fun central engine for a deck.
I enjoyed how fast the deck changed with XP. The skills mostly cost just a single XP. You get three Glimmers for 2xp. There’s just a lot happening to the deck from very little you put in.
What i found interesting is that you don’t actually want to Transfigure into Wini as soon as possible. When i had Transfigure in my start hand, i’d even mulligan it back into the deck. The reason for that is that you want to have a few setup turns with Patrice where you use her Draw 5 ability every turn to get your assets together. Ideally, you’d also get to throw two or three Glimmers into the discard pile along the way.
The turn where you transfigure can be incredibly awkward. As Patrice, you don’t really get to decide your timing, you have to play the card when you draw it (or risk waiting for a while until you see the second copy). So you turn into Winifred with just 4 cards in hand. Chances are that one or two don’t even have an icon on them or that you simply won’t be able to have matching icons for a skill test to start ramping up the card draw.
Mitigating this issue are the Glimmers of which you hopefully have some in the discard when turning into Winifred. You can then simply spend an action to return those to your hand. Persistence and/or Gift of Nodens can also come in clutch there to make sure you can start escalating as quickly as possible.
It really can’t be overstated how satisfying it is to turn an autofail into an Elder Sign with Eucatastrophe when you are Winifred. Not only did you not waste your heavy commits on something that fails, but you are passing the test instead and also get to return those commits to your hand because Wini’s Elder Sign is a bomb.
While pure Wini is pretty close to a real flex and can walk a 50/50 balance between fighting and seeking, the red version is much more skewed towards investigation. Between Charts, Contemplative, Winging It and Sharp Vision you are an incredible clue hound. While there are fighting counterparts to all of these, they don’t add up to the same amount of capability, it merely allows some fighting on the side. There is a good chance that Patriciafred is actually best played as a dedicated seeker, with only a splash of fighting on the side (like a 90/10 or maybe 80/20 split).
The tl;dr
Final verdict on the experiment: Pretty cool, the deck works. It is however overall weaker than regular Winifred. Now that shouldn’t come as a huge surprise, Winifred is one of the strongest investigators in the game and there’s a lot of room to be worse than her and still be great. But just how much more the red version would struggle with some of the more difficult tests was a bit of a surprise at first. There was a lot of testing 6 vs 4 involved, where i am pretty sure that a regular Wini deck would have went 8 to 10 vs 4. That being said, the consistency of not having your rewards tied to oversuccesses is nice, you know that you get your card advantage from Unrelenting, Glimmer and Gift of Nodens without any random element tied to it. Glimmer also makes it a lot easier to recover from an autofail-induced faceplant that costs you a chunk of your hand. Eucatastrophe even lets you prevent that danger completely.
I had a lot of fun with this one (and with the Lucius deck as well, for what it’s worth) and will probably revisit the idea in the future with a more clue heavy version that passes on most of the fighting stuff in this list.
In my Investigator Expansion Review for the Drowned City box, I claimed that one of the nicest features of the box for brand new players is how it offers two simple investigators that work out of the box even on the most limited of card pools. Lucius Galloway and Michael McGlen together form the typical power couple of one investigator that provides the clue finding capabilities to advance the act and one investigator that brings the hurt to keep the Mythos in check. To put my money time where my mouth is I figured it would be useful to double check how valid that claim of mine is and actually go ahead and build those decks with nothing but cards from the Core and the Drowned City Investigator Box. Hell, if this looks good, i might even end up playing this on my blind playthrough of the new campaign once it releases. Since this article series is addressed at newer players, i will also go into a bit more detail about some of the underlying concepts of the game, building a deck and card choices than usual.
Lucius Galloway
As the seeker of the team, Lucius’ job is to gather clues. To comfortably beat the typical scenario in a two-player environment, we’d want to shoot for 2 clues per turn discovered as a baseline. Helping with that will be his investigator ability which gains us a clue as long as we are able to oversucceed evasion tests against enemies. This won’t be possible every turn because we don’t expect to have an enemy around permanently, but it still will do a bit of work for us. Access to both the Seeker and the Rogue cardpool will help us develop both sides of Lucius, strengthening both our ability to investigate using our intellect and our ability to keep enemies in check (and get handouts along the way) with our agility. Lucius big achilles heel is his low sanity of 6 coupled with a low willpower of only 2 which makes him very vulnerable to treacheries that deal horror if you can’t pass a willpower test. This type of treachery is a mainstay in encounter decks throughout the game and very common. To make matters worse, his signature weakness also deals horror that won’t really be avoidable and also shuffles back so you can expect to see it multiple times per scenario. The deck will have to address this problem or otherwise we risk dying to horror mid-scenario… and the mental trauma from that will only make things worse in the scenarios after that.
At Level 0
To get the discussion going, here’s a proposal for how a level 0 deck for Lucius on a tightly limited card pool would look like:
We devote both of our handslots to our primary job, investigating locations for clues. Flashlight: Cheap and reliable, offers the equivalent (or better) of a +2 to the test. Just an all around solid card that does the job. Magnifying Glass: Even cheaper and more reliable, it offers a +1 that doesn’t run out of charges. Play this once and now you investigate at 5. You might even play the second and can ride them for the rest of the scenario, their bonus does indeed stack. Forensic Kit: Using your agility instead of intellect for your investigation basically gives you +1 to your test, but do note that Mag Glass won’t be helping you then. And neither do Milan, Perception or Deduction (Manual Dexterity will, though!). It is still worth playing for us however, as the horror heal on Forensic Kit will be our main defense against horror inflicted by treacheries and our own weakness. Consider not spending the uses on this before you actually have horror to heal and an evaded enemy on your location. Also be aware that you don’t have to use agility here. If you have a bunch of +1 intellect bonuses stacked on the board already, you can just test intellect and make use of those bonuses.
Our ally is very strong. Dr. Milan Christopher: He’s basically holding another Mag Glass for us, for a global +1 intellect bonus that supports our main job. He also hands out resources. While he is not cheap himself, he will pay off rather quick and help us gain the resources needed for our assets and events. Milan also soaks one point of horror for us without being defeated which is more relevant than one would think, especially when the whole sanity situation is already on a razor’s edge like it is with Lucius. Quick aside on the optional list of taboos: Milan is strong enough to land a spot on the so-called taboo list, where his text got changed to rein him in a bit. When using taboo, which is completely optional, Milan exhausts on gaining a resource, meaning you can no longer gain two or more resources from him per turn. As a new player, do not worry about this. At all. The changes on the list are made under the assumption of full card pools and the player power that comes with it. There is no reason to worry about gaining a handful extra resources with Milan while still on a fledgling collection. Those that play with taboo do instead play events that gain 5 resources in one action and other wild things to make up for it that you don’t have access to yet. Just play stuff as printed, the game is difficult enough. Worry about the optional stuff once you feel like you need extra challenge. And if the decision then is to still ignore taboo, that’s perfectly okay as well.
For the accessory slot, we have elaborate plans for our upgrade path where we will sink a considerable amount of XP here, but for now all we have is … Dial of Ancients: This thing is fairly easy for Lucius to research, as long as he can draw it early enough. Four evasions at his location is something he can do himself. You may consider keeping one enemy around for longer to get this done and gain access to the upgraded versions that actually do a thing.
We actually have something for the arcane slots, too. Well, kind of. Uncanny Specimen: Mostly acts as glue and filler for our deck, a fast card that draws us another card so we get through our deck quicker and find the stuff we are actually looking for. We have to pay a resource for the privilege, but the Specimen’s ability to bend a test result in our favor makes this worthwhile.
Next up is a range of assets that don’t take up a limited slot. You can play all of these to the board at the same time and stack all of their effects, so there won’t be any “dead” cards clogging up your hand. These assets help you pass tests and/or provide a steady stream of cards to play or commit. Pickpocketing: A card per turn, as long as you have enemies around to evade. One of Lucius strengths is that he doesn’t lose tempo when evading enemies because he can still get a clue out of it. Pickpocketing builds on this strength to the point where you will actively want to keep an enemy around to bully every turn. String Along: String Along is even better than Pickpocketing for us. While it is more expensive and also needs to exhaust before we know if we past the test, it also gives a +1 to that test, making that crucial oversuccess for a clue more likely. It also doesn’t disengage the enemy, which sounds like a drawback but is actually a good thing when your plan involves dragging an enemy around with you to exploit over and over. Hyperawareness: While our resource situation is not great, an early Milan can sometimes lead to situations where you have some to spare and want an outlet. Hyperawareness is that outlet, allowing us to bolster both our intellect and agility with cash. That being said, if you find yourself short on money when you draw it, this is one you might just want to commit for its icons. Artistic Inspiration: It’s a way to gain +1 to your tests after knowing the result, turning barely-fails into barely-passes or regular successes into oversuccesses. Your card draw is strong enough to support feeding into the card. Note that it does stack with Book of Verse. If you get those two cards together you will find that you are suddenly able to pass some tests you had no business to pass before and that your investigator ability becomes very consistent. Book of Verse: Your signature asset does the same thing that Artistic Inspiration does, except it’s just straight up better. It doesn’t require a discard to recharge, instead just a clue discovery… which is our main plan anyways. Book of Verse will even draw the occasional card, further stacking with what we are getting from our evasion based card draw.
This list is heavy on assets, so the event section is predictably short. Emergency Cache: One of the greatest failings of the Core Set is that it doesn’t give a resource event to Rogue. Drowned City doesn’t do so either, so this is what we have to work with. It does the job, i suppose. Only having a pair of Caches for resource events means that getting an early Milan Christopher on the board is going to make a huge difference for us. Backstab: These are ways for Lucius to weaponize his agility into some hefty spike damage. Usually, we’ll want to rely on Michael to keep Lucius safe and handle emergencies through evasion. But having the option to defeat an enemy on our own is still going to be very useful. If nothing else, these can be used to help Michael defeat some huge boss enemy to finish a scenario. Since we are going into the Drowned City campaign blind, we also include these to prepare ourselves for any situations where the investigators get forcibly separated, a situation that comes up every now and then.
Finally, we round out the whole thing with a good amount of skills. The nice thing about skills is that they are free, so having a chunk of them in the list does its part towards relieving our resource situation as well. Deduction: A card for a clue is a very classic trade for seekers to make to accelerate their gameplan. And with all the card draw in the deck, it’s a small price indeed. Perception: These make sure your Deductions don’t fail. They also just generically bolster your investigations while also drawing you a card, accelerating you towards the assets that give you more lasting bonuses. Manual Dexterity: Same deal as with Perception, these help your tests while churning towards your important assets. For Lucius specifically, these also help a lot with getting that oversuccess on the evasion test that nets him a clue. Unexpected Courage: While these can pretty much bolster any test you face, i’d advise you to be a bit precious about using them. With Lucius willpower being as low as it is, you will eventually run into a situation where you need to pass a willpower test, but struggle with it. Most of the tests come at a difficulty of 3, so Courage taking you from 2 to 4 won’t even be good enough to really be comfortable. However, with either Artistic Inspiration, Book of Verse or ideally both on the table, you have a real fighting chance once you throw in a Courage. You have a very limited amount of tries for this trick however and you may want to carefully consider tossing your Courage into a random investigate or evasion test now when it could possibly be used to free yourself from a Frozen in Fear a couple turns later.
Options at level 0
Here are some suggestions for tweaks to the list:
-1 Dial of Ancients: As you will see with the leveled up list in a moment, my list dips rather heavily into the accessory slot and even runs a Relic Hunter. If that is not up to your taste, then Dial of Ancients is the first thing to lose here as you will want a much better accessory than any of the upgraded Dials if you only have one slot.
-1 Hyperawareness, +1 Artistic Inspiration: The way i laid out the slotless assets, you can just play everything to the board and have everything stack with each other. There is an argument to be made that Inspiration is good enough that you want a second copy. Hyperawareness would be the card to cut for it.
-2 Backstab: Lucius doesn’t need to fight. He has innate enemy handling through his high evasion and we are planning on adding a focused main fighter to the team. So these are not strictly necessary and removing them would actually help a bit with our resources too as they are quite expensive at 3 resources.
+2 Bum’s Rush: A solid alternative to Backstab. While it doesn’t have the utility of allowing Lucius to help with nuking a boss enemy, it does have that option of shoving something into a connecting location which does add something that neither Lucius nor Michael would be able to do. It’s also a bit cheaper to play than Backstab.
+2 Guts: The other great option i see for this deck. I am not particularly big on playing Guts in investigators with 2 or less willpower, but the presence of Artistic Inspiration and Book of Verse does make it look more appealing. You could also use it to brute force a willpower test by committing both Guts and Unexpected Courage.
Especially if you are worried about willpower treacheries (a fair thing to worry about!), then removing a Hyperawareness and the Backstabs for another copy of Artistic Inspiration and a pair of Guts could really help you in that regard!
Upgrading
When thinking about how to upgrade my deck, i like to create a deck of about 20-25XP based on the level 0 deck. This is about the amount of XP that you can reliably expect to get on the blind play of a new campaign. The maximum amounts of XP will usually go significantly higher, but remember that especially on the first playthrough you may very well fail scenarios completely or go down a campaign path that leads nowhere productive. Recent campaigns also have a tendency of letting you play fewer than the usual eight scenarios one would expect from old campaigns. So formulating big plans based on 40XP aren’t terribly useful before you know if that’s even achievable. Aim lower and instead work out the priority of those upgrades and how you could see the deck evolve.
Again, i will start by showing you the decklist, then I’ll explain what happened there:
So, let’s get the big thing about this list out of the way first: I am throwing a whopping 15xp at the accessory slot here. That’s three quarters of the first 20xp we earn.
+1 Antikythera – 5XP: This is probably the best thing that Lucius can have in his accessory slot, even at a full cardpool. Just for succeeding a test per turn, it keeps throwing value at you in the form of cards, resources, clues or even actions. A fantastic card on its own, Lucius takes it to the next level with his Book of Verse which not only covers the “succeed by 0” case to complement it, but also allows shifting the test result so you pretty much always get to pick between either getting the cards/resources or the clue. Thanks to Antikythera, it’s very common to collect 2 clues just for evading an enemy: 1 from Lucius ability, one from the accessory. Note: Don’t get caught up in the extra action for a +5 success, the real juice of this card lies in consistently getting one of the lower two rewards turn after turn after turn. Overcommitting cards to test 9 vs 2 just for a shot at the +5 reward is not worth it. Save the commits and build up the value slowly and steadily. +1 Signs of Revelation – 4XP: This upgrade for the Dial allows investigating as a free action with tests being easier while an enemy is at Lucius location. This further plays into our theme of exploiting enemies for clues. +1 Elder Sign Amulet – 3XP: 4 extra points of sanity to keep our weakness to horror in check. It’s not pretty, but it works. +1 Relic Hunter – 3XP: A second accessory slot ramps up the amount of power we can draw from in our play area. Antikythera takes up one slot, the other is taken up by either the Dial or the Elder Sign Amulet. Both the Dial and the ESA eventually run out (either of charges or out of horror soak), so getting a third slot is not worth it here, the two can share one slot.
We are able to laser-focus this hard on a couple high impact cards because as a Seeker/Rogue, Lucius has access to very strong level 0 cards. The truth of the matter is that his cards work perfectly well even at a base level. Unlike a Guardian or Mystic that would feel pressed to upgrade their weapons and spells, a Seeker can get away with this sort of extravaganza because cards like Mag Glasses and Milan will see them all the way to the finale. Seekers also have the card draw to find these high value assets, this is especially true for Lucius who can draw an obscene amount of cards once he starts getting the rewards for evasion flowing.
For the other 5xp, i threw some at each of the three pillars we built our deck on now: Investigation, Evasion, sanity protection. +2 Lockpicks – 1xp each: These replace the Flashlights of the level 0 list. While Lockpicks can only be used once per turn, they do allow us to put our considerable agility to work for getting clues. Even without any other modifiers, Lucius tests at 9 vs shroud with Lockpicks, which makes oversucceeding easy. This ensures that he won’t break his lockpicks and also works towards putting that oversuccess by 5 for Antikythera on the table. +3 Doppelgänger – 1xp (for all three): Funfact, Lucius doesn’t require you to evade an enemy at his location to get a clue. Doppelgänger allows Lucius to remote evade enemies, and there’s a couple of uses for this. You can throw this on any location you pass and next time an enemy is drawn with a spawn instruction of “empty location”, you can drop it right into the trap. You can also place Doppelgänger on your location right after evading a Hunter enemy. That way, you can evade the thing again after it tries to hunt after you even if you already moved on. Bonus points if you also put a Doppelgänger into the location the Hunter moved into. That’s a lot of shenanigans for 1xp. +2 Dreams of the Clay – 1xp each: The idea with these is to commit them to any treachery that tests agility, easily pass the test and then put them into play to later cancel a willpower treachery that you wouldn’t be able to pass. This is a neat bit of reassurance against whatever the encounter deck might try to stop you.
We can’t just add new stuff to the deck, we also have to make some cuts from our level 0 deck, of course. The cards i removed for this proposed list are:
–2 Flashlights: These simply got directly upgraded into Lockpicks. -1 Forensic Kit: Their main reason to exist in the deck was healing some horror. With the ESA and Dreams of the Clay in the deck, I feel comfortable taking one of them out now. We’ll keep on of them in for emergencies, but since we plan on ending up with a Lockpicks in one hand and a Mag Glass in the other, it’s not a card I hope to need. -3 Uncanny Specimen: These were in the deck as filler and are no longer required. -1 Hyperawareness: This was the worst card in the level 0 deck and an easy cut to make. -2 Backstab: Presumably, Michael is upgrading his deck at the same pace as we do. As he gets more powerful, we can assume that he’ll make this emergency measure no longer necessary for us.
As for priorities, i think Antikythera is the first thing to get. It’s just so good and nothing else in this deck comes even close to its impact on the game.
Options for upgrades
Honestly, not that many. At a limited card pool like this, we’ll be taking what we can!
One thing that is worth addressing is that extraordinary focus on the accessory slot though. If that’s not what you want to do, i would still strongly advise you to go for the Antikythera. That card is incredibly strong for Lucius and i don’t see skipping it as a realistic option. In that case, you will of course be ditching the Dial and its upgrade. The Elder Sign Amulet as well. This leaves you with 10xp you can put towards other things. My suggestion would be a pair of Cryptic Researches (4xp each) to find your Antikythera. The other two XP can go towards whatever else… maybe a Scientific Study Grant to give you the option of ending up with 2 Mag Glasses, a Forensic Kit and a Lockpick all in play at the same time?
You can also go for Charisma, opening up your ally slot in a similar way to what i did here with the accessories. At a basic card pool level, there is not a whole lot here though. Alton O’Connell gives some extra agility which is fine but probably not worth running Charisma for. Research Librarian fetches up the signature asset which is neat for sure but again not really good enough on its own to justify 3XP. Leo De Luca is great, but unless your plan is to play Memories of Another Life and cheat him out that way, he’s probably too expensive. That being said, Memories is a fantastic card and if your collection has at least a little bit more in it than the basic level i am assuming here, it starts to look really attractive.
Over to you, Mr. McGlen
Overall, this looks pretty good! This is definitely a deck i feel comfortable in taking into a campaign, both the level 0 and the level 20 version seem perfectly capable. Let’s hope Michael has similar luck. One thing that we’ve already seen today is that the Rogue card pool at Core + TDC isn’t at all concerned with giving extra resources to the investigator, which is usually a major theme of them. So that’s an immediate concern that i have when we are talking about our firearm centric fighter. We’ll see how it works out in part 2.
This is a list i did for my own convenience, but figured i might as well press “Publish” in case anyone else can use it. It’s all investigators and which Specialist cards are available to them.
Guardian
Roland – Agency, Detective – Dakota, Trench Armor, On Their Heels
Zoey – Believer, Hunter – Cowl of Sekmet, Dakota, Blood of K’n-yan, Tankgewehr, On their Heels, Memories of Another Life
Mark – Veteran – Trench Armor, Tankgewehr
Leo – Veteran, Wayfarer – Bound for the Horizon, Dakota, Trench Armor, Tankgewehr
Carolyn – Medic – Sound Support
Tommy – Police, Warden – Sound Support, Tankgewehr, On Their Heels
Mary – Believer, Blessed – Forbidden Sutra, True Awakening, Cowl of Sekhmet, Storm Ruler, Memories of Another Life
Daniela – Entrepreneur – Nose to the Grindstone, Double Down
Skids – Criminal – Name Your Price, Double Down, Nose to the Grindstone
Jenny – Drifter – Bound for the Horizon, True Awakening, Nose to the Grindstone
Jenny, parallel – Drifter, Socialite – Bound for the Horizon, Walter Fitzpatrick, Name Your Price, Double Down, True Awakening, Nose to the Grindstone, Motivational Speech
Sefina – Artist – Dreams of Clay, Memories of Another Life
Finn – Criminal – Name Your Price, Double Down, Nose to the Grindstone
Preston – Silver Twilight, Socialite – Walter Fitzpatrick, Name Your Price, Double Down, Motivational Speech, Sacred Oath
Tony – Criminal, Hunter – Bound for the Horizon, Name Your Price, Double Down, Dakota, Nose to the Grindstone, Blood of K’n-yan, On Their Heels
Trish – Agency, Detective – Dakota, Trench Armor, On Their Heels
Monterey – Wayfarer – Bound for the Horizon, Dakota
Kymani – Criminal – Name Your Price, Double Down, Nose to the Grindstone
Alessandra – Drifter, Socialite – Bound for the Horizon, Walter Fitzpatrick, Name Your Price, Double Down, True Awakening, Nose to the Grindstone, Motivational Speech
Michael – Criminal, Hunter – Bound for the Horizon, Name Your Price, Double Down, Dakota, Nose to the Grindstone, Blood of K’n-yan, On Their Heels
Winifred – Criminal – Name Your Price, Double Down, Nose to the Grindstone
Mystic
Agnes – Sorcerer – Forbidden Sutra, Captivating Performance, Blood of K’n-yan, Storm Ruler, Dimensional Vortex, Memories of Another Life
Jim – Performer – Dreams of Clay, Captivating Performance, Motivational Speech, Dimensional Vortex
Akachi – Sorcerer – Forbidden Sutra, Captivating Performance, Blood of K’n-yan, Storm Ruler, Dimensional Vortex, Memories of Another Life
Mateo – Believer, Warden – Cowl of Sekhmet, Sound Support, Tankgewehr, Memories of Another Life
Diana – Cultist, Silver Twilight – Walter Fitzpatrick, Cowl of Sekhmet, Sacred Oath
Marie – Performer, Sorcerer – Dreams of Clay, Forbidden Sutra, Captivating Performance, Blood of K’n-yan, Motivational Speech, Storm Ruler, Dimensional Vortex, Memories of Another Life
Luke – Dreamer, Drifter, Wayfarer – Dreams of Clay, Bound for the Horizon, True Awakening, Captivating Performance, Dakota, Nose to the Grindstone, Memories of Another Life
Dexter – Sorcerer, Veteran – Forbidden Sutra, Captivating Performance, Trench Armor, Blood of K’n-yan, Storm Ruler, Tankgewehr, Dimensional Vortex, Memories of Another Life
This is an overview of the player cards in the Drowned City Investigator Expansion. I will be looking at the investigators first, then go over the rest grouped by class. For most cards I will try to keep it short and to the point to not stretch this article even more. For every group of cards I will nominate the three most useful and the three least useful cards. This isn’t necessarily about raw power, but more about how good they are at fueling a lot of your decks. It will also be informed by how well these cards stand on their own – while i might dip into a card’s role in the full cardpool, this article series is part of the Buying Guide for new players. Finally, I will give my opinion on how well this selection of player cards stands on its own in total, answering if it’s worthwhile to get as a first expansion next to the core set and if this expansion + Core is enough to support the investigators contained in this expansion. These articles do ignore the optional list of taboos. This is because they are mostly aimed at new players trying to figure out which investigator expansion to get next and taboo isn’t a thing that I want to weigh them down with. It’d also make things unnecessary complicated. I might mention a gamechanging taboo in exceptional cases. The ranking I use for cards is Bad < Okay < Good < Excellent < Staple with each of those spanning quite a range. I use something like “Okay to Good” or “Good to Okay” when I want to specify whether it’s on the upper or lower range of that rank. Please don’t take these rankings too seriously and more as a guide line, cards need to be evaluated in context and compressing these contexts down into just one word is really unprecise. I still find it useful for this overview as a shortcut to put the cards into relation quickly.
The Investigators
That is a lot of investigator images, aren’t we usually only getting 5 per box? Well, two things are special here. One, we get a bonus sixth investigator, Gloria, who had previously been released as a book promo. And Agatha Crane has two investigator cards. But let’s start at the top. Marion Tavares is The Trawler and our new Guardian. Her specialty is event based play and she gains considerable bonuses as long as you can reliably string two events together every turn. She works quite differently from usual Guardians, with innate card draw that makes her consistent and dynamic. She plays Guardian cards of course, and also has trait based access that lets her take certain events from other classes, mostly Survivor and Rogue. The Poet, Lucius Galloway, follows the “level 5 mainclass, level 2 sideclass” type of deckbuilding that was introduced in the Core Set. He is Seeker first, Rogue second and his abilities around evasion and clue discovery reinforce this. He is generic and open-ended, as a clue gatherer that can also handle enemies he’s a powerful all-rounder. The other seeker in the box is Agatha Crane, The Parapsychologist. Like Marion, she supports an event based approach to the game – but in a very different way that rewards token manipulation with the ability to replay cards from the discard pile. At the same time, Agatha Crane is also one of the mystics in the box – you are allowed to choose either of the two investigator cards at campaign start which will modify which cards you are allowed to take. This card access spans cards of their chosen main class and a trait that is at home in that class, but affords some splashes from other classes. She also gets some lowlevel cards from the class she didn’t take for an overall not too shabby range of cards. Her special ability requires very specific deckbuilding that has to balance token manipulation and spell/insight events. The other mystic is Gloria Goldberg, The Writer. Her speciality is rewriting the story we are playing in, which takes the form of superb encounter deck manipulation. At her best, she can prevent bad treacheries from happening completely while stacking that deck in a way that is the most convenient for everyone. She is a fully capable mystic by herself of course and can (in addition to full Mystic card access) choose between one of three sideclasses to take low-level events and skills from. She’s outstandingly powerful and flexible. Michael McGlen is our rogue and as The Gangster his interests are simple: Shoot enemies and get paid for it. A very strong combat character whose card access allows him to play all cards that mention Firearms, no matter if its the guns themselves or other cards that interact with them. His ability hands him resources for shooting his guns. Straight to the point and very capable. Finally, George Barnaby is The Lawyer and provides the counterbalance to this straightforwardness by being a bit more involved. He is a survivor that gets rewarded for discarding cards from his hand. Instead of discarding to the discard pile, he sort of has a second hand from these cards can still be committed and sometimes even returned to his actual hand. Again, this promises big rewards for committing to the bit and making full use of this investigator specific mechanic. He supplements his Survivor card access with level 0 cards from both Seeker and Rogue which gives him a wide range to pick from.
Guardian
The Book of War: Excellent. We are starting off with a banger of a card. Allowing you to play the same event four times is very powerful and there are a lot of synergies to exploit here. But even just as a way to replay your best cards without any shenanigans this is great. Crowbar: Good to Excellent. It does a job no other card in Guardian does, repeatedly allowing you to contribute to the clue game using your best skill. Cards like this already exist in other classes and are widely played, but the hand slot is more contested in Guardian for sure. Remington 1859: Okay to Bad. Using its special attack on leaving play often requires taking an attack of opportunity as you play a new gun to replace this one. With just two ammo and a low attack value, this just reaches barely tolerable.
Primed for Action: Good, but requires a deeper collection. Investing a card gains you 2 resources and an action here, which is significant. You do of course need to have a gun and an upgrade ready to play, which is going to be difficult on just Core and Drowned City because there are no upgrades in that pool… but once you open up your options, this becomes a notable card. Ready for Anything: Good to Excellent. Card draw is what makes decks feel good, it makes your deck more reliable and limits the extent to which random chance can screw you over. Guardian is notably weak in that department, so getting another card that can be played to keep the cards flowing is very good. It also offers some healing on the side which is a nice bonus to get. Hardboiled: Good. For a level 0 card, this can offer a lot of icons. After taking three fight actions you can commit it for four icons to another players test on their turn, for example. But even just as a way to make sure that your third attack against an Elite will find its mark, this is rock solid.
Hunter’s Mark(1): Excellent. Another Vicious Blow variant, increasing our damage and attack value. Unlike VBlow, this one won’t be foiled by an autofail and it can even help the whole team get some attacks in before cashing in on the extra damage. Alice Luxley(2): Good. A repeatable way to deal damage that also allows investigations while engaged. All around solid and a good alternative to Field Agent from Scarlet Keys. I never was a huge fan of the level 0, but this seems fine. Notably a lot of sanity soak on her too (while Field Agent pretty much won’t tank sanity for you at all), which is a weakness for a bunch of investigators that can take her. Bulwark(2): Good. I am a bit sceptical if it’s worth sealing one of your good tokens here, but the effect is certainly nice. A repeatable ready effect is something we barely ever see, so that’s something that this card might get used for. Ignoring attacks makes it easier to use Bold cards and the like, too. So maybe i am even underrating it a bit, but i really don’t vibe with sealing a good token (or even two at the same time) here.
Inspiring Presence(2): Okay. It’s fine, but i find that i rarely want this effect as a one-time deal. If i barely ever play the level 0 from Carcosa, then paying 2xp for an upgrade is unlikely. The most important part of Presence, the Ready effect, is already on the level 0 card, too. That being said, there is some decent value here if you can use all parts of the card (icons, heal, ready) so i am sure this card is for someone. Locked and Loaded(3): Good. An extra ammo on every gun you play takes a few plays of guns before you get a good cumulative value from this card. As a permanent card it does however also not ask anything from you except the XP to upgrade into it, it’s basically like upgrading all of your guns at the same time for just 3xp.
Quickshot(3): Okay to Bad. Playing these from your hand is pretty bad in terms of just raw value, but sometimes that final point of damage simply is required and Quickshot can then do the job without costing you an action. Those moments are rare however and running up to three cards that do very little if you don’t draw them at exactly the right moment is just clogging up your deck. Remington 1859(4): Excellent. With the often somewhat tense resource situation in Guardian decks, it can not be overstated how good a 2 cost gun is for them. I have a very soft spot for the .18 Derringer(2), a survivor gun with 3 bullets, +2 combat and 2 cost. All of these things are present on the Remington(4) which makes it a very attractive deal. Of course it costs 2 more XP than the Derringer, but it also offers two extra free attacks (one on entering, one on leaving play) to sweeten the deal. 5 Attacks for 2 resources? Unheard of outside of melee weapons.
Most useful: Book of War, Hunter’s Mark, Remington(4) Least useful: Quickshot, Inspiring Presence, Remington(0)
Guardian is looking good and healthy here. No real misses and several cards that are sure to make an impression. Art of War and Crowbar stick out as new assets that give the whole class a bit more dimension and perspective, to do things aside from just testing combat to shoot guns and swing machetes. But even the gun archetype gets some cool new pieces here, including the first Guardian pistol since the Carcosa set eight years ago and support for the “Gun Voltron” deck that stacks upgrades on a firearm.
Marion Tavares will be interested in several of these fast events, as they allow her investigator ability to sing. Add some Dodges, Extra Ammo and maybe even a Dynamite Blast or two from the Core Set, add some more stuff from the trait based access and you can cobble something together from the Core and just Drowned City to play an good Marion deck. Obviously, she is an investigator that gains a lot from additional investigator expansions being in your collection, but she’s definitely playable without having to bend too much. Notably, the investigator starter for Guardian is also an event based character, so just getting the Nathaniel Cho deck can increase how much you’ll get out of Marion.
Overall, I’m very happy with all of this.
Seeker
Alton O’Connell: Good. The usefulness of +1 agility on a seeker ally is limited to a very specific audience, but it’s of course a card that some of them are likely to play. I am not a huge fan of the “exactly by 3” trigger, this isn’t going to come up organically all that often and then you do need multiples of them just to collect a clue. That being said, there is no exhaust limitation on the trigger, so if you are able to manage this consistently you could end up with a good payoff here. Certainly a solid card for level 0 and has potential to be useful with shroud reduction effects for cheap free clues. Artistic Inspiration: Good to Excellent. You have to feed cards into it to keep it going, so this is not just going into any deck. But the ability to modify your skill values after the token pull is certainly powerful and with just a bit of synergy this can be a good enabler for the “Exact Science” archetype or just plain reassurance for skill tests of all kinds. Forensic Kit: Bad to Okay. This is a bit of a strange place to put incidental horror healing and there are enough conditions here to make this unappealing. The ability to investigate with agility instead of intellect is fine, but the number of investigators interested in it is again limited. And those usually already have access to this effect through the rogue class. Okay when playing from a small collection, but rapidly falls off with more options.
Mortar and Pestle: Okay, but niche. Like Forensic Kit, there is only a small number of investigators who could be interested, but unlike the Kit, it does have an effect that is hard to replace. Consistent extra income is exactly what you want when your gameplay is playing many spells over the course of the game… but the overlap between “plays spells” and “uses seeker cards” is small. Oculus Mortum: Okay. The damage to Geists is not going to matter a whole lot. That being said, that part is mostly flavor anyways, you run this to gain clues for being attacked which is a pretty neat mechanic if you can trigger it repeatedly. Probably a bit more effort to support with token manipulation than it is worth, but it’s a cute new angle on doing things and it’s at least worth exploring. Uncanny Specimen: Good. It’s fast, cheap and draws a card to replace itself. That alone is worth taking note of, as it can be used to make your deck appear a bit smaller than it actually is to increase the consistency of your draws. If it helps with a test, even better. This seems like a good filler card for level 0 decks just on that base level. If you have synergies with token manipulation (Agatha), the Science tag (Kate) or Myriad (Dream-Enhancing Serum), then this becomes a downright attractive card on its own merits. It will probably not stick around till the end of the campaign, but this seems like an important enabler for low level Agatha in particular.
Correlate All Its Contents: Okay to Good. This does a bunch of different things and you’ll want to be able to use all of them for Correlate to be worth keeping around in your deck. If you can use this to manipulate your test and cash in on a couple secrets this is solid, secrets have become quite valuable and flexible over the last expansions. As long as you can turn those secrets or charges into more value, this is a nice little card for a level 0 deck. Cosmic Revelation(1): Excellent. A great way for Seekers to give the whole team a shot in the arm. It scales heavily with player count, but the option to have the whole team gain the equivalent of an extra action can solve a lot of tight situations. Quick Witted(1): Bad to Okay. It does its job, but honestly it’s just not all that impressive. Only the third one of them gives a better payoff than just your basic Unexpected Courage. If used in a discard strategy, it can be fine as a way to get some miniscule extra value out of the card you have to discard, but it’s really not moving the needle much. Even in a very limited collection, i’d probably run full sets of Perception, Man Dex and Courage before this one.
Misdirection(2): Good? Maybe only Okay? Let’s go with Good to Okay. When you can trigger it, there is some nice value to be gained here, but it’s just very difficult to get consistent payoff here. Sealing the token is also a cost that i find annoying because it subtly impacts all your tests while you wait for this to matter. Scientific Studies Grant(2): Okay. Extra hand slots are difficult to come by and this card is definitely useful. But having to find it in your deck and then play it for 3 resources and an action is quite a tall order. This works well to scale the capabilities of your deck higher as two additional tools in play can be quite significant. But you can’t really build a deck that would rely on this card, it’s not an enabler. Working a Hunch(2): Okay. I am not convinced that this upgrade is really worth it. Working a Hunch(0) is a fine card and worth playing, actually an important card in a smaller card pool even if it falls off once you have everything. But the upgrade doesn’t solve anything that’d be worth spending the extra XP in my opinion. Just finding one clue from somewhere on the map won’t clear this location for you, so you’ll probably just have to move there eventually anyways. And you might as well play WaH(0) then. This changes in solo play of course, WaH(2) is pretty insane there. But that’s the exception.
Antikythera(5): Staple. This gives Seeker an accessory slot item that just keeps handing out value turn after turn after turn. It reminds me a lot of Rogue’s Lucky Cigarette Case in that way. Or the Red Clock. It is level 5, but you get a lot for that here. As long as your investigator takes tests, this just keeps feeding you clues, resources and cards. A level 5 card has a hard time getting the status of a staple card, but this one is just actually good for everyone. Dial of the Ancients(4): Good. Speaking of Researched cards, here’s the one for this set. The condition for researching this one is a bit akward, but luckily it counts if someone else does the evading for you. So it’s not limited to just high agility seekers. The upgrades then have very little to do with this evasion condition, they are token sealing, a weapon or an investigation tool instead. They also all deal with token manipulation, making them enablers for Agatha. The upgrades all serve their purpose fine, but not in an exceptionally good way. As a limit 1 per deck accessory, they are a bit unreliable if you want to build around them in a more meaningful way, but i suppose Seeker has enough ways to find cards in their deck.
Most useful: Artistic Inspiration, Cosmic Revelation, Antikythera Least useful: Quick-Witted, Forensic Kit, Mortar and Pestle
Notably trending a lot more towards the “Okay” line than the “Good” line compared to Guardian, the offerings for Seeker here are a bit of a mixed bag at times. There’s some very neat cards in there even beyond the three i picked out above as most useful. I especially like the continued support for the Exact Science archetype which asks players to hit exact amounts of oversuccess on their tests. The seeker investigator of the set, Lucius, even does support this with his signature asset, marrying this new seeker take on oversuccess with the classic oversuccess archetype from Rogue.
Many of the “okay” cards in this Seeker pool aren’t necessarily bad or underpowered, they are just very niche to specific investigators. As an example, Mortar and Pestle is actually quite solid as a way to generate income, but when you ask for a special focus on spell events in Seeker, then that excludes most of the investigators in that class. It is notably a nice card for Agatha though.
Lucius is a very open-ended character that can access a wide range of cards and play all sorts of strategies from Seeker and Rogue. For that reason, he works very well even if all you have is Drowned City and a Core Set. 100% approved on that front. As for Seeker Agatha (or Sagatha, if you will), she can access Insights in addition to Seeker cards. With just the Core, that is not going to span a lot of ground but thanks to all the token manipulation support from this set alone we can properly enable her anyways.
Seems fair overall. Even if the card-by-card isn’t super exciting, the investigators are properly supported for new players. Meanwhile entrenched players can enjoy some of the exploration in the direction of archetypes that didn’t get much attention before. Having agility support on seeker cards is something to look deeper into, for example.
Rogue
Luger P08: Excellent. Cheap and functionally infinite in ammo, this is a near perfect sidearm if you aren’t planning on fighting as a main job. It asks very little of you in terms of opportunity cost while giving you an ability to dispatch small enemies without having to rely on a main fighter to bail you out. If you want to use this every turn, then the reload actions start to stack up a bit more than is comfortable, but as a sidearm this is a beautiful little piece. Robert Castaigne: Good. I do not think his level zero beats Lonnie Ritter from the Winifred starter deck in a general sense, but he has his niche. And of course not everyone has Lonnie Ritter in their collection in the first place. His ability allows you to get some use out of extra guns in your hand and that’s okay, but not overly exciting. It still does cost the action as if you had just used a gun in your hand after all. But he is an ally with a relevant stat boost and that’s a valuable thing to have available. String Along: Excellent. Evading without disengaging seems like a weird thing to do, but there are a lot of good reasons for it. From parley focused players that want to keep someone around they can chat up, to just keeping enemies bound to you so they won’t engage someone else, there is some good utility in this. You can move around afterwards and move the enemy with you which also has some applications. And then there’s of course the card draw and skill bonus to the evade as well. This seems like a very good card to me.
Where’s The Party: Excellent to Staple. If finding enemies is what you actively want to do, then this soars in how good it is. You can use this to find enemies with victory points, parley victims, annoying enemies you don’t want to risk showing up later. You even exhaust the enemy, giving you ample time to deal with it afterwards. A very strong card that is worth it even if all you want to do is dig for Victory while drawing a card or two. You’ve Had Worse: Okay. There’s been plenty of situations where i would have loved to be able to pay 3 bucks to cancel a Rotting Remains. And since you can use this on either yourself or other players, it has some utility that even “proper” Mystic cancels don’t have at level 0. This solves some common problems that rogue face. There’s alternatives for it in the wider pool, but this does have a place even there. If nothing else, it can go into your level 0 deck before it gets replaced by better cards. Bum’s Rush: Okay to Good. There is some utility in tossing enemies into connecting locations, especially if those are locations you do not plan on going again. In some cases, this can just straight up deal with that enemy. The damage is largely inconsequential, but just evade and move the enemy does a good job of getting rid of something.
Intimidation: Okay to Bad. Another way to get rid of enemies. There are some thing that don’t appeal to me here however. For one, you are using just your combat skill here, meaning you might as well have attacked. Sure, the difficulty might be lower in some cases, but then again you want to use this on enemies with high health to even gain something here. You are also paying 3 resources for this which is a lot. At that point, i’d rather just look to Backstab the fool. There is some situational benefit here too, like getting around Vengeance – but then again, you are also getting around Victory. Yeah, i am not seeing it. Crack Shot: Good. A cool +3 to an attack. This is about as straightforward as it gets. Seems like a great way to help your level 0 deck meet the challenge when something big shows up in an early scenario. Rock solid card that does exactly what it says on the tin. Doppelgänger(1): Okay to Good. Cards that attach to locations in anticipation of things that happen later have a history of not really working all that well in practice. That being said, they also have a history of costing way too much XP while this one is about as cheap as it gets for a non-level 0 card, with 3 cards for 1XP. Do you actually want all three in your deck? The ability to remote evade Hunters in linear scenarios or to keep a freshly evaded enemy down is pretty good and the trigger on “when it leaves the location” does a good job of opening this one up a lot more than existing Trap cards. But still, that is a lot of deckspace devoted to something that probably is rather scenario dependent.
Mob Connections(2Ex): Okay. This thing just eats up your actions before it starts paying off in a way that would justify 4xp on a one-off that is hard to build around. There are some ways to use this and i wouldn’t want to count it out completely, but on a base level this seems like it’s missing something to really be the engine piece it pretends to be. Obscure(2): Okay to Good. Free actions are great and if they allow us to handle a hunter enemy that was about to beat us up, that’s even better. There is some promise in this card and the payoff might just be worth working around its weirdness. Replacing your skill value with the shroud value is a bit more whacky than i would like. Watch This!(3): Good to Excellent. I love Watch This(0) for many reasons, it is actually my favorite player card in the game. Seeing an upgrade to it almost exactly 7 years after its release brings a tear to my eye. All the text is the same, but there’s now 3 wild icons on the side. That makes cashing in on the resources a lot more consistent of course. But the real value here is as a skill that helps with encounter protection. Spiking your willpower from 2 to 5 is amazing for Rogue. It’s a costly upgrade, but well worth it.
Robert Castaigne(4): Excellent. That is quite the glowup that his ability got there. Not only does it turn from an action into a free trigger, but it also attaches card draw or a play action onto the effect. That’s huge! Of course, the level 4 version no longer competes with Lonnie Ritter, but with the likes of Joey(4) or Delilah(3). And you know what, i think he has what it takes to stand out in the range of famously very good rogue allies. You’ve Had Worse(4): Okay to Bad. Arguably a downgrade from level 0, as you are no longer able to use this on yourself. As the rogue, you are often the one most in need of this effect due to being soft to horror treacheries. There is raw power hidden somewhere in the card, but at 4xp this is not worth the trouble. Gatling Gun(5): Excellent. This is the new benchmark for two-handed Firearms. Tons of damage per action, skill value bonuses that enable anyone to use it and a bucket of ammo. What more could you want from your high-end murder implement?
Most useful: Gatling Gun, Where’s The Party, String Along Least useful: Intimidation, Mob Connections, You’ve Had Worse(4)
Damn, Rogue is eating good this expansion. Lots of cards that are just straight up very good. And even the ones that aren’t are at least interesting or fine. I really didn’t expect to find an ally in this set that would be better for Michael McGlen than Delilah, but here we are. And it’s not just the firearm support either, Lucius presence in the box is also felt through several evasion enablers. As a card carrying member of the Rogue Appreciation Guild, all of this gets two thumbs up from me.
As mentioned, Michael McGlen has gotten some special attention in this box. Both the Luger and the minigun are very interesting to him, so his armaments are plenty strong even if this is the first box you are buying in addition to your Core (feel free to use the .45 and Shotgun from there as well!). Definitely very capable from just that small card pool alone. It’s worth pointing out this means that with Lucius and Michael you get a great pair of a seeker and a fighter here which is often the most obvious pairing of investigators to tackle campaigns with. I’d feel confident going into the Drowned City campaign with these two, even as a new player. That strikes me as a very important and commendable thing for them to put into the box. Between Lucius and Michael, you have combat, clues and evasion all covered and are solid or better in all skills. Perfect little core team that splits up among them a small slice of the card pool. So if you are playing in a bigger group, the other players have free range of Mystic, Survivor and most of Guardian.
Mystic
Blood of Thoth: Bad. One of the worst cards in the game, laughably so. Has received significant changes from the optional list of taboos which turns it into a cornerstone card for the doomplay archetype, so if you have any intention of trying this with Amina, check out those changes instead of trying to make this work as printed. Breath of the Sleeper: Okay to Bad. Unlike its sister spell to which we’ll come in a second, activating this without the bonus is kinda awful. Attacking for 1 damage is just never something you want to do. When you do get the bonus, this thing is pretty great, but i suspect this is just another “Song of the Dead” situation where this sort of unreliability just doesn’t fly on a combat card. Eyes of the Dreamer: Excellent to Staple. What a difference it makes to apply these mechanics to a clue spell instead of a combat spell. Activating Eyes without getting a bonus is perfectly fine, actually you can just use it without spending a charge at all. Using your willpower to investigate is super strong. There’s already a card in the pool that does this, so there’s a precedent. And Eyes is just straight up better than Sixth Sense.
The Great Work/Lost Homunculus: Okay to Bad. I think it’s just not good at all. That one XP is nowhere near enough to offset the risk of getting turned into the Homunculus. This is going to impact how you have to play, avoid risks and possibly kneecap your whole team when they lose their Mystic. I know that people do a lot for XP, but truth be told, i feel like this just makes you a burden on your team. Katarina Sojka: Excellent. This seems like a nice way to increase your chances of getting either specific symbol tokens or just symbol tokens in general. She does so with a little less control than Olive McBride offers, but also she doesn’t increase the difficulty of your test as much either. Very cool card.
Sign of Xelotaph: Okay. Tucking away one of the bad symbols can be nice. There were some options available to do so before, but i think Sign of Xelotaph beats all of them. The card does its job, it’s just arguable how worthwhile that job is in the first place. Spectral Shield: Good to Excellent. I am surprised to see a card like this at level 0, this is some really neat stuff. It’s okay as just general soak fueled by charges (like, say some spell assets with 9 charges on them), but with some synergies this can get spicy. Notably, the effect is Forced, so once you have it on the table that could actually eat out your uses on cards when you don’t want to. Whispers of Doom: Good. It’s pricey, but impactful. Most campaigns have annoying non-Elite enemies that are hard to defeat, but easy to evade and they have often been prime targets for cards like this. Instead of chewing your way through the 5 health of a Deep One Bull, you can just dump him to the discard pile. It even counts as defeating, for the purpose of collecting Victory. Against Elites this deals 3 damage… and you know what, that’s also pretty good.
Eye of Ghatanothoa(2Ex): Okay to Good. I am not sure how much one is actually able to capitalize on seeing the next encounter card. There is some value in it for sure, but unless you have specific tech it’s going to be hard to quantify what this does for you. So that leaves Eye as only worth 4xp when you have that tech. Sword Cane(2): Excellent. I’ve stopped playing the level 0, but this upgrade can definitely revive Sword Cane. Making it Fast is huge for this type of card and the ping of damage on entering play can do a lot of good things too. If you are looking for a way to repeatedly evade with your willpower as a Mystic, Cane is one of the best options around. Spiritual Echo(2): Bad. This is just very inefficient for being already so difficult to set up in a way that’d pay off. Just hold this next to Doppelgänger from this set and this becomes quite apparent.
Transfiguration(2): Excellent. The options that are opened up by this card are near endless and the card is utterly unique. No matter if you use this to do elaborate setups where you transplant any card into any investigator you can think of or if you use it in a more reactionary way to change your investigator based on the current situation, it is hard to imagine that you will not find a good use for this card when you have it. Enraptured(2): Excellent to Staple. This card is insane value. There is all sorts of talk about abusing the card to hell and back with Practice Makes Perfect or Amanda. But honestly, there is absolutely no need for that. Just playing it straight to pass an intellect test and put 3 more uses on your Grim Memoir or Eon Chart is exceptional. Or using it with an investigation spell asset to pass your test and then recharge the asset for three more uses. Just wow. Lost Arcana(3): Good. Another great source of fuel for your spells. Is massively overshadowed by Enraptured here, but you can just play both and go completely nuts. Arcana also does offer a continuous output of charges which can be relevant.
Deliverance(3): Good. This is a case where i think i need to see it in action before i can properly evaluate it. It’s absolutely a flashy card and I can easily imagine cases where taking the load off of your team is going to enable them to just finish the scenario or at least make great strides towards it. But how does it compare to something like Ward(2) which, while only affecting one, can be played as a reaction when it’s actually making a difference. Super interesting and exciting card in either case, of course. Eldritch Brand(5Ex): Good. Look, it’s 10XP. But that seems to be actually worth it in this case. Assuming you want to use this with a 4-5XP spell, half of the 10XP already goes towards not needing a second copy. The other 5 then let you draw a specific card and also give an action. This is overall a very good package. While quite the investment, the main trick here will be finding a spell that is worth building around this way. Sixth Sense(4) maybe? I have played curse decks that would have appreciated starting reliably with Eye of Chaos(4), too.
Most useful: Transfiguration, Enraptured, Eye of the Dreamer Least useful: Blood of Thoth, The Great Work, Spiritual Echo
Mystic cards are always such a rollercoaster. The highs are really high, with near-staples and downright transformational cards around. But the lows are equally low as if to balance it out.
There’s a lot i appreciate about this selection of Mystic cards. There is always bound to be some spell assets around for the classic willpower based gameplay, but this set’s offering is noticably different enough from previous ones. What i particularly like about Eye of the Dreamer and Breath of the Sleeper is that over the course of the campaign you don’t upgrade them, but make them more consistent by upgrading the rest of the deck. There is also a lot of variety in these cards, which i find remarkable considering that there are fewer in-class cards in this set because of the Specialist cards taking up a large of the box. Many of these cards, like the upgraded Sword Cane, Whispers of Doom or the Spirit Shield make a really nice impression even in the full card pool.
Gloria isn’t really getting a whole lot of support here, if you are building her deck based on just the Core and Drowned City you will find it difficult to really play to her specific strengths. [EDIT: When i wrote this, i somehow completely missed that Scrying is actually in the Core Set, both in its level 0 and level 3. That is of course huge for Gloria and will enabler her well. She will still need to find the card in her deck before she goes fully online, but she does have her most important card there. So it’s a bit better than i thought!] She is still a generically strong investigator of course, but before you can add some of the key Gloria enablers, Agnes is likely going to do the whole spellcasting thing better. That being said, Gloria has the choice between Guardian, Rogue and Seeker as her side class while Agnes has Survivor. So they do complement each other in that regard neatly.
Magatha Mystic Agatha in Core + TDC will actually have to lean a bit on her Seeker splash to get enough cards to recur and enablers to manipulate tokens. This is somewhat weird as this sort of flips once you open up the card pool where Mystic token manipulation is much more numerous. That is not to say that there’s nothing on the mystic side here, just that it’s a bit sparse to stand on its own.
Overall, this is good. The excellent parts easily outweight the few missteps.
Survivor
Anchor Chain: Good. I actually like this a lot as an event. Putting an enemy down for two turns is close to handling it in many cases and Anchor Chain is doing some good work to allow this in Survivor instead of just Rogue as usual. That’s not to say that this doesn’t also have merits as an asset, of course. But then you likely need to go a bit deeper into the discard synergies to fuel repeated activations. Nautical Chart: Staple. Repeatable ways to gain 2 clues with one action are pretty much always good.There is a lot of raw power in this one, even if you don’t have specific discard synergy. Being able to turn any card in your hand into a Deduction is huge and almost always worth doing. Hand Hook: Okay. When you take a look at available options for one-handed weapons in Survivor, things are actually looking pretty grim. Things usually have some sort of weirdness or conditions layered on top of their mechanics, having to discard stuff is actually not that big of a deal in comparison. Hand Hook regrettably exhausts on attack which stops it from being very good, but again i think that it’s actually a somewhat decent fight event.
Lawrence Carlisle: Excellent. An intellect ally that also gives you resources? That’s something that has proven to be incredibly good. Carlisle is not quite as good as Milan Christopher, but he’s certainly very good and has broad appeal to many investigators. Profane Idol: Okay to Bad. The damage soak version of this card, Improvised Shield, never turned any heads and i don’t expect this one to fare any better. While horror soak is slightly better than damage soak (there’s simply fewer options for it), the accessory slot is also a much harder ask for something like this than a handslot. Catch!: Good. What i said about Anchor Chain and the value of double-evading an enemy is true here as well. I rate this slightly higher than Anchor Chain because that skill bonus can be very signficant. While survivors assets usually aren’t super expensive, getting a solid +3 or +4 is not too difficult here, which is where this becomes an evasion enabler for low-agility investigators.
Unconventional Method: Good to Excellent. As with Catch, the skill bonus comes in clutch here, giving low-intellect investigators another card to gain two clues with one action (the other being Look What i Found from the Core Set). The existence of such a strong alternative in the Core stops Unconventional Method from just being a new staple card, but it’s certainly very strong. Contemplative: Staple. A card for a clue is something that is always going to be playable as long as the conditions aren’t outrageous. In this case the conditions are very soft, asking for investigations or Parley happening. It can even be someone else who does that and that is pretty much a given, meaning this is always worth running in your deck, at least at level 0. Ample Supplies(2): Okay to Bad. What kills this card for me is having to discard it to get to the resources. Without that clause, this could have been a fine long term cash engine for discard decks. Even then, it would have played second fiddle to Carlisle who doesn’t ask you to spend 2xp on it. It’s also super awkward that you can only have 1 in play, but you desperately want to play two in your deck because you need it early enough to matter. There is some potential, but I think the math just doesn’t work out in favor of the card here.
A Glimmer of Hope(2): Good to Excellent. I rarely, if ever play Glimmer of Hope(0) with the plan of committing them. It’s only ever as food for discard effects like Ashcan’s ability or similar. The only one where i’d consider it would be Minh, but she can do better imo. This does change with the upgrade, as getting self-recurring instances of +2 will or +2 agility can be quite nice just on its own merits. If you are just looking for something to toss into your Nautical Charts, then the upgrade is probably not worth it, though. So this upgrade sort of shifts the functionality of the card, turning it into something notably different. I like that a lot. Good Weather(2): Good to Excellent. Talking about +2 skill boosts, this one can apply to any skill and is global and lasts through the whole turn. That seems great, even just at two players this is really nice. And with more players it just becomes a bit absurd. That you get three of these for just 2xp is a steal, but finding the deck slots can be an issue. Improvised Weapon(2): Good to Excellent. -2 to the difficulty is pretty significant and in some cases will even drop the difficulty to zero, allowing you to make short work of a small critter or cultist. But even if not, this is just a nice combat event that also draws a card to replace itself. Pure value.
Last Chance(3): Excellent. Unlike the level 0 version, this one does a great impression even if you still have a couple cards in hand. Even adding “only” 3 wild icons and drawing 2 cards is worth the cost in xp and it can be a lot better than that. Gift of Nodens(5): Excellent. A great capstone for Survivor decks that have some xp to burn. It doesn’t even require all that much specific support, most survivor decks already run some really good skill cards that you likely want to get more use out of.
Most useful: Nautical Chart, Contemplative, Lawrence Carlisle Least useful: Ample Supplies, Profane Idol, Hand Hook
Oh wow, George Barnaby got showered with discard enablers and payoffs, someone must have been really afraid about him not getting by on Core + TDC otherwise. You know what, i appreciate that level of commitment. Considering that he is the most funky of the group, it was probably a good idea to give players immediate guidance through the card selection here to prevent bad first experiences. Glimmer of Hope and Improvised Weapons are great strategic “reprints through upgrade” that get those cards in the hands of not only George, but also Marion. That Imp Weapon didn’t bring the rest of its cycle along is going to eat at me for a long while though! I really wanted my Winging It(2)!
Eh, i’ll live. After all, there is already a crazy amount of survivor flavored investigation in this box to make up for it. Between Charts, Contemplative and Unconventional Methods a level 0 survivor can rival seekers at level zero. What a great self-contained package and if you add Look What i Found from the Core to it you are just straight up set for clues from scenario 1. And on top of that, you get an intellect ally, too. Worth noting that this is not only great for George and Marion, but also for Wendy and (to a lesser extent) Agnes.
There is very little chaff in this class either. While two cards do miss the mark a little for me, the rest of them are all useful in some capacity.
Neutral
Ascetic: Actually, this one kinda breaks my rating system. Playing this straight from scenario 1 is probably more of a challenge run than a good idea. But there are some shenanigans you can get up to with it. It’s most obvious use case is taking it after being killed or driven insane, forcing you to build a new deck mid-campaign. Ascetic can help you be a productive member of your team straight away again. If you want to get cheeky, you can take this to get past a difficult scenario 1 and then abandon your investigator for your real deck afterwards. If you want to get even cheekier, there is another amusing way to use this: You could abandon your investigator after every scenario and build a new one with 10xp (13, if you also take In the Thick of It) tailored to whatever scenario is next. This is probably not a good idea, but it is a funny one. Short Rest: Okay to Bad. A card for a heal is not a great trade and if your plan was to make everyone take this card and then chain a bunch of them in one action… let me tell you that trading 8 of these for 8 heal is still an awful, awful deal. Do it once for the memes, if you have to get it out of your system, i guess. I can imagine some situations where this is decent enough in a level zero deck, possibly even only with one or two copies, not even making use of the Myriad. But that’s about it. This is filler for the level 0 Marion deck, i guess.
Confidence: Good. In the right deck, it seems trivial to turn this into an Unexpected Courage and still easy to scale it to 3 or even 4 icons. Not much to say about this one, it’s going to be fairly obvious when you want it and when you don’t. Spiritual Healing(4): Okay. It’s priced right, after all if this gets too cheap then it just makes the game easier for everyone forever. But i don’t see myself going for this even in emergencies. By the time i start worrying about trauma to the point that i want to throw 4xp at the problem, i will be packing some expensive healing or soak to counteract several points of trauma at the same time. If Roland is sitting at 4 mental trauma, going down to 3 is just not *that* much of a difference.
Taking Stock
Before i move into the Specialist cards, i want to take a short moment just to take stock until here because while the Specialist cards are the new flashy thing i believe that the class cards still make out the most of what you get out of this investigator expansion. Especially as a new player the Specialist cards are very narrow in who can play them… in some cases a new player might not even own a character that can use that card. So i decided to not pull them into my usual evaluation of the card set for purposes of determining how well the investigators are supported and how much this set adds to a fledgling card pool.
Luckily, the impressions so far have been almost universally positive. There’s always a few cards that aren’t quite what i want them to be in every set, that’s unavoidable. But by and large this set offers up six investigators, five of which are very well supported in this box. Gloria is the outlier – while she can be played successfully just based on her card pool, unlocking her investigator specific power requires a bit more input from outside the set. [EDIT: This was written without remembering that Scrying(0) and Scrying(3) are both in the Revised Core, which is certainly helping Gloria a lot more than i gave it credit for here.] Considering that Gloria is kind of our bonus investigator for this set, this seems fair enough – i won’t hold it against a set when it has bonus stuff in it.
In terms of archetype support and interesting directions, the box also delivers. We have some support for a variety of things, from firearm based strategies in both Guardian and Rogue over discard synergy in Survivor to sealing in Seeker in Mystic. Plus various other things on the side. Honestly, this box is a real nice addition to a collection of any size, just based on the class stuff already.
With that out of the way, let’s dive into the Specialist cards. Most of this is probably going to be more interesting for entrenched players, but i’ll try to keep an open mind when cards are playable by Core or Drowned City investigators as well and check if they are of use to new players too.
Specialist
Library Pass(1): Good. This is another one of those cards that you can abuse to hell and back and break the game through interactions with cards from previous sets. But even just played “as intended” this offers good value, saving on resources and play actions as you keep cycling in new tomes. A bit limited in that you need to run a certain amount of Tomes in the first place for it to be worth it. Dreams of the Clay(1): Excellent. Mystics can do better, but anyone else with these traits can use this very well. Commit to a test you are favored to pass first, then cancel a different test later on and you got a nice bit of encounter protection for very little cost. Inquisitive(1): Okay. Near guarantees triggering some payoff from either an oversuccess or an exact success card. Is that payoff going to be good enough to warrant spending a card? You do also get a wild icon here and the card is cheap to get, but deckspace is not unlimited and i don’t think this has quite enough intrinsic value.
Bound for the Horizon(2): Excellent to Staple. Discarding a card for a move is a great deal, even moreso if you can get value out of the discard itself. Notably George is on the list of investigators that can play this one and i think he will usually want to. There is also a bunch of other survivors and rogues that would be able to make fantastic use of this. Seems like a very good card to me! Forbidden Sutra(2): Okay. It’s somewhat unimpressive when held next to some of the comparable Mystic cards (and Sutra is basically a Mystic card). I suppose it does its job and the token manipulation isn’t bad (just difficult to sustain) so i won’t call it bad, but that horror cost is rough. Walter Fitzpatrick(2): Excellent. Hey, it’s Milan Christopher for Parley! Clearly a very good card in its archetype, but 2xp is enough of an opportunity cost to not make him an autoinclude.
Name Your Price(2): Staple. There is a rogue event called Small Favor that deals 1 damage for 2 resources. Name your Price is basically Small Favor, except on playing it you draw 9 extra cards (all of which are Small Favor) and gain 9 actions (all of which are used to play Small Favors). You have to pay the resource cost for all of them, but drawing 9 cards and gaining 9 actions? Amazing. (This review was brought to you by the Council of Click Economy) Name Your Price(2): Okay to Bad. I love that this exists just because it’ll be fun to pull off. But if we are evaluating the card on how useful it actually is aside from bragging rights and doing it because you can… then it’s kinda jank. There is a decktype that hoards money and will reach 20+ resources fairly easily. That deck doesn’t plan on spending those during most of the scenario, but in the final turns it can just dump the resources on closing out the scenario. Usually this takes the form of spending 12 resources on Intel Reports or the like, but that’s where i could see an unironic use of Name Your Price. True Awakening(2): Good to Excellent. A bit restrictive XP-wise for such a generic card, but this is good value and an effective deck thinner. Marion can take this and for her this is a really nice boost to her engine. I imagine this can find its way into various other decks as well. Double Down(2): Good to Excellent. A very flexible card for rich investigators. Throwing money at a problem until it goes away is a great way of dealing with things and up to 7 wild icons will even make a low-willpower rogue finally snap out of being Frozen in Fear. That this can not only work as treachery mitigation, but also to just pass other crucial tests puts this ahead of many other options. You can even commit it to someone else, paying to make their problems go away. Very nice card.
Captivating Performance(3): Okay to Good. An asset that promises an extra action every turn has to be taken seriously, but there are a bit too many hoops to jump through to get there. I imagine you will often find that the extra action has been severely limited by what you did before. And if all you get from this card is an extra resource action or card draw, then it’s sort of underwhelming as there are plenty other cards that can offer that at 3xp. I believe this can probably be taken to a place where it’s good, but it is going to fight you all of the way to there. Cowl of Sekhmet(3): Okay. Once an enemy engages you (for example after drawing one), this won’t protect you anymore, but you can use this to sneak past enemies already on the map. This strikes me as a card that can potentially trivialize some scenarios, but not quite worth the 3xp if you just want to run it on its own merits as a generic defensive asset. Dakota Garofalo(3): Excellent. As mentioned with Bound for the Horizon earlier, extra movement is a premium ability. Dakota requires enemies to move to, so she is strictly for enemy handlers, but that’s fine. Her ability is still quite strong. Move and Engage does bypass some pesky enemy keywords (Aloof, Elusive) while helping to combat others (Hunter). I think this is a fine ally, her only problem is going to be the usual one for allies: There is only 1 ally slot by default and there are some filthy allies around in the class pools. That being said, i can see her be worth running Charisma for.
Nose to the Grindstone(2): Okay to Good. I value this as an enabler for Kymani who otherwise doesn’t have the intellect or combat value to use most of the tools they get special access to. Wilson also can use this to make up for having no access to Crafty to boost his tool use. The 3xp cost puts it into a spot where less specialized investigators likely won’t go for this, though. Sound Support(3): Good to Excellent. Taking the pressure in terms of horror and damage not only from you, but also your teammate with a slotless asset is quite good. The list of investigators that can run it is fairly narrow however and doesn’t include anyone from the Core or Drowned City. Trench Armor(3): Good. A card that works very well with the Bold line of cards which need to be played with the first action of the turn. Only six investigators in the whole game can run this card so far, but Trish is among them and she too gains a lot from being able to ignore attacks of opportunity. When everything else fails, this is still a 3 health soak for 2 resources which is respectable. I think this is quite good, but sadly very limited in who can take it.
Blood of K’n-yan(3): Okay. 3xp for a spell that banishes an enemy to the shadow realm. Requires some building around with the empty handslots, which has some neat enablers in the wider card pool, but very spread around. I don’t think this is quite there yet, but i believe that the designers are building towards something there with all the handslot matter cards we’ve sporadically been getting. Storm Ruler(4): Okay. Wildly inconsistent between dealing 1 and 4 damage, but to get there you need to reveal symbol tokens. I don’t know that this is really worth the effort. I do like that it only exhausts if you want to make the symbols count, so if you don’t get any you can try again afterwards. There’s a chance i am underestimating this one. Motivational Speech(4): Excellent. Very powerful card that saves actions, costs and even gives a bit of extra value from ignoring the activation cost completely on that first use. A very worthwhile upgrade to the already great level 0 card from Scarlet Keys.
Archibald MacVeigh(5): Bad to Okay. An ally with +1 int, and after you use his secrets to pay for events he effectively was free. But that doesn’t help with the resource situation when you set up your board at all. And converting other cards’ secrets to money is rarely worth it, usually we expect a secret to me more valuable than that. I don’t hate the text on the card, but at 5xp it’s priced out of range where you can tinker with it. Library Pass(5): Excellent. The biggest problem with level 1 Pass is that it’s a limit 1 per deck card you need to find before you can use it. This solves that problem perfectly, making it permanent. Even adds some other benefits on top to sweeten the deal. Great engine. Mauser Tankgewehr(5): Okay. Has some fun uses for Dexter and Mateo, but the rest of the people that can take it have other options that are a bit less unwieldy. I like this to take a 3 combat investigator to 8 combat, basically moving them from “can defend themselves if they have to” to “crackshot sniper” in one go.
Sacred Oath(5): Okay. Seems like an interesting option for Preston or Diana, possibly Patrice. But most investigators that can use this would rather take less restricted cancels that also don’t take that much XP to buy. That being said, Sacred Oath should probably not evaluated as a 5xp card, but as a pack of three 2xp cards that need to be bought as a bundle. And i think they are fine for that benchmark.
On Their Heels(5): Good. 2 resources for 5 testless clues is really good in terms of value. The damage option can also be nice, as long as it saves you an action in the process. Zoey could combine the dogs with her cross to defeat small fry that engages her without effort, for example. Also, Whippoorwills hate hate hate these good bois. Just be aware that these stay in play after being used up and there’s pretty much no way to discard them at will. They also use a unique type of use. So it’s 5 uses and that’s it… even if you have a second copy in your deck you likely won’t be able to play it. Dimensional Vortex(5): Okay. The ultimate panic button, this solves any enemy based problem your team might currently have anywhere on the map. That can be a huge ace to have up your sleeve. It’s not the type of card that usually sees 5xp thrown at however. Memories of Another Life: Staple. The best case for this card is insane, getting to play any level 0 card from your collection without paying anything for it is a huge swing. This could allow your Mystic (or Lucius) to just casually drop a free Leo De Luca into play on turn 1. Just need to find a test to succeed at. It’s immensely powerful and (as long as you have a solid card pool) will always find a great option to solve whatever problem you currently have.
Most useful: Bound for the Horizon, Dakota Garofalo, Memories of Another Life Least useful: Archibald MacVeigh, Forbidden Sutra, Inquisitive
Some hits, some misses. Overall i’d call the specialist cards less impressive than what we have seen in the classes, but there are of course still some highlights. Just the fact that many of these are only available to a very limited group of characters and that often the card is only actively interesting for like one to three of them makes these appear a bit more narrow than I’d like. For being this narrow, many of them could have been pushed a bit more. I mean, it’s not really a neutral card if only 3 people can meaningfully play, right? So they don’t deserve to be balanced as conservatively as Neutral cards. That being said, there is some good stuff here, both in terms of build-arounds, specific archetype support and generically good cards.
Final Verdict
So, is this investigator set worth getting? To get the obvious out of the way: If you have a decent collection already, let’s say Core + Starters + 2 or more investigator boxes, you do not need to fear that the specialist cards would end up being to narrow for you. At that point you will have 26 or more investigators, which is where the options for Specialist stuff open up. The class cards also have a lot of fun stuff in them, enriching existing archetypes. And the investigators are also great. So yeah. get this box. It’s good.
The more interesting question is how well it squares up as a first (or second) buy for a new player after the Core. This usually depends on if the player cards are cohesive enough to support archetypes without stuff from other sets and on whether the investigators are playable just with what’s in the box. For this set, there is also the concern about the specialist cards however, which due to their narrow focus are more tailored towards those players that can support all those various niches.
My take is that someone who gets this set as their first expansion will not regret it… but it would also not be something I’d necessarily recommend. For a new player, i’d recommend going for sets that give you as much bang for your buck as possible, to get your card pool up faster. If you want to get to a position where you can engage in meaningful deckbuilding, then getting more cards will be better for you than getting fewer, but more powerful ones. The specialist cards from this set don’t do a whole lot for a new player overall. While they might play the occasional one, like On Their Heels in Roland or Dreams of the Clay in Lucius, most of these cards simply need a bit more behind them to shine. That being said, if you want to get this box because the investigators appeal to you or simply because it’s the thing that you see on the shelf in your LGS… it’s perfectly fine. The investigators are well supported in this set, with only Gloria being a bit left out (but to be fair, she kind of is even in the full cardpool…). So you’ll immediately be able to open this box and build decks for a Marion, Lucius and Michael teamup for example and can pit that against Night of the Zealot. Or the Drowned City campaign, once it releases. The player cards are pretty coherent and centered around the investigators in the set. Which also are very different from those in the Core, so you get a good experience from all the class cards.
I’m still recommending either Edge of the Earth or the range of Investigator Starter Decks as the best way to give your collection an immediate shot in the arm. But this is perfectly fine as well, as long as you don’t mind that there’s a group of cards in here of which you’ll have to set a few aside for later.
A new expansion is aaaaalmost upon us, the full list of player cards is available (well, kinda), time to do another round of predictions which cards (or group of cards) i believe will make the biggest impact on the full card pool. Part of the fun of this is doing it on very early vibes, so i try to get it out as soon as possible. We don’t even have images of every card in english. Keep in mind that i am translating the card’s titles freely, they might turn out to be slightly different when we have the cards in hand ourselves. I might also not get every detail of their text 100% but the minutiae between “taking an action” and “performing one” or other rules lawyery are not really important for the purpose of this article. As with previous expansions, i will first go back to my predictions from the last time and see how well those held up… or if i was just completely off-base on them. As a reminder, “Most game-changing” is not the same thing as “most powerful”, it’s more about providing something the card pool didn’t have available before. That being said, power can certainly play a role as well as it’s an important factor in how playable a certain card is.
Looking back at Hemlock Vale
Here’s the predictions i made when Hemlock Vale was brand new: Link to article. Let’s see how on point they were! Or not…
Ancestral Token: I am very comfortable with this shout. Token has taken the spot that’d usually be occupied by Hallowed Mirror in a decent amount of Guardian lists and done excellent work there. Definitely belongs on the lower end of this Top 10, and Cleaning Kit definitely made the bigger splash, but still I think this one lived up to expectations and i’ll score this as a win. Survival Technique: I called this one out as an engine card with future potential. I suppose that’s still where i’d file it, as it didn’t really manage to break out in a meaningful way yet. Looking at arkhamdb, there are very few decks with it, mostly around Breaching the Door many times with Daniela or abusing Hiding Spot. Not sure this really belonged on a game changers list yet. Snitch: I believe this one got a bit of an overreaction by the community, including myself. It’s not a bad card by any means, but as far as i am aware, people aren’t really putting Parley stuff in their deck with the express purpose of enabling Snitch. From my own decks, i mostly stuck with simply playing Pilfer for burst clues in Rogue. Obviously, Snitch is an excellent card to play when you are already doing Parleys for other reasons, but seems to see little play outside of Alessandra decks. I don’t think i can call this one an accurate prediction, neither did it break out of its niche nor did it make its niche more prominent. Bewitching: Yep, this one is as good as anticipated. Shows up in plenty of rogue lists and especially Rita is almost unthinkable without Bewitching in her deck now. The capability of serving up Dirty Fighting (and making it so you don’t need two of them) and also finding your Easy Marks is just very, very good. Ravenous Myconid: Arguably, this one suffered from its own success. Quickly confirmed to be indeed broken and boring, it’s now mostly considered to be a card you play once to see it for yourself and then lose interest in it. I’ll count that as a prediction that came to pass, it’s just an inherently broken card that shouldn’t exist in this form. Blessed Blade: No surprise here, Blessed Blade(4) is every bit as good as advertised. Dreadfully boring, but it’s hard to argue against it being one of the new benchmarks when it comes to weapons. Matchbox: Gets played in lots of decks and the look at arkhamdb shows it’s not just in Darrell either. From Wendy over Wilson to Patrice, there’s just no arguing that this low investment card has a lot to offer while asking for very little. I appreciate that it’s not just Keyring fodder either, it’s actually quite solid on its own merits. Call the Beyond: Flexible, efficient, cheap. What’s not to like. I find it very strange that there are only six decks on arkhamdb using this card. Even stranger that none of them is a Daisy deck doubling down on Grim Memoirs. I suppose this means that the card didn’t actually catch on, but i find this very hard to accept. Insert an “Am I out of touch? No it’s the community that is wrong.” meme here. I’ll chalk this up as a miss on my part, but i am not happy about it. Long Shot/Strong-Armed: Wild how much a difference the 1XP cost makes here. I have not seen Strong-Armed in a lot of decks or talked about much since release aside from a few Silas lists. But Long Shot is EVERYWHERE, including those very same Silas lists. And many, many others. I will count this as a win on the back of Long Shot alone, that card really moved the needle on what a survivor fighter can do. The Masks: Yeah, these are good. Overestimated by many, but that doesn’t stop them from being very, very influential on decklists all over. One can make an argument that they belong on #2 behind Long Shot, but as a whole they really did a lot to enable some investigators like Skids or Wilson. While at the same time being just a great one-off in most lists that is hard to argue against. All of this is enough that i personally think that the #1 spot is deserved. Wolf and Sparrow definitely stand out as the two most universally useful ones. Fox is the one that suprised me the most with how much better its recharge trigger actually is than i thought. Cat is a bit more marginal, but doesn’t have a lot of competition for what it does. For once, it seems like the Seeker contribution to a cycle is the one that made the least impact. Overall, these are a great addition to the card pool though, i am very happy with how much they enable and i think their power level is spot on, too.
Huh, not bad. No super embarassing total miss here. Survival Technique is a sleeper, i overvalued Snitch and apparently i am the only one thinking that Call the Beyond is incredible. Still, that leaves me with a solid 7/10 predictions. I’ll take it!
Some cards that might have earned a spot on the list instead of my misses: Cleaning Kit: Turns up in a surprising amount of different decklists all over arkhamdb. Fueling anything from chainsaws over fingerprint kits to ornate bows and shotguns, this one carved out a nice niche for itself. Confound: Everyone went crazy over Snitch, but honestly Confound might just be the better card. A double clue and a double evade in one action is a super impactful play. The test on the card keeps it in check from being completely nuts, but i believe Confound is what most people (myself included) thought Snitch would be. Gabriel Carillo: Personally, i think he’s better value than Milan. If Milan would finally get the 1XP chain he deserves, i’d likely play Gabriel more often than Milan. British Bulldog: Amazing card that belongs in the top 5 of the list. Both the ability to use agility to fight and the ability to bypass Aloof are incredible and this is now one of the best pistols in the game. Rod of Carnamagos: Long story short, the rules lawyers won this one and now Rod of Carnamagos is the best thing you can do with chaos tokens. If you use tokens, you want Rod, it’s not even a contest. Occult Reliquary: It’s another permanent way to gain extra slots. A handslot, even. This sort of thing has huge influence on what your decks can do.
Finally, these cards aren’t quite cut out for a top ten of game changers, but turned out to be a lot better than anticipated. So here’s a shoutout to: Bank Job: This card plays so much better than it reads, it’s incredible. Became a bit of a rogue staple for myself and has outperformed Faustian at times. I really like this one, easily the best of the Doubles in the set in my opinion. Pitchfork: Another overperformer that works out so much better in practice than it reads. When compared to the Sledge, the ability to be able to split up the two actions per attack over two turns is super relevant, as is the fact that it only eats one action when you miss. If you have to, you can have three tries at hitting something with a Pitchfork in one turn. With a Sledgehammer, you get one try. This is actually an insanely good weapon for 0XP. Hatchet: Yet another overperformer. When i previewed this card during spoiler season, i kind of thought of it as a quirky card that is more gimmicky than good. It has however proven itself to be really good in campaigns with chunky enemies since then. Rita uses it particularly well due to the nice interaction between her investigator ability, Hatchet and Dirty Fighting. But many others get tons of security from it as well, as the high fight bonus on the weapon makes it super reliable.
The Drowned City
But enough looking back, let’s check out the new goodies. Here’s my ten picks for most enabling from the Drowned City:
[Spell asset with 9 charges. For an action, Investigate using willpower instead of intellect. You may spend charges to draw that many extra chaos tokens. You choose 1 revealed token. If you succeed and one of the ignored tokens is identical to the one you chose, get an extra clue.] #10: Eyes of the Dreamer. I think this one straight up replaces Sixth Sense at level 0. It gives you the crucial ability to use willpower for your investigations, the rest of the text on Sixth Sense(0) has never been that relevant. Although one could certainly explore if the new mystic ally, Katarina Sojka, changes something about how Sixth Sense(0) can be used, i would wager that Eyes of the Dreamer will come out on top in most cases even if you aren’t using it with any specific synergy. Once you do, Eyes(0) might just stay in your deck till the end of the campaign.
[Unconventional Methods is Act of Desperation for investigating. Discard an item from hand or play when playing it, then investigate with +X to the test. X is the discarded card’s cost. If you discarded from play, gain an extra clue. Contemplation is Long Shot for investigating. Commit to any parley or investigate test at your or connected location. On success, the performing investigator gains a clue at their location.]
#9: Unconventional Methods and Contemplation. I am bundling these two. Survivors are so good at investigating by now, i am not even sure this counts as game-changing anymore or if these are just more excellent cards for the pile. Both of these allow Survivors to add to the clue effort, even if they aren’t necessarily good in intellect themselves. That’s worth a lot and both of these are level 0 which just seems insanely good to me considering how little they ask of you to do their thing. The level 0 part is what makes me want to put them on this list. I expect to add these to a lot of decks alongside Look What I Found.
#8: Cosmic Revelation. Support Seeker? In my Arkham? About time, i say. This does a fine impression of Ever Vigilant, but both the missing discount on the played cards and being forced to spread the effect round the table are bigger factors than many seem to admit when calling this a better Ever Vigilant. Without a Stick to the Plan to back it up either, i don’t expect this card to gain an importance that would be even remotely comparable to Ever Vigilant. It’s definitely a good card though and its best case is fairly hot for a lowlevel card.
#7: Gift of Nodens. I really like this one. It gives Survivor a card to spend 5xp on and get an appropriate amount of power for it which is still rare. I also like that it doesn’t need much building around, cards like Resourceful, Take Heart and Sharp Vision/Brute Force are in many red decks anyways just for value. I think this will make quite a few decks, both as a focus and as just a piece of late-campaign value.
#6: Luger P08. This is a near perfect sidearm for anyone who doesn’t expect to fight as their main job, but don’t want to go fistycuffs on Ghouls either. Being a level 0 card is pretty clutch here as it puts the gun into the hands of a lot of different investigators with lowlevel rogue access. With its ammo being virtually unlimited, it’s even an intriguing target for stacking upgrade cards on the pistol.
#5: Crowbar. This card does play a super important role in making blue investigators less one-dimensional. It enables flexing into clue getting in a similar way that Thieves Kit or Lockpicks do for rogues and that does a lot to make your Guardian investigators feel more well-rounded. It does a job, it does it well and it does a job that no other Guardian card was able to do before. That’s really all i expect from a level 0 card.
[Enraptured(2) is a Practiced and Developed skill that commits for an intellect and a wild icon, max 1 per test. If successful on an investigation test, place up to 3 secrets or charges on assets at your location.]
#4: Enraptured(2). I am really high on this one. Adding either 3 charges or secrets is an incredible payoff for a skill and the wild icon also enables Mystics to use it with their spells. An very significant upgrade to a card that was marginal at best at level 0. This can fuel a lot of strategies, no matter if you are just using spell assets, if you are Bestowing Resolve or if you do fancy shenanigans with Art of War. The community better not pull a Call the Beyond on this one.
[Sun Tzu’s Art of War is a unique Tome asset that takes up a handslot. It has uses, 3 secrets. As a reaction, after playing a Tactic event, you may spend a secret and exhaust the book to return that Tactic back to your hand from the discard at the end of turn.]
#3: The Art of War. Guardian doesn’t get a lot of engine cards, so when one pops up it’s something to notice. Recurring a specific Tactics card and allowing you to play it on four consecutive turns (or more, if you can get more secrets) is something that can really elevate some of those events. This is like 80% of a Dayana, except at level 0 and with an (arguably) easier slot. Fantastic. You could go for pure value and play your Practice makes Perfects way more than is reasonable. You could do some dirty stuff with One in the Chamber, firing an empty gun four times with +3 to the test. Or maybe you just want to make sure that you get enemies to interact with and go On The Hunt a lot. While 4 cost and a handslot is not a small order, this is a card that has a lot of potential to do something really cool. Will i be taking it too far and do dumb shit with Art of War and Double Double in Skids? Probably. But i have no doubt that even without going all-in, this one will be able to be very good.
#2: Gatling Gun. It’s still a gun and thus limited by ammo of course. But compared to what else is around for high XP guns, i think that Gatling Gun just set the new benchmark, with only Flamethrower being in its tier. It being a rogue card instead of a Guardian card also puts it into the class that has the ammo events to keep on spinning those barrels. There’s some doomsaying about difficulty levels when facing a swarm of enemies, but the way i see it the most likely outcome in that case is that i am just going to pass my 13 vs 8 test and nuke those suckers. Also… how did it come to the point where there’s a swarm of enemies on the board, after all you have a Gatling Gun to prevent that from happening.
#1: Transfiguration. I mean, if we are talking game-changers, then it’s hard to beat a card that enables us to combine any card with any investigator (without resorting to multiplayer shenanigans). The existence of the card is an immediate shot in the arm for Lola of course, but also gives a new great use to the somewhat underwhelming and utilitarian Mystic 0-2 splash. Is Transfiguration actually powerful and good? Honestly, i don’t think so. Having a deck that needs to function under the constraints of two investigators is going to be tough, there will be times where you simply don’t draw into the card you based everything on. But that doesn’t stop it from promising and delivering a huge wave of new deck ideas and possibilities. Beautiful card that cracks deckbuilding options wide open and that will spawn lots and lots of new deck ideas.
Honorable mentions
I like Lost Arcana, but i don’t think it’s as good as Call the Beyond. And since i seem to be the only one liking that one, i am just going ahead and assume that Lost Arcana isn’t going to make an impression beyond a few cute decks that use it with True Magick. Also, Enraptured(2) kinda muscles it out for many use cases. Deliverance is clearly a flashy card but i don’t really have an idea about how desirable the effect is ultimately. I sort of expect that just running your usual cancels is going to be better. Alternatively, that someone finds a way to abuse the hell out of it and breaks Deliverance. The cycle of Nautical Charts, Anchor Chain and Hand Hook is pretty good, but nothing too special or new. As a sidenote, I expect that Hand Hook will surprise people by how good it actually is once you stop comparing it to Nautical Charts (as if that would actually be a choice you’d have to make during deckbuilding) and start comparing it to the survivor weapons it competes with. I hold both Ornate Bow and the Beretta M1918 in high esteem because through their high skill value bonus they enable some investigators to fight that otherwise wouldn’t be able to. Because of that, i do like the Mauser Tankgewehr quite a bit and think that it can definitely bring something new to the table as well. But of the investigators that can take it, this mostly concerns only Dexter and Mateo which is hardly game-changing. This is actually an issue for this list that i ran into with Specialist cards in general. They often are restricted to a very small circle of investigators that would consider the card, even if the circle of investigators that can play it was similar to that of a regular in-class card. Gave most of them a very niche footprint. Antikythera is a very good level 5 card for Seeker. Now, Seeker does of course already have plenty of high level XP outlets thanks to their obligatory Researched cards. But they are genuinely lacking a generically good accessory. This is that card, just tons of value. God, i love Watch This(3). Nothing else to say, really. Watch This(0) is my favorite Arkham card, seeing an upgraded version makes me feel things. Robert Castaigne seems like a really good ally, but i wonder how he fares next to Delilah.
Eh, i’ll stop here. I’ll do a full review of the set soon enough. Anyways, that was my list of game-changers. Looking forward to revisiting this one when the next set drops!
