Month: January 2026

Intro

Something i always do after a new set has been revealed is going over the full spoiler and pick out the candidates that i anticipate to be the ones with the most long-lasting impact. Now, the Core 2026 is designed to be a new start for Chapter 2 and for the most part i do look at it from that lens on this site. But for this article specifically i want to look at the new Core from the perspective of someone who adds it to their full “Legacy” card pool. So while cards like Dorothy are going to be quite important for Chapter 2 players, they are of course barely a blip on the radar for anyone who can just run Milan or Kirby instead. Since the Core offers a smaller pool of cards than a full investigator expansion and also comes with some reprints, we are going to have to lower our bar for what makes the cut as a game-changer a bit… but i think we should still be able to point to ten cards that are relevant even against the backdrop of 10 years of product.
But before we get into that, as is tradition by now, a look at my predictions after Drowned City and how well they held up now that we actually played with the cards.

Looking back at Drowned City

Here’s the predictions i made last year: <Click me, I’m a link!>. Alright then, let’s see how well i did then. One point for each accurate prediction. Last year i scored 7/10, I hope to do better this time.

#10 – Eyes of the Dreamer: Sure. This is a somewhat relevant card, both as just a general level 0 investigation card and as an enabler for token shenanigans. Nothing *truly* gamechanging, but as the last spot in the list this is fine. I count this one in my favor.
#9 – The Survivor Investigate Package: I’ve definitely been overestimating Unconventional Method, it’s a lot more clunky than i expected. Contemplative is every bit as good as advertised however. I think i can’t give myself a point there on the pure outrageous fact that i snubbed Nautical Charts in this context. Unforgivable.
#8 – Cosmic Revelation: After the usual cries for taboo at reveal, it turns out that actually nobody gives a crap about this card. I was already fairly mild on it, but it’s just been complete silence around this one. Definitely can’t count this one either.
#7 – Gift of Nodens: I’ve seen some cool decks around this, done one myself. I also see it mentioned in discussions around new skills all the time. Clearly this had a lasting impact.
#6 – Luger P08: This is not the sort of card that gets a lot of talk, so let me reference arkhamdb for this one. Couple of decks on there, but almost all of them are Michael decks. My prediction was based on the Luger having importance outside of Michael too, so i think i can’t in good conscience count this as an accurate prediction.
#5 – Crowbar: Well, nobody uses it so i guess that makes me the idiot. Truly a “No, everyone else must be wrong.” moment for me. I still like it myself and i have used it to great effect in a couple of decks now. But if i am the only one, then I can not count this one as a win for me.
#4 – Enraptured(2): If anything, i placed this too low. I believe at this point everyone agrees that this card is just nuts and belongs on the taboo watchlist. Win.
#3 – Book of War: Gets talked about a lot and plenty of decks are being made around it. I probably placed it a bit higher than it deserves, it’s not quite as powerful as i thought. But definitely a card that belongs on this list and i will count it as a win.
#2 – Gatling Gun: Shows up in very few decks on arkhamdb. While a highlevel card like this is never going to have the same widespread impact as a level 0 card, this clearly didn’t make enough of a wave for me to count it in my favor. I believe i was right about the things i said about this gun, that it raises the ceiling for firearms and is only paralleled by the Flamethrower in how well it clears enemies. But apparently that’s not something that many are interested in, or at least not at that price.
#1 – Transfiguration: Literally one of the most unique cards in existence. This win was never in question. Like with the Gatling, there is only a small amount of decks with this on arkhamdb, but unlike the Gatling, Transfig is a card that is very much being discussed all the time and introduced deckbuilding options like no other card since Versatile. That counts.

So … 5/10 then, huh. Well, that could have gone better. For example i could have mentioned these five cards instead which inspired the community much more than Crowbar and Cosmic Revelation.

Nautical Charts: The big one. A contender for best level 0 investigation asset in the game now. This is a huge card, even without any special synergy. Just the ability to say that for the rest of the game you are only drawing Deductions is incredible and that’s just the floor of the card, synergies are everywhere in the Survivor cardpool and you’d almost have to purposefully avoid them not to have any in your deck. This should have been #2 on the list, possibly even #1.
Where’s The Party: And this might be #3. I found this to be just fantastic, even as just a generic draw. But that the enemy comes into play exhausted is sooooo good too. I am not sure why people talk about Kicking the Hornet’s Nest still, this is better on so many levels.
Antikythera: It’s just so good, i want to put this into every deck that can run it ever. All it asks from you is to take a test per turn. The easiest level 5 card to just put into your deck ever.
Memories of Another Life: Same, tbh. If you can run this, it is just objectively one of the best cards you could add to your deck no matter what it is you are doing. If Enraptured(2) wouldn’t blow the whole roof off with how outlandishly powerful it is with just a tiny bit of recursion, this would be the card with the most raw power in the Drowned City set. Getting turn 1 Leo De Luca for free is one hell of a drug and again that’s just the start.
Glimmer of Hope(2): I severely underestimated this one as well. This really plays a lot different from Glimmer(0). Where the level0 only exists as food for other effects, Glimmer(2) is actually genuinely good just on its own and solves a lot of the encounter deck for you by itself.

Ooof, not my finest hour, let’s move on quickly.

Looking ahead at the 2026 Core Set

Well then, here are my picks for the new Core:

#10: Second Sight. Similar to Eyes of the Dreamer and Sixth Sense in its role, it allows Mystics at level 0 to use their intellect for investigating. Unlike those other two spells, it can run out, but revealing 4 cultists is probably going to take a long time. The more relevant drawback compared to Eyes and Sense is the resource cost of 4. But for that you get the ability to trade in extra charges for clues… and that seems very worth it to me.

#9: Decisive Strike. Rogue has few combat events and the one that is most often played, Backstab, is notably a huge drain on resources. Decisive Strike then comes in with three relevant upsides: For one, it tests combat instead of agility. It gives a sizeable skill bonus while Backstab pretty much assumed you were holding a Manual Dexterity to go with it. And it actually makes money instead of costing money. All of these are fairly significant… but of course if you specifically need your combat event to deal 3 damage, then Backstab is still your best bet. While Decisive Strike is currently without a good home in chapter 2 due to both of the investigators only being passable at using it instead of actually competent enough that you feel good about spending your xp on this, there are several investigators with access to this card that have 4+ combat in chapter 1 and they may very well use this event to great success. I am particularly liking this as a possible supplement to Michael’s firearms for when the cops confiscate his stuff. And as a particular spicy pick, Marion can use it if she takes Gambits as her chosen deckbuilding trait.

#8: Prestidigitation. A fun card that can do a lot of neat tricks. Unlike its taboo’d sister card, Sleight of Hand, this one respects the cost of the card and it doesn’t bypass additional costs either, so i don’t see it break anything. For the most part, this is just a way to get some additional uses into play or maybe reuse an “enters play” trigger here or there. People are talking about putting this on the taboo watchlist, but i don’t see this anywhere close to that level. That’s not to say that i think this is bad, I’d definitely put this on a power level with something like Calling In Favors which is a similar tricksy card that switches cards in play around.

#7: Olivier Bishop. I can’t believe it took us this long to finally get our level 0 agility ally in Rogue. Seeker got there before Rogue! What a disgrace. Luckily, now that he’s here, he’s actually really good. I still put him on the lower end of these rankings, the need for an agility ally isn’t actually that high and filled exceptionally well with a couple of 3xp allies. At the same time, for investigators that aren’t here for the agility and only interested in the movement part i think i would still go with Leo De Luca in most cases instead. Undoubtedly a good card, but the Rogue ally slot is so stacked that Olivier doesn’t make a huge dent.

#6: Will of the Cosmos. There’s not a whole lot of clue events in Mystic, and this is a very good one. Drawn to the Flame is one of the staple cards that i pretty much always look at fitting somewhere into my decks and Will of the Cosmos is potentially even better. Splitting up the clue gain makes it a bit less desirable as tech against certain treacheries, but that Doom token is often a lot easier to handle than an extra encounter card is. Even without specific synergies this is just good value and i am always happy to see flexy cards that bypass the need for tests in Mystic. Anything that can distance the class from being only tied to Willpower is good. And for whatever that is worth, this is also a nice shot in the arm for doomplay.

#5: Gather Intel. Even on a full card pool, card draw at level 0 isn’t as plentiful as one would think, including in Seeker. Beyond Lab Ass (which takes an ally slot) and Deep Knowledge (which involves curses) things are already starting to go downhill fast. With that in mind, getting a fairly straightforward Draw-2 here that doesn’t cost an action is pretty big. There is a condition to it, but it’s one that is going to fulfill itself soon enough, you don’t have to do anything for it either. This isn’t a flashy card, but it’s one that will make your deck better just by making everything flow a bit better and more reliable and i foresee putting this in my starting 30 most of the time when building a Seeker deck. I’d also not be surprised to see this last until the end of the campaign more often than not.

#4: Cosmic Flame. Even though i feel a bit dirty putting yet another willpower spell asset on here when Legacy already has so many, i have to acknowledge how good these are. At level 0, Cosmic Flame is likely already going to just straight up be better than Azure and Shrivelling. While it has one fewer charges and can also lose a charge on revealing a skull, that is more than made up by only having to spend a charge on success and the ability to not spend a charge at all if all you want is deal one point of damage. Brand of Cthugha has similar benefits and is rightly lauded for it, but requires an xp to include. At level 5, this just straight up becomes one of the best weapons in the game. While it does lack the raw impact of a Flamethrower or Cyclopean Hammer, it does bring the ability to just (near-)endlessly attack with +2 skill and +1 damage without even taking a handslot. That’s immensely powerful before even taking into account that you can also spend spare charges for even more damage. There’s been people paying 5xp for Timeworn Brand before and Cosmic Flame is pretty much better in every way except for that one gimmick ability on the Brand. Outstanding spell asset and excellent weapon overall.

#3: Jim Culver. I’ll be honest with you, i never liked David Renfield much. Still don’t really. So i am very happy to see another ally with +willpower in the game. But Jim is similarly notable for giving Mystic a way to draw some extra cards, something the class is somewhat weak in. Getting the first two cards out of him is reasonably easy, anything beyond that is requiring some shenanigans, but that’s still quite novel. [EDIT: Oh good grief, i read Jim wrong. He triggers when YOU take a damage/horror, not only when it’s put on Jim. That is sooo much better even! Yeaaaah, he might be the breakout card of the set after all.]
His resource cost definitely is a huge issue, even in a full card pool Mystic tends to have a weak spot there which is why i don’t think he’s going to cause quite a Milan-level sort of upheaval to the class. But he’s definitely very very good and the tradeoff between him and Arcane Initiate (the other level 0 Mystic ally that can draw cards) is going to be interesting and truly a case-by-case decision with each deck because i think they are both on a similar level in terms of what they offer in power.

#2: M1911. Oh, i am not even kidding with this one. Having a proper good firearm at level 0 that is competitive with melee options? That’s been unheard of for 10 years… well, in Guardian at least. Rogue got there with the Wini deck and most recently the Bulldog. But in Guardian it was the .45 Auto or … well, nothing else that’s actually good really comes to mind at level 0. This is a huge boost for any fighter that wants to use any of the many firearm-related cards in the card pool without feeling like they have to justify even bothering when Machete or the .45 Thompson are right there to either go melee or two-handed. Since the situation around Guardian pistols is so dire, this doesn’t even make the .45 Auto obsolete, you likely are going to play both in many such decks. What a difference ticking down a number by one can make.

#1: Hunter’s Instinct. So, among the cards in the new Core, which one is most likely to just break something? Trick question, the answer is Isabelle Barnes of course. But among the non-investigators, i think Hunter’s Instinct is the card that is most likely to find something in the full card pool to go supernova with. We all know how good Scavenging is, and Scavenging can notably only recur Items assets. This can fetch events instead, a class of cards that is often balanced by the fact that they are one-shot effects. This is already very good when we consider that Izzie (or Patrice, Agnes and a couple others) can just get a Spectral Razor from her discard whenever she engages an enemy. But i am sure we can get much more degenerate here. But i don’t just put this on #1 because of degeneracy, i think this is just a good card to run in a fair way and get more out of your stuff. This will be a fun one to figure out and that i expect to put into lots of decks even as a plain value card that’s just returning some Look What I Founds and Luckys.

Honorable Mentions

As is to be expected from a small set that is not primarily targeted at adding more to the Legacy card pool, there is definitely not as much to talk about from a full card pool perspective as usual. But let me just address a few cards that i am sure i would otherwise be asked about anyways:

Logan Hastings is good and an upgrade over Beat Cop(0). Thing is, i already didn’t really run Beat Cop(0) anymore and i don’t think that Logan is good enough to compete with Beat Cop(2) either. Logan is going to see play, but i don’t see him as being as much of an upgrade to the existing options as Jim and Olivier are.
Counterattack i almost put on the list instead of Decisive Strike, but i feel like Decisive Strike is a bit more novel. Counterattack is definitely also good, but there are already a lot of cards that do similar things to it (even if they don’t do it quite as well as Counterattack does).
Aleksey Saburov gets overshadowed by Pete Sylvestre and Jessica Hyde, i think the skill bonuses on either of those are worth regenerating only either health or sanity. If you need both… run both.
Scrape By is just Lucky(1). Or Eucatastrophe(1), if you want to frame it that way. Fine card, but i don’t see what all the fuss is about.

And that’s it for this set’s “Gamechangers” article. My predictions for Drowned City were a bit of a mixed bag in terms of accuracy, maybe having a smaller set to pick the top 10 out of will improve my odds when we return to these once i do … that is a good question actually. When do i do the next one? I probably want to do a Gamechanger article for the new investigator decks as well and that’s definitely too early to review these Core predictions. Eh, that’s for Future Me to figure out.

Intro

Okay, how the hell did Mystic of all classes end up being the most interesting one in the new Core? Ahem, I am getting ahead of myself, let’s try this again: Welcome to the last installment of Early Impressions for the new Core Set, where after two weeks of looking at the Chapter 2 offerings for Mystic card-by-card, we now take a look at the class at a whole. What are they about, what is their role in the game? Is their investigator up to the task? How much chaff is there in the set? And can we build functioning decks that get stuff done?

The Investigator

In chapter 1, Dexter Drake was one of my favorites among the more traditional “5 willpower” Mystics as his access to rogue cards and a cool playstyle around replacing assets gave him a more interactive spin than many of the others. Luckily, this sentiment can continue into chapter 2, as Dexter Drake again looks very dynamic and powerful.
His skill line shifts slightly, losing a point of combat in favor of agility. The quest for the elusive mystic with 4 combat continues, i suppose. Anyways, his does make sense for the class combination with Rogue and it is in a general sense more useful as agility is also used for encounter defense. It does limit Dexter in terms of using his asset shenanigans to pull guns and knives out of his hat however… unless they are guns that use agility to fight.
Speaking of the ability, this is quite flexible and will often result in a full action gained as he can set up efficiently playing two assets with one action. Alternatively, he can “reload” his spent assets by returning them to his hand, ready to be played again. If he has some Fast assets, he can even use those to sneak other non-Fast assets into play without spending an action at all. There’s a good amount of range here and since there is no limitation here to Items, Spells or whatever, this is going to be an ability that is constantly going to find something fun to do in any new set. Notably, both his signature and the obvious Dexter-plant Prestidigitation in Rogue play an asset, so they both are able to trigger the investigator ability for some very cute and value-filled turns.
That signature is really really good. Searching up something from your deck and immediately playing it and also getting a cost reduction? Brilliant and exactly what was needed for Dexter to have some extra consistency on a shallow Core card pool that is still limited in resource generation and redundancy.
Finally, the weakness is scary enough that you need to deal with it immediately. In many ways, it’s The Gold Bug but for the arcane slot, occasionally discarding something from play and shutting everything else down. The willpower 5 test is not trivial at all and passing it will require further investment unless you are fine with having Necronomicon shuffle back to be seen again later. Nasty business, but very appropriate for Dexter’s otherwise high powerlevel.

Core Mystic Themes

In terms of mechanics, the 2026 Mystic isn’t all that different from what we have been seeing before. The execution on those however is a lot more satisfying.
Willpower matters: Each of the four base skills has more or less a class associated with it: Guardians care about combat, Seekers care about intellect and Rogues care about agility. But even more than those, Mystics care about willpower. One central part of what made up their identity in chapter 1 is the existence of spell assets that allow them to take any sort of test, no matter if its fight, investigate, evasion or anything else, using willpower instead of the other skills. This is present in the new Core as well, with two level 0 spell assets, for fighting and investigating. Augur of Elokoss also allows using your willpower score to gain clues. Two willpower boosters exist as further enabler, the Mystic talent and Jim Culver. In comparison to the old Core, i especially appreciate that the investigation asset is level 0 as well, allowing Dexter to be flexible right out of the Core Set at deck creation.
Sanity/Horror: I am sure this partially is informed by Izzie’s presence in the Core Set as well, but the fact that there are a lot of purple cards around that care about horror works very well in a broader Mystic context as well. It actually somewhat mirrors the old Core where Agnes Baker was similarly supported with some horror sources. In the new core, sanity costs are attached to both Ward of Protection and Soul Link, which Lucky Charm and Fearless allow you to mitigate. Even better, Jim Culver and the Cloak of Resonance let you even take advantage of incoming horror.
Power at a Cost: Mystic cards often come with extra costs attached. This does not only include the extra horror costs from Soul Link and Ward, but can for example also mean having to place doom like on Will of the Cosmos. Their cards can also come with drawbacks that inject some unpredictability, like the two spell assets that lose charges when drawing specific symbols tokens.
Token Manipulation: Mystics can invest into tools that allow them to push the odds in their favor when it comes to token reveals. Premonition allows them to preview the next token so they can walk into a test with full knowledge. Mask of Silenus lets them draw extra tokens and pick whichever they like best. This does pay off in better test odds, avoiding consequences like on the spell assets, but can also trigger extra effects like on Augur of Elokoss.
All of this comes together in a similar way to Rogue, with a bunch of different directions overlapping on the cards to both provide a synergistic starter pool and give some hints at things that are to come.

Card Quality and Usability

Individually, these are just straight up good with very little room to complain. All these cards are playable, most of them are in the range of what my investigator reviews would classify as “good to excellent” with some staple cards strewn in. The only outlier here is Augur of Elokoss, but even that one is just a bit mild because of its xp cost, not because of its effect which is again quite good.
Taken as a whole, i do worry that Dexter’s early decks may look a bit scattered and unfocused. There is a lot of enabling in this card pool and possibly not as much payoffs as one would hope. The Mystic class is of course not unfamiliar with the concept of only being able to do a productive thing if they get the requisite spells. Unlike a seeker who can always just test intellect to gather clues, a mystic requires something that weaponizes their willpower. For seeking, this is well set up, with Second Sight and Will of the Cosmos allowing some contribution to the clue effort right out of the gate and Augur to further specialize. But their combat capability pretty much hinges on Cosmic Flame right now and Dexter might have to look into how feasible some combination of Cloak of Resonance, Soul Link and Decisive Strike turns out to be, if he wants to do a bit more fighting. That being said he does get to upgrade into what is the best weapon in the Core Set, the level 5 Cosmic Flame which gives a high ceiling to his combat power.
That being said, the whole tradeoff of being able to do everything, but you need to get your enablers first is one that is somewhat core to the Mystic class and arguably even necessary to counterbalance how powerful their Willpower thing is when it really works. Dexter’s signature is excellent in this context, as it allows fetching up any spell or item that he might need right now, giving him some extra consistency while the card pool is still shallow.
In chapter 1, Mystics are also known for being the class with the worst economy or tied for that dubious honor with Guardian. This continues into chapter 2, which only offers one card draw source and zero resources, both things that play right into that reliance on drawing and playing certain assets to “turn on”. Dexter specifically can at least dip into green cards to help a little bit, with Lucky Cigarette Case being very relevant… but since he’s probably not evading enough enemies to make Sticky Fingers relevant and lacks the base skills to really take advantage of Thieves Kit, the resource situation doesn’t look that great still. We might just need to plan on taking an uncomfortable amount of resource actions with him, at least until hopefully the Marie deck gives us something (better than Paint the Town Red) to generate a couple bucks. Again, there is at least his signature to consider as an extra ECache in the deck. That signature is really putting in some work to hold Dexter’s deck together!

Overall

So with Mystic we are ending up in sort of the opposite corner from where we ended up with Rogue. While in Rogue the cards looks individually somewhat restrained and not overly powerful, they came together in a way that made me clearly see how Trish can use them to be really good at doing her thing. Mystic cards appear quite powerful to me individually, but are all over the place in terms of effects. Dexter will be good at things… but what things those are is for a good part going to depend on the card he draws. The winner here then is Isabelle who is eating really good, with many powerful options in both of her classes for an excellent flex investigator playstyle.
This Mystic card pool really surprised me. I typically do not care overly much about purple cards, they are my least favorite class in chapter 1. And sure, there’s some minor nitpicks here, like i think i would have preferred a resource cards like Voice of Ra over something niche like Premonition, and Augur of Elokoss could have been 2xp… but that’s really me trying to find just something to complain about when i don’t really should be doing so. After all, this is a genuinely super interesting looking set of Mystic cards, plus the investigator is great and on par with Izzie. I’m very happy with this and am now eagerly looking forward to Marie’s deck and how it expands on this excellent start.

Mystic Week part 2

Spoiler season for the Chapter 2 Core is over, now pack it up and ship it already. Here’s our final look at community previews. There’s a couple holes still left in the visual spoiler, but officially spoiler season is over. Let’s hope the last handful of cards shows up in the next few days… (EDIT: The cards have shown up, i updated this roundup!)
In addition, Asmodee stores put up the preorders for some of the Chapter 1 product and they come with descriptive blurbs that are worth taking a quick look at and see what they might hint at!

Sources

Second Sight and Fearless(2) have been previewed by Mythos Busters on their Twitch, alongside the artwork for Languor
Soul Link and Spiritual Intuition have been previewed by Faza Mitów on their Youtube
Dexter Drake’s front, sig and weakness have been previewed by Fantasy Flight Games on FFG.com
Cosmic Flame(5), Relic Hunter, Charisma and three returning basic weaknesses were given to us by the community manager

The preorders can be found on the Asmodee UK Store, here’s a link that is filtered to new stuff from FFG which includes the investigator decks, Traces to Nowhere and Children of Blood which are the things i will take a quick look at.

Dexter Drake

What the hell, Dexter is amazing. A five willpower Mystic with access to rogue, a great investigator ability, an insanely strong signature and a chunky weakness that is worth worrying about… i could not be happier about seeing a Mystic investigator. I’ll be talking in more depth about him in the First Impressions, but just to give a quick take:
Investigator ability is strong and versatile. Thankfully it is not limited to Item assets which is something i was afraid of after seeing Prestidigitation having that restriction. The signature is spectacular. Both a tutor and a resource card, and since the asset you are tutoring up there gets played it will trigger the investigator ability as well. 10/10. The Drake Necronomicon is scary. Shuts down most of your board and likely you need to deal with it immediately. Passing a willpower(5) test is not easy, not even for Dexter, so this will reshuffle and deal horror way more often than is comfortable.

Mystic

The investigation counterpart to Cosmic Flame, this seems quite good. Allows Mystics to investigate with their best stat and gives them the opportunity to accelerate some clues along the way if they have teh charges to spare. Second Sight and Cosmic Flame are a good base to start from for spell assets, we are going to be playing those a lot. I like that them being evergreen frees up the need for continuously putting new variants of the idea into expansions. They also seem to hit a good balance spot where i think they are slightly better than the old Core/Dunwich staples (Shrivelling, Rite of Seeking), but with enough of a twist to them to be their own thing.

Three wild icons on a level 0 card is just soooo many, on Standard it turns a test of base skill 2 versus difficulty 3 into one that you are favored to pass. It really can’t be overstated how much better 3 icons on a skill are than your basic Unexpected Courage. This is always going to be useful and in Chapter 1 i am very used to paying 1xp for the ability to run cards like this.
Soul Link is level 0, but instead of xp you do reserve a bit of your sanity for the privelege of getting to dunk on a couple of tests. That cost is not nothing, but the Core Set already gives you all the tools to not only buffer that cost, but even to take advantage of it.
When building a deck, you may find that you are asking yourself if you want to include both Soul Link and Ward of Protections, seeing how they both cost horror to play. And that contest between the two is closer than one would think at first glance – while there is definitely something to be said for Ward just straight up stopping something, Soul Link is a good card to have against most treacheries as well while also doing a dozen other things that Ward doesn’t do at all. So i suppose i land with my initial impression of this on “About as good as Ward of Protection, a staple since the inception of the game”… what more can i ask for. Some people are going to point towards chapter 1 all-star Promise of Power as something that is even better, but that card is just unreasonable and probably straight up the best level 0 Mystic card in the full card pool so let’s not start with something quite as broken out of the gate.
One additional small detail here is the Spell trait. While not the first skill to have it, it is kind of rare and Spell tends to end up as a relevant trait, so it’s something to look out for if we get something like Arcane Initiate or similar again that lets us dig up spells from our decks.

Speaking of the Spell trait… here’s Mystic’s talent that allows them to trade resources for skill points. The willpower is of course going to be the most relevant for the class in general, especially with a look towards the extra condition. Spell and Ritual cards don’t really have a habit of testing combat, so unless that changes in chapter 2 (which would surprise me), Spiritual Intuition is more or less just a willpower booster. I suppose Dexter might end up paying two bucks with this to punch a rat sometimes?
As a generic willpower booster for spells this is pretty strong though and i can see it be a bit of a staple at least for the early life of chapter 2… if Mystics can figure out their resources. As good as their card pool looks right now, gaining extra resources seems to be a bit of a blind spot for them right now. Not a problem for Dexter who can dip into rogue cards, but if Marie wants to use this, she will probably have to bring something like Voice of Ra to let her gain some spending cash beyond what she needs for assets.

Seeing Fearless isn’t a huge surprise, ever since Isabelle got revealed we have been talking about how good that skill would be for her. At least I did however not expect that we’d get the level 2 version, i expected the level 0. I’m not mad about it however, since Fearless(2) is a much better and much more universally playable card. The level 0 would just have been an Izzy enabler, this is a genuine great pull for the whole Mystic class. In the full card pool it has even muscled itself into having a place next to Guts(2), in our fledgling new card pool it is just a straight up staple. Very good card in a very obvious way for everyone… and then Izzie also has shenanigans. Running both Ward of Protection and Soul Link suddenly also looks even better than before.

Again, very good! 5xp is a lot and in the past we usually didn’t upgrade our Shrivels and Azure Flames up to that point (also because they had other escalating drawbacks), but this is very attractive. At just the baseline, if you never use a charge for a bonus, you just straight up can attack with +2 skill and +1 damage until you reveal 5 skulls during those tests… that will often be enough to simply last for the whole scenario. And if you need to because it saves an action, you can just spend an extra charge for an extra damage. And that extra damage doesn’t even need to hit the same enemy that you attacked. Fantastic value for your 5xp.
One thing though: That last sentence is regular rules text, not reminder text. How they sometimes put text like that in parantheses bothers me to no end, maybe more than any of the other templating weirdness this game sometimes gets up to. It’s just straight up misleading for anyone who has ever played another card game before.

Neutral

Well, we still haven’t seen Overpower, it’s the last missing card on the spoiler. We do of course know the card, know what it does etc. So no big deal. Speaking of cards we know:

These two bad boys are back. I approve. I expect that they will go a similar trajectory as they did in chapter 1. Relic Hunter was a bit of a non-entity for a while and is similarly not hugely relevant in chapter 2 for now. There’s only three accessories in the player cards after all, so unless you really really want to use two cigarette cases or counter the Gold Bug you don’t need this yet. It’s a card that gradually gains traction when more sets are added to the pool however. The inverse is true for Charisma. One of the best things you can upgrade into right now, even if its just for extra soak. The resource situation is however a limiting factor for allies for sure, so don’t expect that you can just jam Olivier and Jim next to each other in every Dexter deck without having to make concessions elsewhere. Charisma stayed an important card all throughout chapter 2 of course, but as more and more cards want you to spend your xp on them, it becomes much less of a slam dunk that you just always want.
I think these are both very healthy cards to have and i do believe they belong in the Core as opposed to a rotating set.

Weaknesses

This is somewhat of my platonic ideal of a random basic weakness. It’s an exciting card that always creates loads of drama when it comes down and since it bases its effect on the encounter deck of the scenario it just is inherently fair. It is also a card that i fear, it’s definitely on the upper end of what random basic weaknesses should be able to do to you. Very happy to see this return, it’s a fantastic weakness to randomly pull.

These two i am much less keen on seeing again. They are often very dependent with their impact on who draws them. In some cases they can even make you stop do the thing you wanted with your deck … although i’d argue that you should just veto and redraw in those cases. Still, there is just a huge difference to getting Amnesia on an investigator that is based on assets to one that does their thing with events and/or skills. Similarly, Paranoia does very little to some investigators and just wrecks others. If these were like “lose 7 resources” and “discard 4 cards” i would be much more on board as that would allow investigators that rely on a big bank or big hand to overcome them. As they are, I am not a huge fan of these, i find them too swingy and all-or-nothing.
On a sidenote, i never really understood why the concept of “Paranoia” makes you lose resources. And the new flavor text doesn’t really clear that up, if anything it makes it more of a headscratcher…

Encounter Art

What do you mean, “encounter art”? This looks pretty chill, how encouraging to see that our investigators can enjoy a nice quiet time-out here and there.

Asmodee UK Pre-Orders

Traces to Nowhere:

Maybe it’s because i am sensitivized to this after a surprising amount of references to the Red Coterie this preview season, but this smells a bit to me like the Outsiders from the Scarlet Keys campaign might be making a comeback here. There’s no mention of memory loss, so it’s not a complete match and i am probably wrong, but who knows. The price for the pack is the same as for Film Fatale and Midwinter Gala, so no surprises there.

Children of Blood:

Obvious vampire antagonists are obvious, so that’s not worth speculating on. They are even namedropping Twilight, so the references are clear ;) We know there are three scenarios to it, and it seems like “Track monsters through the streets”, “Plumb the depths of a cult’s lair” and “crash a party to confront the cult” are these three scenarios. Sure, those all sound like reasonable premises. The price is the same as two standalone scenarios or an investigator expansion.

The investigator decks:

Looks like we are getting our firearm investigator here, complementing the more melee oriented Daniela. Sounds pretty straightforward. One question though: What does focus mean in this context and how does one wield it in equal measure to a firearm?
(Price for all of the new investigator decks is the same as for the old Starter decks.)

Carolyn changed classes from Guardian to Seeker, but she does retain her ability to heal horror. Not completely unexpected and horror healing is not without precedence in Seeker, of course.

Extra actions, you say? I definitely like those. His ally version in Film Fatale gives an extra action for succeeding at skill tests that have multiple skills committed to them… that or something similar might very well be his investigator ability.

This doesn’t necessarily read like Marie is focused on doom again? It’s a possible interpretation of the dark legacy and pain to power thing, but you don’t really lift anyone up through enchanting song by putting doom into play! Maybe “pain” is more literal here and we are talking about damage instead of doom?

Traps are a funky theme. Chapter 1 had a trap focused investigator as well, but he’s a parallel investigator (and thus isn’t real and can’t hurt us) and also came with a signature that was so overpowered it made any trapping redundant. Outside of Parallel Pete, traps have not been particularly great in the past, so seeing that theme get a revisit in chapter 2 with a dedicated investigator sounds neat. Not a thing i expected from an evergreen character, but i suppose that’s Survivor for you. Always with the gimmicks.

Spoiler Season is dead, long live Spoiler Season

I’ll be doing the “Early Impressions: Mystic” article very soon (hopefully tomorrow), and then that’s it for immediate Core Set coverage. There’s still close to two months to go before the new Core is actually available in stores, but fret not! We had one preview season, but second preview season is just around the corner. Liv mentioned mid-February as the start for previews of the investigator decks… which is in two or three weeks! Obviously, you can expect the same sort of coverage that i did for the Core for those. So, short breather and then let’s dive back in real soon.

There’s also one other somewhat annoying little piece here… we were expecting the set to be fully revealed now but there’s still a couple holes in the visual spoiler. The final upgraded Mystic card is missing. Overpower is missing. But the most frustrating on is the presumably two upgraded Neutral cards… knowing whether those are Relic Hunter and Charisma or not is potentially important if we want to talk about decks. More on that as soon as we get something, i suppose! (EDIT: We got everything! Well, except for the new art on Overpower, i guess. But we can build our first chapter 2 decks now!)

Intro

With Chapter 2, FFG is changing the release model for Arkham Horror LCG. Again. Details for this have been announced a good while back during the In-Flight Report, but left a good amount of room for open questions. This week we had another Live Stream where Duke and Liv went over some more details and a written article that reiterated the info from the stream. So now that we got a bit more info than before, i figure i’d give some comments as to how i feel about them. This is, like my take on the chapters and play formats from earlier, meant to be a comment on how i personally look ahead to these and what my own expectations, hopes and worries with these are.

Relevant Sources

The In-Flight Report at PAX Unplugged.
The AHLCG Product Roadmap stream.
The FFG.com article “A Look At Things To Come“

A Look At Things To Come

As a reminder, here is the timeline we got at the In-Flight Report:

In addition to the four types of products shown in that timeline (Core, Investigator deck, Short Campaign, Scenario), three more product types were inroduced in the most recent article and stream:
– The full campaigns, consisting of around 5 scenarios (as opposed to the three in the small campaigns)
– The investigator expansion, unchanged from how it looks now, with 5 investigators and player cards to go along with them
– The deckbuilding expansion, which is smaller than an investigator expansion, has no investigators in it (at least not always) and focuses on a mechanic

The New Core Set

I am very much looking forward to this one. Truth be told, it was overdue. Whatever else happens with the new products, but getting a new Core is fantastic both on the player card and encounter card level and i am 100% behind it.
We’ve only seen the player card side so far (the visual spoiler is almost complete, only a handful cards missing) and that is looking really good overall. On the encounter side we’ve not seen anything, however. My interest in those new Core Encounter Sets is huge of course and I will definitely talk about those on this site a lot once we have them. A lot hinges on them, let’s hope the designers handle them as well as they did the player cards.

The Investigator Decks

Our second part to the initial card pool, we are getting the set of five soon after the Core. That is important for providing options in deckbuilding and gives a good base to move forwards from. These are notably designated as “Evergreen” alongside the Core, putting them above the investigator and deckbuilding expansions in the hierarchy. I expect these to be more or less extensions of the Core in a way that Dunwich used to be in Chapter 1.
Unclear is how often we get more of these, for now they seem to be a one-off thing, with deckbuilding and investigator expansions instead being the regular way of putting out more player cards. Since i, as mentioned in that other article, bought fully into the idea of a chapter 2 restart on the player card side, I am definitely going to get these and i expect them to be very significant.
One notable thing here that i haven’t heard anyone else comment on is that FFG hasn’t called these “Starter Decks” even once (unless i missed it) despite that being the term for Nathaniel, Wini and the others. This seems like a very deliberate change in nomenclature to me, but i am not quite sure what it means.

The Investigator Expansion

We know these, we like these, they are worth our time and money. They’ve been confirmed to be unchanged in size, so that’s all familiar and approved. Moving on!

The Deckbuilding Expansion

These are sets of player cards, focused on a specific mechanic. Smaller than a full investigator expansion, these aren’t always going to have investigators in them. Instead, they are to be understood as ways to acquire cards for certain decktypes all in one go. For example, i would expect this to be the way that we might see bless or curse again without them having to take over large parts of an Investigator Expansion. Or support for a specific trait, like a Science themed expansion. Maybe even something like “Here’s a box of Specialist cards.” That all makes sense to me and it does increase the number of player cards we get without them having to increase the frequency of the big investigator boxes.
We don’t know yet how big these are going to be, but that’s ultimately all just a matter of pricing. Yeah sure, i am down for more player cards.

The Standalone Scenario

I’ve never been terribly interested in these. I like Blob, i like Excelsior… but i don’t play those much either. I mostly view these as something for the convention goers to have a good time with, but in terms of long-term content they don’t offer me much personally. I’ve not bought the recent standalone scenarios and probably am not going to start with it now. There is a faint possibility that these gain some value to me if they are designed to be integrated into one of the campaigns, but probably not.

The Small Campaign

Notably our only new campaign content in 2026, the Chapter 2 scenario side is going to consist of the introductory 3-parter in the Core and another 3-parter, the Children of Blood. On the stream, they made a point of mentioning that we are supposed to think of these as “small campaigns” as opposed to “big standalones”, but i got to be real with you there … Mentally, i am grouping these with the Standalones right now and Children of Blood would need to be one banger of a three-part experience to convince me otherwise.
I am definitely going to give Children of Blood a try and play it, but i don’t really go into it expecting the replayability and long-term interest that i have in any of the current campaigns. This is fiiiine as a way to tide us over until we get something more substantial, but long term i wouldn’t be too surprised if i end up skipping these the same way i do standalones.

The Full Campaign

Oh man. As someone who has seen and lamented the tendency towards shorter campaigns in the last couple expansions, this worries me quite a bit. The campaign expansions get reduced in scope to have around 5 scenarios instead of the previous standard of 8.
Now, i do believe that 5 can indeed work, there is nothing inherently wrong with that number. After all, the reason why Arkham has had 8-part campaigns until now most likely comes down to “That’s how LotR did it”, not some higher design principle brought to us by the gods of tabletop gaming. For example, i look at Innsmouth (my #2 favorite campaign) as a 6-part campaign already (plus a playable 2 scenario epilogue one might as well skip). Hemlock Vale is similarly set up to not have an 8-part campaign despite there being 8 scenarios in the box, same as Scarlet Keys.
However, both Hemlock and Scarlet Keys also illustrate the big issues that going down to 5 scenarios as a default can bring with it. You give up the choice in routes and scenarios, which do make up a significant amount of the replayability of either campaign. At the same time, there is also something to be said for the ability to skip certain scenarios you don’t like… having the freedom to just say no to scenarios you don’t enjoy playing (in my case that’s Shades of Suffering for TSK and to a lesser degree Written in Rock for Hemlock) does bring up the overall enjoyment of those campaigns as you get to focus on the parts you do like. If campaigns are now coming with 5 scenarios only and one of those turns out to be a dud, then that is going to suck a lot more than it did before.
So while i do believe that 5 good scenarios can make for a good and complete campaign, it’s going to be a lot more difficult than it was with 8. The design team pretty much had their margin for error eliminated here to a very uncomfortable point. Godspeed to them.
One thing i wish we had as information as well is the actual card count of the boxes. My understanding of boardgame logistics (and i want to stress that this is very surface level understanding) is that you can’t just make up new box formats and card counts all the time and there are strong incentives to having standards that you adhere to. Which leads me to believe that these might follow the box size, card count (and pricing) of Marvel Champions expansions. Those are 280-ish cards at 40€(-ish). For comparison, the old campaigns are 360-ish for 70€. That seems…. not so bad, actually? It’d even potentially mean that there’s more cards per scenario which could help with the replayability in other ways. But yeah, we don’t actually know anything about the size of the box or the price, so we’ll just have to wait and see until we get the details on this.

The Release Schedule

The new cadence for release is at least four products per year. One of them is going to be a standalone, to coincide with the yearly conventions. The other three are some combination of player card and scenario content, with some years having more campaign stuff and others having more player card stuff. Looks like 2026 is starting out with more player cards, so we expect 2027 to feature more campaign content. The chapter 1 schedule was around a campaign and investigator expansion every 1.3 years… so the promise is that we are getting more of both player and campaign content overall.
For player cards, this definitely checks out. For campaign content … this is going to depend on how much you value the 3 scenario campaigns. At least to me, 5+3 is less than 8 here, unlike player card pools this doesn’t just straight add up in the same way.

Overall thoughts

There’s definitely a huge gulf between how i perceive the changes for the player card side and how i see them for the campaign content. For player cards, i am pretty much completely on board with all of this. Love the chapter 2 reset, Core Set previews were excellent, looking forward to the investigator decks and i also like the idea of bundling up subthemes into deckbuilding expansions that you can buy a la carte. 10/10.
On the scenario side however i am definitely a lot more restrained in my excitement. I am a huge fan of the longer campaigns and breaking them up worries me a lot. The smaller half especially is likely just not going to end up as all that interesting to me unless the designers really pull off something spectacular with Children of Blood that has me coming back for the next one. The bigger half… can work. I am not completely opposed to a shorter campaign and maybe this is even what was missing to make me take a second look at standalones as a plug-in sixth scenario. But this is going to take some convincing to make me think of these as worth replacing our chapter 1 campaign model. There is enough good faith built up that i will for sure give them the chance to convince me, but if the 2027 campaign stumbles… oof, let’s hope it won’t come to that.
One thing however to keep in mind is that there’s still a good deal that we don’t know, the most important thing being the size and price of the new campaign expansions. There’s a lot of bad faith doomposting related to this going around in the usual places, but i’d at least point towards the last time we had a change in the product lineup: Things did indeed get cheaper and more convenient for us with the step from Deluxe + Mythos Packs to the Investigator Expansion + Campaign Expansion combo. And if the new campaigns do indeed use the Marvel Champions box format, that’d be perfectly fine in my opinion. At least from a financial point of view.
Anyways, that’s my take right now. Very happy with the player card side, cautious but trying to keep an open mind about the scenario side. We’ll just have to see how it goes over the next year.

Mystic Week part 1

We are almost done with the previews for the new Core … and can pretty much mentally prepare for the Investigator Deck previews which are supposed to start in mid-February! But before we get there, we still got Dexter Drake and the rest of the purple cards to check out. And also a few neutrals. Let’s hope we get everything in these two weeks.

Sources

Dexter Drake‘s backside was previewed on the official ArkhamHorror.com site, alongside the schedule for Mystic Previews
Jim Culver and Will of the Cosmos were previewed by arkhamhorrorlcg.ru on their Youtube
Lucky Charm and Mask of Silenus were previewed by Discipulos de Armitage on their Youtube
Premonition and (probably) Manual Dexterity were previewed by Arkham Chronicle on their Youtube.

Dexter Drake

We’ve learned from an Asmodee store image that Dexter lost his Veteran trait, which is even more surprising when seeing how heavily his WWI background features in his backstory. That he has his own translation of the Necronomicon now is really cool though. That something called the “Drake Translation” exists now is one hell of a flex for the guy!
Sadly no signature Top Hat asset, but oh well. Can’t win em all.

Mystic

Oh wow, that’s big in at least two ways. For one, this is the first instance of an Arkham Horror investigator being not only represented by the investigator card, but also by an ally. This was overdue, as it’s an easy way to inject flavor and make the world seem connected. Especially now with the Chapter 2 reset, it’s also making sure that we can see the range of familiar characters before another 10 years pass. LotRLCG does it, Marvel Champions does it, about time Arkham went to that well too. The only thing that would need to be ensured is that these investigator allies do feel powerful enough to actually matter. Which leads us straight to the second reason why this is big: This is just straight up a very good card. Mystic has struggled with card draw in the past and getting a semi-passive source of extra cards is a huge win for them. Since it counts any damage and/or horror you take, not just the ones going on Jim himself, the card is also ripe for all sorts of interactions with the rest of the card pool. All the while giving that +1 willpower that almost all Mystics crave. Hot stuff. Now i sort of wish that the other “+1 stat” allies in the Core would have been ally versions of known investigators, so instead of Dorothy, Olivier and Logan we could have gotten for example Amanda, Skids and Leo.

I am starting to get worried about the levels of damage and horror that these new campaigns are planning to start throwing at us. There is so much soak in this set across all the classes! The baseline of just getting two sanity soak here is solid, but the real juice lies in the ability of course. And there is a lot of interactivity here that can give this card a good place. Transferring damage or horror to assets that trigger on getting them (like the new Cloak) or to self-healing assets like Alexsey both is promising. As is just the ability to transfer damage from one investigator to another. It’s also a great way to handle direct damage/horror and let it end up on an asset after all instead of your investigator card. And all that on a free trigger ability, to make it a very neat package. I like this card, there is a lot of subtle utility here for a level 0 card.
One other thing that is notable here: The effect isn’t restricted to player cards, this can heal story assets at your location. That is something to keep your eye on and already has some very strong interactions in some Chapter 1 scenarios that have you guard something … like the Captives in The Longest Night or Shelly in The Thing in the Depths (both from the Feast of Hemlock Vale).

Woah, guess we aren’t shying away from mechanically dense cards for the new Core then! This card has some non-obvious rules stuff associated with it, but i suppose the sooner we get people on board with the idea of sealing tokens on events that stay in play, the better. Get that chart of where the player windows are on hand – in particular, you’ll want to remind yourself of the one right before the investigator phase which allows you to do a Premonition before deciding who gets the first turn and gets to make the best use of the revealed token.
This chapter 1 reprint is a card that is easy to underestimate, i have done so for a long time myself. Knowing the result of a test in advance is quite useful and will often do the same job that a skill card would have done. Where it gets spicy is when you can add synergies with sealing, token manipulation and the like.
This is a fancy card, very playable and universally useful. It has a bit of a history for me of being my cards #31 and #32 that get cut just before i start the campaign, but that is with a full card pool. It’ll take a while before Premonition gets to that point and even then, that’s a perfectly reasonable spot to end up in.

Will of the Cosmos is very good. While i don’t really believe in the merits of continuous doomplay as an archetype, this is great as just a standalone card. The obvious comparison we have from chapter 1 is Drawn to the Flame, but that card is significantly different enough that this is not a direct replacement at all. There are two huge differences here. The first being that the drawback of Will of the Cosmos is a lot more predictable than the one on Drawn to the Flame. An extra doom is on average a more impactful thing than a random encounter card, but with Will you know what you get in advance. With DttF, you’d sometimes have those moments where a Nightgaunt, Deep One Bull or similar thing comes from the top of the deck and messes everyone’s turns up enough that it’s just always a bit of a risk to play. I am giving the advantage here to Will – if nothing else, you can always wait until the Witching Hour (when the agenda would advance next turn anyways) to play it and basically just get some free clues and feel super smart about yourself. Or, if you are Dexter, pick up the doomed asset with Prestidigitation and feel super smart about yourself. Or put the doom on the Premonition in front of you and feel super smart about yourself.
The other huge difference is that these clues have to be split up between two revealed locations. One of the nice things about Drawn to the Flame was how it allowed just completely stealing all clues from under a Locked Door or Obscuring Fog and that sort of thing is more difficult to do with Will of the Cosmos. That makes it more of a general value card that you add to your deck to flex collect some clues while focusing on something else while DttF should often be held until it can fix a specific problem.
Of course, only one of them is in Chapter 2, making the comparison moot beyond just getting a frame of reference. It’s a very good card, it’s going to see plenty of play. And in formats that allow both DttF and WotC (what an unfortunate acronym btw) you may just end up playing both in the same deck. Add Read the Signs and you can do some significant clue contribution without ever playing an investigation spell asset or having to invest all that much into your willpower.

Spending 3 resources on an asset like this is a big ask, but especially Dexter who has access to the resource cards from Rogue might find this attractive enough nonetheless. The ability to pick from two tokens instead of just resolving the one you always draw is powerful reassurance for important tests, even when you don’t have any specific synergies for revealing certain tokens. I’ve definitely enjoyed playing Grotesque Statue(2) in the past, but usually would only go for it if i do indeed get extra synergy (because maybe i am fishing for bless/curse or my Elder Sign) but maybe lowering the xp cost by 1 while also making it no longer take up the handslot is enough to give it enough appeal as just a value card. It will almost certainly make the cut for Dexter who can afford it and also recharge it with Prestidigitation. And for everyone else… well, all it takes is getting some extra payoff for bag manipulation and this will go up in value. Definitely a card that will be played and i can see this have longterm staying power as well.

And there’s your first payoff for bag manipulation. Investigating with a big bonus while also gaining an extra clue is very nice and if you can push the odds in your favor for the bonus you are looking at one impactful card. It probably would have been fine at 2xp as well, you do need to put in some work to comfortably get that bonus discard after all and likely that will already also ask some xp investment from you (Mask of Silenus, for example). Is asking for a third clue on a 3xp event too greedy? Maybe, but it would have given the card a place in full card pools as well – as it is now, it pretty much gets its lunch eaten there by Read the Signs(2).
Still, just on impact per card alone this will see a decent amount of play and will complement Will of the Cosmos nicely at enabling Mystics to push past difficult to investigate locations. If you play Mask of Silenus and Premonition (both perfectly reasonable cards on their own), the condition doesn’t seem particularly hard to trigger either.

Neutral

Arkham Chronicles also showed off this piece of artwork and told us that it goes on a reprint of an old card. They’ll reveal which one it is on Monday, but let’s be real… it’s Manual Dexterity, right? Feel free to enter their raffle for a Barkham pack (or something else) through the link i put up above in the Sources.
As for Man Dex itself, there’s not much to say. It’s one of the Core skills. We like those. The new one will have Wini instead of Trish on it, which i am all in favor of. Enough said.

Weakness

Looks like the first two weaknesses we got to see were giving us a bit of a wrong impression then. After seeing Gold Bug and the Lurker, it looked like the new random basic weaknesses would significantly depart from what we had in the old core and get a lot more punishing. However, the last three weaknesses all were some variation of “When <thing> happens, take a damage or horror. Two actions to Discard.”, a format that is fairly predictable in its impact and easy enough to handle. Even if it will definitely be inconvenient at times to have to spend those two actions, it will not fluctuate in impact wildly based on scenario. This still being the standard for a random basic weakness makes all of this similar enough to the Old Core. As for Pursued specifically, it doesn’t seem so bad. You’ll still want to take that double action eventually, but if you have to keep it around for a turn or three because other important things are happening, that’s perfectly fine too in most cases. There’s an interesting bit of player scaling here, where you take damage from any enemy that spawns or moves into your location, not just the ones you draw and engage yourself. So if you are in a group and all at the same location, you could reasonably expect to get slapped for 2 or even more horror right in the Mythos phase after drawing this. On that note, just hope that the Swarm keyword doesn’t make a sudden comeback :D

Intro

Hell yeah, Rogue. The class i was looking forward to the most, both because it’s a personal favorite and because it’s the class that was most done dirty by the old Core. So there was both a desire and a real need for some improvements on that front.
Now, to put this out first, yes the New Core is a lot better for getting into the Rogue class than the old one. But that bar is so incredibly low, it can’t be our only point of reference – Rogue in the old core was pretty much nonfunctional. So what we are looking for beyond just “be better than useless” is a strong theme and identity, a solid deckbuilding direction and a role for our Core investigator to fill. So, with that in mind, let’s start with Trish.

The Investigator

Ms. Scarborough puts evasion front and center as something to care about. She gets a free evasion attempt every turn, potentially giving her a very efficient way to deal with enemies she’s facing. The “Evadey Seeker” is a well established archetype in chapter 1, with many investigators falling into that niche, most of which are quite powerful. So that’s a solid point to start at for sure and gives Trish a clear way of how to contribute to the game: Get clues, handle enemies by delaying them.
She appears quite capable in those roles as well, with 4s in both of her primary stats she requires little setup to get going. Her presence nonetheless informs a chunk of the selection of cards we get in the New Core, with plenty of payoffs and enablers for evasion and investigation alike.
In the bigger lineup of the full card pool, Trish has two challenges: One, she shares an investigator ability with another existing character. Two, there are already a lot of evadey seekers, arguably it’s the most crowded archetype. The first point is in my opinion not really much of an issue. Finn and Trish are overall quite distinct from each other, thanks to Finn’s extra focus on also being able to fight. He is an actual allrounder that can use all three of the “do something” stats to good effect, while Trish is a bit more boxed in with regards to her role. The second point is more relevant here, as characters like Monterey, Old Trish or even Wendy already cover what New Trish is bringing to the table. I feel like especially next to her old version, she doesn’t really seem like something i’d care much about for Legacy card pools.
That being said, my main concern here is the New Core in the context of a Chapter 2 restart of the game, so i am leaving my first impressions on Trish very satisfied. She’s is a much better representation for Rogue in the Core than Skids ever was, with a healthy card pool backing her and her own way of approaching the game. I do particularly like that she gives a second option to fill the crucial job of a primary Seeker in a group. Roland was never quite up to that task, but i can easily imagine a group of investigators playing through the Core campaign that is not bringing Joe Diamond because their clue needs are covered by Trish doing the main work with Izzie and Dexter also chipping in.

Core Rogue Themes

The Old Core stranded us with oversuccess payoffs and no enablers anywhere in sight, hopefully the new one does a better job of establishing some themes that Rogue cares about and is good at!
Evasion: We have seen a smidge of evasion payoff in Survivor, but Rogue is of course the primary class for this type of enemy handling. The card pool has both payoffs and enablers for this, thanks to Silver Tongue and Sticky Fingers, but most of the theme is of course shouldered by Trish herself. Rogues also get a weapon, but the Hammerless is notably only really useful if the rogue evades the enemy first.
Agility matters: There’s a bit of overlap with the evasion theme here of course, as anything that boosts agility also boosts how good the investigator is at evasion. However, “Agility Matters” does mean that rogues are able to use their agility score for more than evading. Breaking and Entering and the Thieves Kit both allow investigating using agility, while the Hammerless is at least a passable way to weaponize agility to defeat something.
Money: Rogues are rich, another thing that the Old Core kind of forgot about to actually enable despite putting a resource intense ability on its investigator. The New Core leans the other way, with plenty of extra ways to get resources being around, mostly in the form of drip income that pays you for evading (Sticky Fingers), investigating (Thieves Kit) or fighting (Decisive Strike). The pool of green cards is missing some sort of nice payoff for this, something like Leo De Luca from the old core, or maybe a high powered event like Pilfer. The best ways for Trish to spend her money are probably yellow cards: Fingerprint Kit and Sharp Rhetoric.
Free movement: I almost wasn’t going to mention this, as there were only two cards that feed into this theme on the revealed spoiler (Olivier and Out of Sight). But then Trish’s signature also turned out to give bonus moves, so this should at least be mentioned here. I feel like this is mostly on Olivier, though. Running Out of Sight is not going to make you feel all that more mobile, i expect.
Oversuccess: Finally, a dash of this is also present. Lucky Cigarette Case is of course the standout card that rewards rogues with cards for being particularly good at what they do. Silver Tongue is an enabler, as is Breaking and Entering. Out of Sight is both enabler and payoff.
So it looks like we got quite a few things going on here. Thanks to several of these overlapping on a number of different cards, this all makes quite a good impression to me. Several of these themes do of course beg to be fleshed out some more, but honestly this looks like it should work remarkably well considering it’s all compressed into 14 cards and an investigator with her kit.

Card Quality and Usability

Yeah, this is overall good. Several of these cards look kind of only okay individually, but as part of their respective archetypes they should work out just fine. That is not to say that there aren’t some things that do feel a bit out of whack, though.
More than with the card pools from the other classes, i find the balance between the cards within the class very uneven. Some cards are quite high on their apparent powerlevel while others are strangely conservative and juuuust on the cusp of being functional. While this probably won’t matter for the Core itself, it probably has implications for the class going forward, with a couple of the cards here falling out of favor very fast as the card pool grows while others are going to be strong enough that they will always be on the forefront.

On the low end, we have Out of Sight and Paint the Town Red. Out of Sight(0) struggles to justify its card slot in the deck… a bad sign if that sort of concern already pops up when only looking at the Core, this is only going to get worse as the pool increases. It does offer a move for a card and that can be okay, at least it doesn’t cost you anything to include. In sharp contrast, Out of Sight(3) does cost a hefty chunk of XP but it also gives a payoff that is much more worth spending a card on, especially if you also care about oversuccess those three icons are not going to waste. I think this is actually pretty good for now, but likely will also fall off over time as other XP options become available. Finally, Paint the Town Red is probably the worst card on the spoiler right now? Is it worse than Bodyguard? People obviously compare it to the options from Chapter 1 (Kicking the Hornets Nest and Where’s the Party), a very unflattering comparison indeed. But even if we put that aside and just fully accept that chapter 1 cards don’t matter for the evaluation of the new core, i don’t really see a reason to use this. The only reason you use this is if putting an extra enemy into play is a good thing for you, in which case you do a classic rogue thing: Achieve something while getting some resources as well for good measure. That’d be solid. But that payoff for bringing out an enemy is just not there, you don’t do that just so you can evade the guy and get a resource from Sticky Fingers… this really needed to do something more, even if it just was putting that enemy into play exhausted. So, in conclusion, is it worse than Bodyguard? At the moment, i think so. But Paint the Town has at least a chance to grow into a niche player, Bodyguard is just numerically bad and already inferior to even something as fringe as the Fedora.

The outliers on the top of the food chain are Olivier Bishop and Lucky Cigarette Case. I’ve seen some talk online about Prestidigitation too, but i don’t see that card as problematic at all, it has the necessary safeguards to stop it from being abused too hard. The concern with Olivier and LCC is that they both take up a slot (ally and accessory) and it’s a slot we only have one of. So if it turns out that these are too good compared to other options, it would mean that those other options would only see play in narrow circumstances or when you deliberately pass on the objectively better one. Basically it’d be “The Milan Effect”. I don’t think that either of the two cards is quite strong enough to really warrant a strong concern there. LCC is a card we have experience with from chapter 1 of course. Definitely a strong card and universally useful. It meant that some borderline cards (like the Decorated Skull which was in the same cycle as LCC originally) never really had a chance to see play, but there were definitely options that were able to compete. It’s a spicy inclusion here for sure, but i am willing to give the benefit of the doubt for now and not complain until we see what other accessories Rogue gets in the future. We don’t have much of a reference at all actually, the only other accessory across all classes on the spoiler so far is a weakness. And a really nasty weakness as well, so maybe this is just a sign that accessories in general are more powerful from now on? We’re going to have to wait and see.
As for Olivier, i think he’s good but also a bit overrated by the community right now. He’s definitely no Milan. While agility is certainly more important to Rogues than it is to others, it doesn’t have nearly the universal appeal to them that intellect has to Seekers. That universal appeal is a huge part of why Milan is as oppressive as he is, there’s simply next to no Seeker that doesn’t want resources and intellect. For Olivier however, as soon as your investigator doesn’t go hard on agility, you are using your ally slot for a free movement each turn. Definitely good, but not overpowering in any way. Truth be told, i can totally see myself using Dorothy instead of Olivier in Trish as well, depending on whether i want to lean on the investigation or evasion side. Good card, but i don’t see Olivier as a problem at all.

Overall

I am happy with this. This set of cards is both functional and quite diverse. The Rogue class is leaning in a lot of different directions here, something that i was missing from Guardian in my first impressions for them. There’s one or two cards here that probably don’t have much of a future, but that shouldn’t distract from the overall positive takeaway here. Which is that you can now buy a Core Set, pick up the green investigator and have fun with them instead of pulling out your hair because everything seems nonfunctional. I also like the new Trish, she seems like she uses the Rogue/Seeker cardpool in a way that is both powerful and representative for how the two classes overlap.

Next up is the final class, Mystic. Assuming this starts right away on Monday, we will have finished this preview season in two weeks time. Exciting. Will Overpower and Manual Dexterity be reprinted? What about Relic Hunter and Charisma? There’s at least three more random basic weaknesses to go as well. Oh right, some people do care about Mystic cardds as well, i guess… well then, will Dexter have a unique top asset signature that takes the new headwear slot?

More on this to come!

Rogue Week 2

Final bits of rogue spoilers for the new Core, let’s check it out.
With all of them available now, I’ll do the “First Impressions” article as well of course. Should be up tomorrow or over the weekend, so we got that out of our way before we (presumably) jump straight into Mystic next.

Sources

Prestidigitation and Breaking and Entering were previewed by Little Geek on their Youtube
Silver Tongue and Syndicate Obligations were previewed by Will.I.Game on their Instagram, alongside the artwork for Fire!
The rest of Trish’s kit was previewed by Fantasy Flight Games on the official site

Trish Scarborough

Very strong signature, but also a very strong weakness. The signature more or less gives her access to old Pickpocketing, but also adds a movement option to it. Seems pretty good to me and stacks up well with the rest of the rogue cards in this set.
The weakness is a tough nugget. 4 combat is very hard to overcome for Trish unless she has a Hammerless available to use her agility score. The guy thankfully has only 2 health, but getting those damages onto him isn’t trivial at all. Evading him is similarly difficult and costs a clue. If Trish happens to not have a clue when the Operative shows up, the evasion is even pointless – this is definitely a point of concern for solo players in particular who won’t be able to get bailed out by their friendly neighborhood Mechanic. Considering the danger that this enemy poses for solo players, they might even need to look into possibly making Decisive Strike work for them. The +2 combat bonus from that event together with an Overpower and/or Unexpected Courage might just be what the doctor ordered to handle this weakness before the cardpool expands to include another agility gun or an evasion based fight event. It’s kinda like when Alessandra has to use Backstab on Zamacona. Clench and hope to not autofail :D

Rogue

Pretty much as expected. I think i like this less than the other talents that were previewed so far, the use case just seems to be a lot more limited. Without leaning heavily into parley, i don’t see myself taking this just for the evasion boost. But if you do want to parley, then this card seems pretty great. Parleying enemies means keeping them around you, which often will necessitate an evasion here and there when you have maybe an enemy more in your face than is comfortable right now. Silver Tongue can make those evades happen even when your investigator maybe isn’t blessed with high innate agility.
For now, i don’t see this being terribly interesting, but i could see it become relevant down the line.

Just a fantastic card that solves a truckload of problems. It’s action compression, test compression and comes with a hefty bonus to the test. Incredible for a level 0 card, what’s not to like. This is a card i have underrated when it came out and since then has gone up for me each time i played with it. I won’t quite call it a staple, but it’s close.

Fantastic card. I am a huge fan of this effect and have actually played Library Docent a whole lot before. Getting to do this switcheroo with any Item instead of just Tomes has me giddy with the possibilities, both in a Chapter 2 context and with eyes on the full card pool. I like that unlike Sleight of Hand, this card comes with the safeguards that stop it from being abusable, so it should be safe from getting butchered by a taboo like Sleight did. You are only getting a net of 1 resource saved, which is more or less a wash with the card you spend on the effect. And you are still playing the card instead of putting it into play, so no bypassing additional costs either.
At its base, it’s easy enough to include in a deck. As long as you run multiple Items, some of which have uses, you probably want this. Return an asset you spent the uses from, play something else for a slight reduction. Or if you can empty an asset in one turn, just drop it into play with this and pick it up again at the end of the turn. This lets you basically treat Prestidigitation as another copy of whatever asset you return for another round of uses. Not broken (unless the asset itself already is), just good clean value.
On a sidenote, I am looking forward to seeing the first investigator in Chapter 2 that can play both red and green cards, as this combines nicely with Hunter’s Instinct…

Basic Weaknesses

Sure, that seems in line with what we expect. Any weakness with a double action to discard is inherently not too devastating and will have to be evaluated for how problematic it’d be if we don’t have the leisure of discarding it right away. Syndicate Obligations seems like we can reasonably ride it out for a turn or three if we really have to. Event based investigators are hit a bit more by it than those that mostly fight/investigate with their assets, of course. But even if it ends up dealing a point or two to you before you have the time to get rid of it, it’s not the end of the world. If i randomly draw this, i’m likely not too worried the way i’d be with one of the more exotic weaknesses. The two actions are of course always a cost that does make a difference in the moment, so it’s not something to just completely ignore either.

Encounter Artwork

Looks like this hazard treachery from the Hemlock Vale makes a comeback here. Whether its as part of the Brethren of Ash three-parter or if it’s going to see use in future campaigns as well, remains to be seen!

Rogue Week 1

New Year’s break is over, time to pick up right where we left off and continue with the preview season for the new Core. The best class in the game is up, let’s check out what we are working with now. Can’t be worse than the old Core, amirite?

Sources

Trish Scarborough‘s backside was showcased by the official Arkham Horror site
Lucky Cigarette Case, Thieves Kit and Decisive Strike were previewed by Horreur A Arkham JCE TV on their Youtube
Out of Sight (0) and (3) were previewed by Tatort Arkham on their Youtube, alongside the encounter art for Herald of Flame
Sticky Fingers (0) and (2) were previewed by Bradley Galbraith on their Youtube
Another Day Another Dollar and Paint the Town Red were previewed by Northern Lights Over Arkham on their Youtube

Trish Scarborough

I already talked about Trish at the last spoiler roundup where we got a look at her front. So i will just refer you back to that here. The deckbuilding technically wasn’t officially spoiled before, but… well, duh.
The more interesting tidbit here is the mention of the Red Coterie in Trish’s updated backstory. We also got a card with one of the Coterie members in the artwork this week, which is either a coincidence, an homage or a not-so-sneaky hint at a future product. Your guess is as good as mine, of course.

Rogue

What a start into Rogue Week, am i right? One of the most important cards to the rogue identity in chapter 1, the Lucky Cigarette Case anchors the oversuccess archetype in the class. This is pretty much on par with Magnifying Glass returning for Seeker, as a card that you will always be happy to play in its slot, but that isn’t impossible to beat by new cards either since they didn’t bring their upgraded versions from chapter 1 along with them.

If evasion is a huge part of your game plan, then this will pay consistent dividends. Seems pretty solid to me as something you can just drop early on and then never have to put something else towards while it keeps paying out. The upgrade is similarly solid, with Fast allowing you to drop it without losing tempo and making it faster for it to pay off. At the same time the additional icon is more relevant than usual due to the Limit 1 per investigator.
It’s not quite as auto-include as Pickpocketing(2) in Chapter 2 was, but that’s probably a good thing. While we are talking about Pickpocketing, the swap from “gain a card” to “gain a resource” for the level 0 makes a lot of sense to me as a complement for Lucky Cigarette Case. In summary, not an exceptional card, but definitely solid enough to see play.

Another great card from Chapter 1 makes a return. A theme of getting paid for doing what you were doing anyways starts to emerge here, and Thieves Kit usually makes its cost back and then some. The flexibility of being able to either use intellect or agility is underrated and Trish in particular can make great use of that as she is very likely to play cards that raise both relevant skills.

Fetching out an enemy and gaining a couple resources is not bad, but notably this card, unlike previous iterations of this effect, doesn’t help you in any way with handling the enemy. Maybe most importantly, this will still draw the card you search, meaning that it will follow its spawn instructions – so you can’t use it to get a cultist or similar enemy and immediately engage it like you could with its closest chapter 1 comparison, Kicking the Hornet’s Nest. No bypassing Aloof either. That does remove a huge part of what was appealing about the Hornet’s Nest in the first place and leaves this in a bit of an awkward spot.
I can think of two likely reasons to include it. Either you want to go big on resources, meaning you want to find 4+ health enemy for it to be better than ECache. Or you might be fishing for Victory enemies. The non-Elite clause puts a limiter on both of these use cases, so it’ll depend on how the encounter decks are made up going forward how useful this is going to be. My first impression is that it’s just a bit on the low end to be desirable on its own merit, unless campaigns start throwing non-Elites with 5+ health at us on a regular basis it’s going to need some good payoff for having an enemy engaged that you really want to hit. Not impossible, but for now i am not terribly excited with this one.

While there are agility icons on this card, you probably don’t plan on committing this to evasion tests. Getting free movement on top of your Thieves Kit activation can be neat however. That being said, while “a card for a move” is a good trade on a level 0 skill, the oversuccess requirement is a bummer and likely just puts it out of range of where i consider this as a value card. More often than not, i’ll probably find something more impactful for that card slot.
The value is of course much higher on the upgrade. Three icons is a lot of icons and if this saves two movement actions, the payoff is considerable and worth both the card slot and the XP cost. That is however a big If due to the requirement for the target location to already be revealed, so getting that value out of the card is going to require some luck and/or planning. I can see arguments for that requirement on level 0 cards, but on a level 3 that’s too restrictive.
As the final strike this skill, the new rogue ally Olivier Bishop already does its job of providing free movement when needed. So I don’t really see much of a home for either version of Out of Sight. While the card pool is small, i will probably consider spending the 3xp just to have a +3 agility skill, but that’s not something that is going to have a lot of long-term appeal.

This i like a lot however! When Decisive Strike lands, that’s a big swing, killing an enemy while also setting you up for the future with a chunk of resources. As is appropriate for the Core Set, this card is a great representation of what Rogue is about. Big plays that carry some risk with it, but when they get to do their thing, they gain a lot out of their actions and cards. My understanding is that there’s sadly no room for “Watch This!” on the spoiler anymore, but this can do a similar job of teaching newbies the joys of pulling the autofail on a test you invested a bunch into :D It’s a valuable lesson and a core part of the rogue experience!
Both rogue investigators in the core have 2 combat which somewhat limits its immediate impact on Chapter 2, but depending on how Trish’s signature enemy weakness looks, it may be important there and the +2 combat on the card let it at least be a possibility.
But even if Dex and Trish end up declining on this one, i do like this card a lot, both as a representation of rogue playstyle and as an impactful card. One needs only to plug this into the Legacy cardpool to immediately see how much potential there is for this one, it’s always only one Chuck Fergus or rogue with 4+ combat away from becoming excellent.

We are getting so much money! I am delighted to see ADAD back in business, i was hoping for it since we saw Studious last year. Not much to say about this one, it’s a proven classic that can do wonders to smooth out your crucial first turns.
A bit of a theme with Rogue seems to be that they are getting paid in resources and cards without really having to spend actions on it, they just get it for playing the game. ADAD fits right in with that, letting them start on high momentum right away.

Encounter Artwork

Update Note

This was originally written in January ’26, before release of chapter 2 and without having some of the details we have today. I have rewritten parts of this page in May, in particular the parts about possibly getting a chapter 1 campaign or two since we now know more about how to make them work without a chapter 1 Core Set.

Intro

I’ve been asked a couple times now about what my advice for new players would be, where would they start if they wanted to get into Arkham LCG? Is it even worth starting now?
I have two Buying Guides on my site, an older one that covered all of Chapter 1 and the content within and is not really realistic to follow anymore – it’s more of a Collector’s Guide now. The more recent Buying Guide isn’t actually all that old… but it does predate the Chapter 2 announcement, most importantly the announcement of the Core and is thus also outdated in several important parts.
It’s a bit early into Chapter 2 to write up yet another buying guide, so this article here is supposed to serve as a stopgap for the situation.

This got fairly long, so I used some color highlights to pick out the actual advice. Everything else is justification for that advice.

Who this advice applies to

If you are the sort of person that can just buy anything, that has an easy $1000 set aside to splurge on whatever, you don’t need a buying guide. Just live your life. However, when asked the question of how to get into Arkham, then “Just buy everything you can get your hands on because you might not be able to get everything otherwise” is just not good advice. It’s not useful, it’s not taking into account that not everyone can just drop that sort of money and even when you can, it’s probably not healthy.
I also assume you get into the game to actually play it. Not to just have it so you can post pictures of shrinkwrapped packages on reddit so you feel something that almost resembles peace for ten seconds, then moan for months about those two campaigns you weren’t able to acquire while having eight other ones unfinished.

With that out of the way, i don’t want to beat around the bush any longer, so let me just get straight to answering both of those questions in a short, concise manner before going into a bit more detail.

Is It Worth Starting With Arkham Horror LCG right now?

Yes, very much so. The game is excellent and the Chapter 2 is not changing any of the fundamentals that make it excellent. Actually, I expect it to improve subtly.

Where Should You Start?

Get the New Core, released in 2026. Ignore Chapter 1 for now, at least where player cards are concerned. After that, continue with the Investigator Decks (Tommy, Carolyn, André, Marie, Miguel) to build out the foundation that chapter 2 player cards will rest on. For scenario content, there are options from chapter 1 which we’ll get into.

Alright, let me justify these takes

The player card pool is going to get built up from the ground with Chapter 2 and is going to cover a lot of the same ground that Chapter 1 did, by necessity. Some things will be different, some lines will be redrawn, but by and large we can still expect to get the same game with the same style of cards, theme for classes, etc. As a result, there’s going to be redundancies and straight up reprints, which isn’t really what gives you the best bang for your buck when starting out.
The new design team is also using this soft reboot of the game to fix some sins of the past, problem cards and longstanding balance issues alike. If you reintroduce the old cards into that new environment, that’s fine in principle – but comes at the cost of that rebalancing. I’m not saying that getting a stray investigator box from chapter 1 would necessarily be a bad idea or a detriment to your collection, but it’s not where you should start.

My strong suggestion here is to trust that the new design team is able to build a coherent new environment, learning from the mistakes of the past while bringing their own fresh takes on ideas that were executed before. By starting with the New Core now you get the experience “as intended” and can be sure that everything you buy is going to align with that. The first wave of cards to be released for Chapter 2 of Arkham is the Core Set and the five new Investigator Starter Decks (Tommy, Carolyn, Marie, Miguel, Andre), which is going to total up to somewhere in the $120-$150 range… which is a good chunk of money for a boardgame that you are just now getting into. And that is going to be enough cards that you will be able to build a solid variety of decks with two investigators per class and a couple options for each of them.

If you really feel like this is not enough, the one thing from the Chapter 1 line i would suggest looking into are the “old” Investigator Starter Decks (Nathaniel, Harvey, Winifred, Jacqueline, Stella). They are self-contained in a way that the regular Investigator Expansions aren’t which could make them good things to add onto the Chapter 2 card pool. That being said, i fully expect Chapter 2 to revisit the specific themes from those decks (like oversuccess, big hand or fail forward) rather sooner than later, which could make them redundant again.

As for the Old Core… Even if you decide to get one because you want to play chapter 1 campaigns (we’ll get to that in a bit), my initial advice would be to put the player cards from that old Core away for now and not use them… at least not at first. The design baselines have shifted considerably from the Old Core to the New Core and many of the cards in the Old Core don’t really fit with what the New Core is doing. It’s something to look into at a later point once we know more about how Chapter 2 shakes out, definitely not something i would want a new player to worry about.

I think that about covers my take on the player card situation. In short, i think it’s best to trust that the designers know what they are doing for now. Stick to Chapter 2 for now. You truly don’t *need* anything from Chapter 1.

Personally, as someone who does own a near-complete Chapter 1 collection, i plan on keeping those cards tucked away for now myself and mostly just play Chapter 2 only as well. Which brings me to another part you may or may not care about: Content Creators, Online Decklists, Online resources for the game in general. If you don’t plan on engaging with the community and just play in your home, this doesn’t apply to you of course. But if you do, it’ll be difficult to compare your experience with other people if you play some hybrid “Chapter 2, but i also have Dream-Eaters and Hemlock Vale” sort of thing. Decklists that are posted and discussed online will (i imagine) mostly assume that you are either playing Chapter 1 only, Chapter 2 only or literally all of it.

Campaign and Scenario Content

Alright, moving on from player cards to campaigns and other scenario content. This is where the lines are more blurred because there’s not really much of a distinction in designer intention between the two chapters here. As far as we know, at least. So there’s nothing standing in the way to play the Forgotten Age, Scarlet Keys or Circle Undone campaigns with the new player card pool. Well, almost nothing. Because the old campaigns require the encounter sets that came with the Old Core.

And this is where the Old Core in my opinion has its only value for new players right now, in those encounter sets. Because those unlock the ability to seamlessly without any adjustments play the old campaigns. Considering that the Old Core still clocks in at $60, that’s however a rather steep price for 50 cards to care about. Thankfully, FFG released the old encounter sets as print&play options on their website.
We were promised that we’d get an official way to play the old campaigns with the new encounter sets from the New Core as well. We got that in form of a substitution table that swaps out old sets with corresponding new ones… however I found this table lacking severely and i can’t really recommend it to new players. I did a series of better replacements on a per scenario basis and that showed that except for two campaigns (Circle Undone, Dream-Eaters) you can port them to chapter 2 with relative ease. If this is of interest to you, please find more details in that article series.

It’s unfortunate that in the product lineup that was shown for this year’s releases, no full campaign was on the docket. There’s a three-part campaign which alongside the three-parter in the New Core itself is our only campaign content that Chapter 2 starts out with. You’ll certainly be able to play those mini-campaigns a couple of times. But i’d expect those three-parters to wear thin fairly quick compared to an eight-parter. So at that point, it’d be beneficial to have the option of a more complete experience through a Chapter 1 campaign.

If you find one of the old standalone scenarios in your local gamestore or (without overpaying) online, you can always pick those up as well, i suppose. They are completely self-contained, don’t use any Core encounters. That being said, they don’t solve anything either, they are just that… a single scenario you can play. Nothing i’d focus on as a new player.

And that’s my take on scenario stuff. In short, due to there not being an eight-part campaign announced for 2026, getting one or two of the old campaigns could be very attractive. It does require swapping out the old encounter sets for different ones, but that is doable reasonably well for most campaigns. Check my guide on that for details. Alternatively, the old encounter sets are also available as print&play on the FFG website.

And just to throw that option out as well, custom content exists. You could print off one of the many existing fan-made campaigns. You are fortunate enough here to walk into a new game, getting to experience it from the start while simultaneously also being able to profit from an already established ecosystem of creators and fans that got you covered if you are interested in that sort of thing.

Intro

This has been a topic that I’ve been sitting out for a while now, but it’s finally time to talk about the chapter 1 to chapter 2 transition and about the proposed play formats from the latest FAQ. When the FAQ came out in July, this all didn’t really look like anything worth caring about to me. But of course the chapter 2 announcement with the new Core Set and design baseline behind it makes a lot more sense and is impactful enough that it’ll inform how i am going to handle certain things going forward.

The Short Version

Personally, i am going to make a pretty hard cut between Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 where player cards are concerned. I see these as separate card pools built on different principles and i don’t see much of a reason to mix them. Formats like Current (consisting of New Core and Old Campaigns) i will just ignore because they don’t make sense to me and will revisit that whole rotation business only once we are actually looking at rotating out our first chapter 2 set in uuuuh… four years?
I expect that most of the times when i play, i will now play Chapter 2 decks and that will be reflected in most of the content that i put out. Decklists would probably be chapter 2 focused, but i might go on a tangent about chapter 1 options if i do a more detailed discussion on a card or investigator.
Basically, i bought into the conceit of a new start for the game pretty heavily and i am confident in the abilities of the new design team to improve on the great foundations that the old guard put down.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that this whole discussion doesn’t extend to the campaigns, only to the player cards. I will happily play any of the new player decks in old campaigns and don’t see a reason against doing that either.

Alright, now onto the long version.

The July ’25 FAQ 2.4

This is when we first got offered some tangible scraps of what the folks at FFG were thinking of for new play environments, made necessary by it being impossible to keep ten years worth of product in stock at all times. Back then, i didn’t really care about this much – after all, Arkham is not a competitive game and campaigns have never been balanced around a full card pool. If you built decks from everything available without restraint, you were always going to crush every campaign. So the whole concept of limiting yourself in some way if you owned everything is not something new, this just introduced some labels… labels that to me didn’t really mean much.
The whole context of these environments changed with the announcement of the New Core and Chapter 2, making this even less of a thing for me to really care about. I suppose it’s nice to have identifiable labels, like calling things “Legacy” and everyone knowing it means you just use whatever.
The other two proposed environments were Current and Limited. Current means the Core Set, the investigator starter decks and the last three released investigator expansions. At time of writing (and at the time of the FAQ) this meant Scarlet Keys, Hemlock Vale and Drowned City. Plus Nathaniel, Harvey, Wini, Jacqueline, Stella. This made sort of sense conceptually – if you do introduce a rotating environment, then having a base of Core + Starters is a solid foundation and three expansions is PLENTY of card pool to work with. At the time however, this pool made little sense to me though. The three campaigns weren’t really designed with this in mind and Scarlet Keys especially is a set that builds very much on the card pool that came before it. So this only ever made sense to me as an environment a year or two down the road when we’d get two or three expansions that’d actually be designed to be part of such an environment… and then the new Core announcement came, alongside the announcement for new starters, so i suppose we will talk about Current in … four investigator expansions when the first of the chapter 2 sets would rotate out of it?
The final environment that was proposed is Limited. Pick the Core, pick the starters, pick three sets of your choice, there’s your pool. I mean, sure. Doesn’t really fit in with what the original impetus for the whole discussion was (not all product being available forever), but might as well put a label on that too. Personally, i would not have included the Starters in this (instead I’d count the five of them together as one expansion), but i am largely indifferent to this concept.

So yeah, bottom line here is that none of that was all that interesting to me, neither as a player nor as a content creator. And with the chapter 2 announcement, all of that is now so far out of date that it matters even less.

Chapter 2

Alright, the big announcement then, from around two months ago. The torch has been passed from the old guard of designers (Nate, Maxine, Waleed) completely to the new team (Duke, Nick, Reid). The game has been going on for close to 10 years and every continually expanded game that goes on for that long will have a bunch of design debts accumulated that piled up over time. A new Core Set is about to release, effectively restarting the design for the player card pool with a modernized mindset and taking the lessons of the past into account – well, that’s the hope, at least, that’s what i am expecting here!
And i bought into that premise pretty much completely and am pretty excited to see what Duke and Nick have in store for us with the new Core and Starters (Reid is new to the team and as far as i am aware not involved in those yet). As i am writing this, we are halfway through spoiler season for the Core and things are looking quite promising to me, with fewer outliers in power and several old issues being consciously addressed (like the Firearm vs Melee divide).
Which makes me pretty adamant about not mixing Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 card pools for my own decks. As an example, I like how the new M1911 looks next to new Machete and i have no desire to throw the Runic Axe (not to mention the old Machete) back into the pool to undo that. Similarly i am looking forward to not playing Milan, Easy Mark, Backpack and Take Heart in every deck under the sun. There might be some exceptions where i think that a Chapter 2 deck would be hugely more fun if i threw a pair of Calling in Favors into it or something, of course. But as far as my own approach to the formats go for now, the two chapters have a strong divide between them that I’d need to have a deck-defining reason to cross.
As mentioned, this does include weird formats like the proposed Current (consisting of new Core with old expansions) from the FAQ which in my eyes just exist because they have to from a marketing perspective, not because any of the designers sees any actual merit in them.

From a content creator’s perspective, i had a good time last year with my forays into limited card pools, specifically building from just the (old) Core and Drowned City. If i do more writeups of campaigns or decks on Ancient Evils, i expect them to be similarly limited to (new) Core and (new) Starters, at least for a good while. Any sort of deep dive on specific cards or investigators (like the Winifred primer i did or the Patriciafred deck) would likely go over options from the full card pool as well though.
While i have bought into the concept of a new chapter, i did however not buy into the idea of a rotating environment. It’s not an impossible sell, but my thought is that i will just keep playing with everything from chapter 2 from now on. But that’s a topic for … well, whenever we are four expansions deep into Chapter 2. When is that? 2030? Remind me when we get there, i guess.