Month: February 2026

Intro

No time to talk, lots of cards to go through as we got the whole Tommy Muldoon deck dropped on our heads. Previews happened all week, at a pace of 4 to 5 cards per day. This right here is where i collect all of them in one place and comment on them. Same thing is happening next week with Carolyn Fern’s deck. I will also be showing off some cards next week, by the way ;)
And because those 20-ish cards aren’t enough, there also was a Live Stream on Youtube where FFG showed off more than a dozen cards across all five decks. This is going to be a long one.

Sources

Overconfident was shown on the official ArkhamHorror.com site.

Vicious Blow(2), Stock Ammo Reload, Indomitable and On the Beat were previewed by The Whisperer in Darkness on their Youtube

Police Dog(0, 1), Physical Fitness(0, 2) and Bounty were previewed by Valentin1331 on arkham.build

Custom Grip, Thompson SMG, Scroll of the Pharaos(0,4, 4, 4), The Grapevine(0, 2), Red Clock, Consume Power, Torrent of Power, Blood Curse(0, 3), Bend Blood, Glassing, Hunting Dog, Same Old Thing all were previewed by FFG live on their Youtube

Make Em Sing, Adapt and Overcome, Armed to the Teeth and M1911 (0, 2) were previewed by Arkham Horror Memes on their instagram

Rookie Cop, Detective Sherman, Endurance(3) and Protective Vest(4) were previewed by Quick Learner on their Youtube

Restrained, Stakeout(0,3) and Extended Barrel were previewed by Los Archivos De Arkham on their Twitch

Guardian

Police Dog comes in and asks how much value you put into flexibility and versatility. There are other cards that give you skill bonuses to either attacks or investigation, but the dog can give you either. In fact, he can even give that bonus to another player. In exchange for that flexibility, you get that bonus only to one test per round. For the level 0, that’s where the tradeoffs end – and while it’s not unplayable, it’s also not all that enticing. But i think the level 1 does change this outlook significantly by also upping the bonus from a +1 to a +2 which means the level 1 dog not only offers flexibility, but also burst power. Getting a repeatable source of +2 to any of the two game progressing actions every round is quite good and at 1xp it’s competitively enough priced that i can see myself going for it as soon as i am not just the 100% dedicated murder hobo of the team.
If you do put the dogs into your deck, you definitely plan on upgrading them to level 1 as soon as possible, chances are you are pretty much never going to enter a scenario 2 with level 0 Police Dog. Truth be told, chances are you just jam Logan in scenario 1 and upgrade to Police Dog(1) from there if that’s your plan.
Something else i think is worth pointing out: Stat-boosting allies in chapter 2 so far have been unique. So unlike with old Beat Cop, you can’t stack two Logans on top of each other. You can in fact use Charisma to get two of these Dogs. Or a dog and Logan.
Overall: I actually like the level 1 quite a bit, but the level 0 is a bit of a filler.

And here’s another ally that helps you get some clues. Well, *a* clue. Rookie Cop’s primary purpose is tanking some damage for you, but that she also gains you a testless clue on her way out is definitely appreciated! She’s not as good as chapter 1’s Tetsuo who was just exceptionally good at dying for a good cause, but she’s still a really good ally. Unlike many others that we’ve seen, she’s also one that doesn’t plan on hogging the ally slot for forever, she can be part of a rotating cast of sacrifi… i mean expenda… i mean temporary friends.
Great, i like this one. Not super strong, but certainly a card to consider often enough.

Another card that helps you be a bit more flexible, allowing for an evade or investigate using your combat value. In a general value sense this is fine, on a level with Breaking and Entering if everything goes right… but for an event i would usually expect a bit more oomph behind it, like the skill bonus rogues get on B&E to make sure things go right in the first place. My biggest sticking point here is that the times when i want to evade with a Guardian is when i am facing an enemy i can’t take down in one turn, some big Elite. However that is exactly when the difficulty of the test on this card is very high, so the evade capabilities of this are limited to smaller enemies… which you can usually just shoot. So it’s kind of at its worst when i need it the most. The card is not particularly pushed in terms of power level and there are only so many events i can spend 2 resources on. This is probably not going to make the cut.

The fuck are you wearing, mustard boi? Questionable fashion choices aside, this will clearly see play, a lot of it. Getting just two resources at Fast speed already puts this on a level with ECache and you will quite often be able to get three or more out of it. Like with Crack the Case in chapter 1, you probably will not always be able to maximize the card because you need those resources – but the fact that it will give you the resources when you need them is already good enough. Great card, and i appreciate that it can play a team support role as well and spread the wealth to someone else.

For the most part, this is just a somewhat overwrought way of reloading your gun. Chapter 1 has some cards in it that interact well, like the Remington and Custom Modifications, but in a chapter 2 context i see this mostly as a placeholder for the Stock Ammo Reload in your deck. Or you could just play an additional Firearm in your deck instead, after all this doesn’t actually give you a better rate on resources per ammo than you get on a fresh gun. Well, i suppose it does save a play action on the new gun, but i’d still look to replace this with something else rather sooner than later.

The biggest problem with healing cards is always the tempo loss from having to spend actions on it. This isn’t *quite* Fast, but close enough as it will give you your healing on top of a move. The level 0 is fine, but not outstanding, two resources are kind of a lot. The upgrade however is significant. Lowering the resource cost while also upping the amount of damage healed makes Physical Fitness(2) a very nice way to purge trauma or just to safeguard against mounting damage from scenario effects and enemy attacks, no matter if provoked or not. Healing cards that can’t be used on other investigators or allies are bit limited, but the numbers are right. Well, at least on the upgraded one they are, i am not super keen on the level 0 version.

Chaining Deep Ones to radiators is surprisingly efficient! This takes care of a lot of enemies with very little fuss, disabling them for at least a turn – or forever, if they are Humanoid. This seems quite good to me. The card is playable on any enemy attack, so it can be used on attacks of opportunities just as well as on regular attacks, when a Hunter moves into you or if a treachery hands out bonus attacks.
One thing worth pointing out is that even if it’s not Humanoid, the card only gets discarded at the end of the round, after the Upkeep phase would ready the enemy. So it stays down for at least one more round.
A great card to have in the Guardian toolbox.

The card is interesting in that you can either play it for two resources to get the horror heal – or just commit it to your investigation, get the +2 anyways and only miss out on the heal. So you basically run this for its icons and if you need the horror heal, you can get a bit here without having to lose tempo for it. However, like i said earlier, there is only so many events i can afford to spend 2 resources on and i am not sure that Stakeout(0) quite holds up to On the Beat and Scene of the Crime for me. It’s cool that i can pretty much play a primary clue Guardian fueled by events now however… well, as soon as i figure out how to pay for all these.
The level 3 confuses me because it removes the one thing that i really like about the level 0: The icons. It is now much better when actually played as an event, gaining 2 clues in one go while also healing a good chunk… but giving up the “skill” mode of the card is rough when it’s also 3xp. I don’t like that aspect at all. That being said, the card isn’t bad. It lets guardians pretend to be seekers for a moment and once you factor in the horror healing you definitely get your value here. I just wish it still had two intellect icons. Three actually, to match the bonus in the textbox…

The game text on the card is somewhat redundant, as the best way to overcome alert and retaliate is passing the skill test. Which is something the icons on any skill already help you do. This does offer a bit of safety against those keywords, but i’d likely put any skill that gives me +3 to the test over this as i’d just value that +1 higher than the explicit alert/retal protection. Might be more worth it in higher difficulties than the one i play?
At the end of the day, i see this as a card that offers the flexibility of committing either for combat or agility icons and that’s solid… but the restriction to attacks or evasions undoes some of that right away. If i could use this to adapt and overcome certain encounter cards, i’d probably be more interested as that is one of the major ways the agility skill is relevant. Bit of a filler card. Isn’t awful, does the job, but i’d wager you can do better. Like for example you could play…

I have played Crack Shot before and it’s remarkably solid. Three icons on a level 0 skill is a great thing to have, the difference between getting +2 and +3 is often huge. This is a more open-ended version of Crack Shot, so that’s a fine baseline. How much more open-ended? Well, if i understand the rules correctly (and i give that a solid 50:50), this cannot be committed to an intellect test on a Fingerprint Kit for example, because while the skill gains two wilds once part of the test, the lack of an initial intellect icon means it can’t be committed to an intellect test in the first place. That leaves willpower and agility then. How often do you test those on an Item? Likely this flexibility doesn’t matter at all for Tommy Muldoon, but once we get our eventual Guardian/Mystic and Guardian/Rogue hybrids, this may become relevant. Notably, Armed to the Teeth does work for melee weapons, so even if we look at it from a pure Guardian angle, this is a better Crack Shot. And that seems perfectly fine to me.

I already sang the praises of the M1911 during the Core Set reveals and even gave it the #2 spot on my list of potential game-changers from the Core because getting a Firearm at a reasonable resource cost is just that damn special. Tommy’s deck also has the upgraded version, which continues to just be chapter 1’s .45 Auto with a resource cost shaved off. And again, that one cost makes all the difference. I was hoping for this card to be here, this is just a great baseline to move forwards from.

It’s a slightly tuned down Reliable. The blue Magnifying Glass went under the radar for all of chapter 1 and never got the notoriety of its handslot-using cousin, but it’s been an excellent card nonetheless. Not sure it really needed to be tuned down to only work with Firearms, though. That doesn’t make it less good, but does of course limit it in its application.
Will see play, will be good. I might even play it alongside Reliable in a full card pool.

That +3 skill bonus is pretty huge, as usually just a +2 isn’t enough to bring a base value of 3 into a range where it comfortably can beat many shrouds. Now, this can bring Tommy from 3 to 6 intellect, enough to reasonably expect two to three clues from a shroud 3 location. That puts it on a similar clue enabling level as Scene of the Crime, and while On the Beat isn’t testless, it also doesn’t require any enemies around and can even lead to a third clue. Add to that the ability to use this as a scenario depended Parley enabler (like for example to woo Ichtaca in Untamed Wilds) and you got a very solid card that is worth 1xp for sure. The icons are good too for when you don’t need the effect. I like this one a lot, both as a quasi-upgrade for Scene of the Crime and as a complement where you can use one while enemies are around and the other while they aren’t.

5 ammo is a lot to gain out of just one card. This allows you to basically replay your firearm for just 2 resources and chances are you get more ammo out of this than the weapon had originally. Being able to divide the ammo up onto multiple firearms can be a thing (like if you are using a M1911 alongside a Service Revolver), but it only a small extra benefit on the side. I’d just purely evaluate this as a 5 ammo for 2 resources trade and that is a very good trade. It does cost 2xp, but since it allows you to double up on your upgraded weapons as well, that seems entirely fair. A staple for the Firearm deck in the making.

Hey, it’s good old Vicious Blow(2). The level 0 card is a staple of the Guardian class and while the level 2 isn’t quite as prolific, it’s still a very nice upgrade. Two icons is a lot more than one and both the consistency gain and the chance of hitting the +2 damage oversuccess make this a good value add to any Guardian deck once they got their essentials figured out.

So many Ally cards in Guardian! I was expecting an upgraded Logan Hastings, but instead we get this guy here who brings +1 combat on a warm body to the table. With Charisma, you can even stack Sherman’s and Logan’s skill bonus which seems relevant enough before even looking at abilities. Sherman has that same “tank for the team” ability that we’ve seen on several Guardian allies now which is neat and gives the class a bit more of a team-player angle. He also serves up some more testless clues, something that Guardian seems to be able to conjure quite a lot in this evergreen card pool of Core + Investigator Decks.
Looks quite good to me and definitely worth the 3xp.

Oh, there’s a lot to unpack with this one. The card is, except for the new Starting keyword, unchanged. So what do you actually get from that keyword? Well, here’s the rules:

So you get the knowledge that the card will always be in your opening hand if you want it. If you include Endurance as a critical part of your gameplan – for example to have a 3 combat investigator reliably fight despite their shortcomings in the printed combat value – then that is obviously valuable. A side-effect of that is that you don’t need to include a second copy of Endurance. Finally, this might also cause you to start the game with an extra card in hand, effectively reducing your deck size. This isn’t guaranteed though – if you draw the card in your starting hand naturally, you’d only get a benefit from Starting if you have another card with the keyword in your deck.
Clearly this is overall weaker than Permanent which also guarantees that you start with the card but doesn’t make you spend an action and resources on playing the card. The potential for an extra card in hand (and some slight deck thinning) is a minor upside of Starting over Permanent, but clearly this is meant as a weaker form of the concept. Which is fair enough, Permanent is one of the best keywords you can put on a player card.
So is this worth it then? Endurance itself… i am not so sure about. You’d really need to depend on the card enough that you’d want to guarantee it in this way which i don’t think Joe, Dani or Tommy will usually do. The keyword is one to keep an eye on for the future, though. I have some qualms with the implementation here, i don’t like that it depends on the luck of the draw during mulligan whether you start with an extra card or not, it should fetch up the card pre-mulligan imo. Exclude the card explicitly from the mulligan itself if you don’t just want this to be Studious with extra steps. But the keyword itself is clearly capable of adding some serious power to a card. I am just not sure that the Talents are the ones where this is really worth it.

I have never been one to look down on skills that just give you a bunch of icons. Passing tests is important and if something like chapter 1’s Defensive Stance is what makes it happen, then i am all for it. At 3xp this does however come at an opportunity cost that is too high for my liking. The promise of 5 icons, 4 of which are wild, is one that i am very much interested in, but if you add that price tag and also a fairly strict condition, then i don’t think i will end up playing this much after all. I do like that this comes with solid icons just by itself, so the fail state is at least reasonable – but overall this doesn’t excite me the way i’d want a 3xp card to do.

There is a bit of a sticker shock element to this, where 4xp seems like a lot at first glance, but i actually like this one a lot. This bundles several cards into one tidy package. So when you draw Protective Vest, you are actually drawing three cards: A Backpack, a Bandolier and a Leather Coat. Which you then play all at once for one action. This gives a lot of value and power from just one card which justifies the xp cost quite handily. In one swoop, this card plays setup, provides defense and increases the ceiling on your offense. That’s significant. If i had the option to pay an extra 2xp an 1 resource in chapter 1 to tack 3 health soak and a hand slot onto my Backpack(2), that’s a deal i would have taken many many times, so i definitely see myself going for this in our new cardpool.
Notably, this is the only way to gain an extra hand slot in chapter 2 (at least as far as we’ve seen), something that is definitely desirable if we plan on wielding Service Revolvers or Axe Wrenches alongside our Becky, shotgun or Thompson. Due to how enabling this sort of effect is i do hope we get a cleaner one eventually that comes with less baggage attached. This Vest is pretty good if you use all parts of it, but i’d like there to be a handslot enabler available that also just provides the basic functionality for decks that don’t focus on Firearms specifically.

Our big gun of the set. Like the shotgun, this can put a lot of damage into one enemy in a short time, but the Thompson achieves this through extra attacks per action instead of extra damage per attack. This has advantages (able to split damage between two enemies, an autofail doesn’t ruin your turn, able to conserve ammo) but also disadvantages (more tests overall, no combat bonus on bonus attacks, uses extra ammo cards less efficiently). Which one is better is going to depend on the deck and investigator and i think that’s a great way to make sure these two weapons complement each other instead of competing against each other.

Seeker

So we are still doing Researched cards, huh. Are we still only doing them in Seeker? Why?! Anyways, the Scroll clearly fits in with Carolyn’s shtick of healing horror for profit, providing a way to actually put horror into play deliberately. But even outside of Carolyn, the translation of the level 0 asset isn’t a huge ask. Four actions, four horror after playing the thing and it does at least partially refund some of the investment with three cards. No tests and no situational triggers involved, so it’s just a matter of drawing the thing and spending the actions. The horror you get here is definitely not nothing, but at least there aren’t any wild tests involved or situations you need to manufacture with enemies at your locations or similar. The worst part is probably that the thing exhausts on use, so you have to slowly translate it over the course of 4 rounds. So no quickly dropping this in at the last minute and getting it done on the last two turns, you are going to need to spend some time with it.
The upgraded versions all seem worth at least considering. Bast provides encounter deck manipulation, Ra is a Seeker gun and Set discovers clues. Ra is definitely the one that makes me perk up the most, as fighting in Seeker is just a more special thing than getting some extra clues. One in three yellow cards can find clues, you don’t really need to do the whole song and dance of a Researched card for that. The attacks from Scroll of Ra don’t seem overly powerful, thankfully. The encounter deck manipulation is probably the strongest one here, as it not only allows ditching the worst of the cards, but reordering the remaining ones also gives a way to manipulate which player draws which card.
Historically, Researched cards trended towards being somewhat problematic in terms of power level, but I don’t think any of these upgrades are really sticking out too much from what we usually expect to get from player cards. These seem… fine?

Rogue

Not bad at all. What makes both versions of The Grapevine work for me is that they don’t use up a slot. So you can just drop it into play at some convenient point without having to maybe hold something else back while you wait for things to align in a way that you can gain value out of the asset. I do like that it helps with handling a bunch of enemy keywords (Aloof, Evasive, Hunter) in addition to the movement benefits. And the upgrade is also worth it, that card draw makes it much easier to gain value. I’m not sure i ever want two of these in my deck, but this is a great one-off.

Out of all the rogue cards from chapter 1, i never could have predicted this reprint. The Red Clock is obviously a crazy card, but for 10xp it better be! It plays into the oversuccess and extra actions theme that André has going on as well as the free movement angle that the designers are pushing for Rogue now, so i see why this is here. What a wild card. In chapter 1, i didn’t play this often because the 10xp are just a huge cost and i was happy with just the 4xp version or a plain old Cigarette Case… but assuming the lower level Red Clock doesn’t also return (i think it would have previewed alongside the big one here), maybe this is where i finally give this another go.

Mystic

Nah, I’m not paying 3 for a Shrivelling charge. At that cost for a single-shot attack, i at least want a bonus to my skill value so it doesn’t miss. That one heal doesn’t seem worth enough to offset how mid this card is at its primary job, even for Marie.

Between Soul Link and Blood Curse, level 0 Mystic has wild icons for days. For months, even. The amount of test security gained from these skills is incredible and my impulse is defaulting to just having two of both in all decks that can run them. That being said, Mystics will have to carefully figure out how much horror and damage they are actually able to take. These cards are all individually very very worth it, but there is a critical mass of self-harm that could prove to be too much. Personally, i will try to greed these as much as possible. Surely there is no way this backfires, especially if i start paying horror with Izzie to recur these skills so i can deal even more horror and damage to myself :D
At level 3, the upgraded Blood Curse is out of Izzie’s reach and that’s probably for the best. Notably, with the upgrade the damage doesn’t have to be put on a *player* card, so you can use this to tack a free damage to an enemy at your location onto any test. Obviously that is very very good, Mystic has a Vicious Blow now. Viscous Blow, if you will.
Man, these Mystic skills we’ve seen so far are all just great.

This is less great though. A card that returns from chapter 1, and it’s one that never really saw much play. You can use it to nuke a test by emptying out a spell you control, but that has rarely been worth doing. And with Soul Link and Blood Curse being right there and already providing you with ways to pass your tests, i don’t see a bright future for this card in chapter 2 either. It’s not bad per se, it’s just mostly outclassed by the alternatives. A world where this becomes actively desirable exists, but would require some very specific support pieces like maybe an asset that actively wants its charges to get depleted fast or a “charge battery” that offers sacrificial charges at an exceptionally good rate. For now, i am not keen on this one.

I don’t think this packs enough of a punch for me to consider dropping 5xp on this event. If i am spending 5xp on a one-shot combat event, i need it to be able to deal 3 (at least… probably more, actually) damage to one target. I see the appeal as a way to disable an Elite boss for a turn and that can potentially make this a great silver bullet to prepare for the final scenario, but just on the base of its raw impact as a combat spell, i don’t think there’s enough here.

Survivor

I feel like the ally slot is too valuable to use it on something minor like this Hunting Dog. It’s an effect you aren’t going to use every turn and where you hope to gain enough value out of it over the course of the scenario through randomly hitting the condition now and again. The ally slot makes all the difference here, just look at The Grapevine again and then compare it to Hunting Dog. They both have a similar vibe of enabling your investigator to stay on top of enemies, but Hunting Dog has worse timing and a higher opportunity cost. As cute as he is, i don’t see this floppy boy be worth it.

Schoffner’s Catalogue for events… except not really, not in the parts that made Schoffner’s such a good card. Costing 2 and paying back 5 basically makes this the same net gain as ECache, but limiting the money on only being spendable for a certain card type. In exchange, you get to use the resources for other players too. What took Schoffner’s over the edge and made it outclass ECache was the Item trait and the synergies that came with it, leading to easy recursion and other benefits. Same Old Thing notably lacks that synergy, so at least at this point i am not sure it even beats out ECache most of the time. It’s a card that does its job and you do need resources to play your events of course, so this will see a solid amount of play. But until we find a way to recur Same Old or gain some benefit from it being a Condition traited card, this is most definitely not in the same league as Schoffner’s.

Like its fighty cousin, the already previewed Lie in Wait, this is a great card. Bonus actions, clue compression, allows investigating with agility, gives a skill bonus, it’s fast, this is just all fantastic. Like Lie in Wait, Glassing also has great icons which alone would be worth running the card for. There’s a bit of wording confusion about which locations exactly are being investigated here, but no matter what the final verdict on that will end up as, this is a very good card.

Basic Weakness

Asks for a double action to discard it, until you do it threatens some ping damage. Doesn’t get much more basic than that. This isn’t anything super new or exciting, in fact i am surprised that this hasn’t been in chapter 1 before. Sure, this works for an evergreen weakness.

Intro

Time for a new update to the FAQ and Taboo document – as if we didn’t have our plate full already Oo
This is nicknamed “The Legacy Edition”, as it may very well be the last one for the chapter 1 card pool? Better make it a good one, then.
The FFG article is here: <Link>
The FAQ pdf is here: <Link>

Disclaimer

I’m not a rules guy. If you are looking for someone to break down things to atomic level and talk about steps within phases and which trigger timings do exactly what and where, there’s better people to listen to than me. I am very much a “ruling by intention” kind of guy who just plays the game and is less concerned about gaming the rules.
I’ll be going over the rules stuff from the document and will be explaining what i think all of this means, but i am sure that a properly motivated rules lawyer can “Umm actually” me plenty. I should hopefully still be right where it actually matters for the gameplay, though. Hopefully :D

Errata

This is the part where hard changes are made to the rules text in the rulebooks or on the cards themselves and are not considered optional. I am going to quote most of these by screenshot, but will be skipping a few very minor things (like a rewording of an achievement in Drowned City).

Rule of thumb is that buying multiple copies of a product isn’t supposed to give you an ingame advantage. This makes a lot of sense of course. So if you have 4 Sled Dogs in your deck, you don’t get to Memories of Another Life for number 5 and 6. Or play additional virtual copies of Occult Lexicon this way.

There are some very few treacheries that can blank the assets of an investigator, this no longer affects something like a Charon’s Obol. Sure.

Good clarification, as printed Ocula Obscura (Agatha’s signature asset) was able to seal the same token over and over again which is of course not the intention.

The timing on Katarina had already been fixed with FAQ2.4, this is only a minor wording change (“reveal chaos tokens” vs “reveal a chaos token”). One for the lawyers.

Two Drowned City campaign related errata. One for a specific Elite enemy which adds the word “directly” into its gametext to clarify that it doesn’t move locations one by one, but teleports. This allows it to ignore any pathing issues. Beneath the City is the agenda card from Sepulchre of the Sleeper and fixes an oversight around the doom mechanics in that scenario. All sensible.

This is Parallel Lola’s weakness enemy. It has Hidden as printed which stops Lola’s player from playing it? Something like that.

Rulings and Clarifications

This is the part where (supposedly) nothing changes about the rules, but the wording is cleaned up or clarified to be clearer.

Mandatory effects like scenario effects can’t be stopped by additional costs. So if there’s a location that says “Pay an extra action to enter” and an advancing agenda tells everyone to move to that location, then that’s happening whether you have an action to pay or not. This is simply a blanket allowance for scenario effects to happen when they need to. Makes sense, we don’t like broken scenarios.

Kinda weird to see rules about where to place cards on the table? Anyway, this doesn’t change anything about how Limbo (the space where cards go when they leave your hand and are being resolved) works so let’s move on.

Just a minor wording change here, previously it talked about “when you end your turn” which isn’t a real timing point and introduced some ambiguity about whether it would happen before or after other “end of turn” effects.

If a card tells you it can be played, it can be played. One for the lawyers.

I believe this is about some glyphs in the Drowned City? Can’t really think about a specific example for this one.

“If a scenario lacks these instructions, make it up as you go along. Also, feel free to add whatever tokens you want to the bag.” Riiiight, helpful :D

I think this is more Lola shenanigans? Not sure where else it would matter whether a card without a class is Neutral or not.

Was this in question? If the game text tells you to add a card, you add the card.

This came up here and there with cards like Down the Rabbit Hole, having this spelled out is good.

No “snapshotting” of skill values at specific times, no changing of the test result after it’s been determined. This all makes sense and is intuitive.

Good. This has been part of the campaign book in scenarios where this mattered most of the time, but having this codified to be part of the global rules makes a lot of sense.

What this means is that if Luke is engaged with an enemy and plays an investigation event into a location that also has an enemy, he will get attacks of opportunity from both sides. Previously it used to be that he’d only get attacked by the one on the target location because he was treated “as if” no longer on his old location. IMy read on this is basically that the threat area moves with the investigator in these “as if” situations now, which is somewhat consistent with how the threat area usually behaves.

This didn’t mention horror before, only damage. Yeah. Whatever, this is not a change, this is fixing a typo.

I feel like this belongs in the errata section, this is an actual rules change. I like this change, the previous way to determine the farthest location (which required adding every locations distance from every investigator) was really convoluted. This is much cleaner.

I don’t think anything changed here in a substantial way? Comparing this to the wording from the 2.4FAQ, the sentences seem to have been cleaned up a bit, reordered in parts. But if i am not overlooking anything, then this is unchanged from before.

Neutral is not a class. Yep, makes sense.

*nods along* Yes, that is all what i’d intuitively expect this to work like.

This is great news for anyone who can interrupt these attacks with reaction abilities, like (old) Daniela Reyes who gets to autoevade her attacker. Good to see this written down here in plain text.

FAQ

This is where rule explanations go, where we get things spelled out for us in case the rules text left any ambiguity. I’ll again be cutting out some particularly obvious “reading the card explains the card” sort of answers so I don’t spend all day here.

This makes Laboratory Assistant an excellent way to hedge against George’s weakness, as the hand size increase will apply and let you keep some of your cards in hand even if his boat gets emptied.

I’m surprised to read this, i didn’t expect the upgrade sheet to just reset like that. But this only applies if you are using customizable cards to get around Exile costs, in which case i am side-eyeing you for your nonsense anyways.

Honestly, that wording should have been retired long ago. Just spell it out on the card that the enemy attacks, then exhausts. No need to “as if” this one.

There’s nothing in the rules stopping you from attacking an enemy at another location (or investigating another location) in principle, so once you initiated the thing it’s perfectly fine to finish it even if you moved after the initiation of the effect.

Meh. If they want a card to only ignore resource costs, they should write that on the card. “No cost” means “no cost”. Not “actually there are some costs”. I see how this is analogue to the “Ignoring all costs” thing from earlier, but that just illustrates that maybe you shouldn’t use five different wordings for the same thing. Check Spiritual Echo for how to properly word “ignore only the action cost”, apply the same wording to ignoring only the resource cost. But no redefining of basic english words, “No” is not a keyword, No means No.
Or you know, just let Memories pull Bank Job and let Shotcaster pull Summoned Hounds. Either is far from the most powerful thing you can do with those cards.
I am salty about this one, doesn’t make a lick of sense to me both on a rules and on a gameplay level.

*chuckles* I know i wanted to cut out the obvious parts, but “a token ignored counts as an ignored token” is one of the funnier bits of this FAQ.

From what i gathered from Discord chatter, this doesn’t fully clear up the timing pf Glimpse of the Void (Agatha’s weakness). But this does make the intention clear enough at least: The extra token is revealed alongside the others and treated as a separate entity. Truth be told, i am not sure what specifically the issues were with Glimpse, i suppose this is about stacking all sorts of extra token reveals on top of each other?

That makes sense to me. A good rule of thumb in general is to treat the preludes as Act 0 of the following scenario, with the exceptions that are explicitly spelt out in the campaign book (discard down to one asset, etc).

Taboo: Chaining/Unchaining

Okay, with all the rules headaches out of the way, it’s finally time for the fun part. The taboo list is an optional list of modifiers to cards supposed to make outliers fall in line with the intended balance of the rest of the game. This can mean buffing underperformers or nerfing overperformers. Chaining is the simplest way to do this, adding extra XP to the costs of adding a card to a deck. This doesn’t change the level of the card, so this has no influence on deckbuilding options.

Here’s a link to the level 5 Monster Slayer, in case you also didn’t think of this card in five or more years. You can get it now for 3xp, but to be honest i am not sure that is enough. There are some heavy duty non-Elites that this can be useful against but not in a capacity that i really see this card make a difference. Lowering the xp cost is a step in the right direction, i suppose.

The autofail protection on top of the Vicious Blow is strong, but did this cause any problems? To be honest, i found the 1xp to be easily enough of an opportunity cost to not run this a lot – and when i wanted this effect i have usually been playing Hunter’s Mark instead. This doesn’t strike me like a card to care enough about to chain it.

This is bullshit and it legitimately makes me angry. Their ruling that Rod is indeed a broken combo piece was already controversial like no other, with barely anyone being in favor of it. And now they taboo the thing so that you actively get punished for playing it fair, fully aware of how most feel about the ruling. What a mean-spirited middlefinger to everyone who just wants to play a fun card that puts Rots on enemies instead of a Cyclopean Hammer sized piece of overpowered nonsense that trivializes all token interactions and obsoletes half a dozen cards. Garbage. I hate it and will ignore it. In my world, Rod of Carnamagos has the text “except during a skill test” and it’s a better world than whatever this is.

Yeah, this is neat. Quick Shot is laughably overcosted at 3xp, “Working a Punch” is barely playable as it is. At 1xp for all three copies it does have a shot of being played for shits and giggles here and there, even if it’s likely not ever going to be the “best” card. The best home i can see for this is Marion who can use more Fast events to tack other events onto. Dealing a damage to something, then following it up with a Toe to Toe is a pretty nice way to testless kill a 3 health enemy without even taking an action. Hunter’s Mark can be used the same way, but to be fair, you get 2 Hunter’s Mark for 2xp while you can get 3 Quick Shot for 1xp. Or just jam all five. With Glory and Ready for Anything, Marion even has a decent enough chance to get the occasional free shot off, although i still wouldn’t assume that to be the regular thing to shoot for, that’s just a bonus.

This is mad. Bum’s Rush? Here, I’ll link it because many won’t even have that on their radar as a card that exists. Likely the sticking point here is that the move effect happens no matter if you fail or pass – and to be fair i can see an unconditional enemy move be a 1xp effect. But is this really the card in the whole wide card pool that needed a rebalancing? Didn’t we take cards like Higher Education off of the list to keep it down to the absolute most necessary offenders? This is what belongs in a lineup with Pathfinder and Myconid in the +1xp club? Some dorky two cost event :D Nah, this is mad nonsense. If you take offense at the unconditional move, mutate the card wording to what likely was the original intention anyways but this is just random as hell.

Speaking of Myconid, the treachery canceling strain of Ravenous Myconid is no longer chained by +1, due to getting a mutation instead. So let’s look at the mutations.

Taboo: Mutations

Mutations are changes to the game text that are supposed to either clamp down on abuse cases or to give a card new playability through a more generous rules text.

Oh, that’s cute. A bunch of Mystic cards have already undergone the same treatment of triggering on any symbol instead of just the listed ones and given them a good amount of new life. Wither in a blurse deck looks actually somewhat solid now. As an added bonus, the upgraded Wither’s effect now last until end of phase instead of end of turn, meaning it persists from the Mystic’s turn into another player’s turn, only fading at the end of the investigator phase. Good stuff.

I mean, this does almost kind of sort of plug the loophole of sitting on a shroud 0 location with a Myconid and canceling every card. Now you need to have 1 growth to do it. So… still horribly broken. The Myconid line is just fundamentally cooked, any genuine attempt to fix it would probably have to start with its Uncanny Growth enabler, making it not discover clues would be a good start…

Yeah, this makes a lot of sense, Spectral Shield is super cracked for a level 0 card even with this modification in effect. This does stop the worst abuse cases.

This is another interesting one. Removing the action cost from Spiritual Echo turns it into genuine action advantage. It’s a bit fiddly and there are hoops to jump through, but the payoff is now there to do cool things with it. I like this change a lot.

Heh, people were salty about having to pay library fees even when they didn’t read anything at the time. Sure, this makes sense.

I like this a lot. As a slotless asset, On the Heels has very few ways of discarding from play as printed, so once it was empty, there was no way to get it back somehow. It’s also using bespoke uses so there wasn’t any way to refill it (beyond that one Mystic card). While he ability to discard, reshuffle and get drawn again isn’t a huge factor in its playability, the lack of it has actually stopped me from including the card before. Good change.

Taboo: Forbidden

Forbidden cards can’t be played if you follow the optional list of taboos. This list is reserved for those cards that are truly unsalvagable. There were two cards on this list before (Double or Nothing and the level 5 Necronomicon), now there’s a third one.

And good riddance to Burn After Reading. Some people were doing things like exiling the level 2 Signum Crucis, then rebuying it for free because it’s unchained by -2xp. Or doing the trick with the Customizables. Basically, a bunch of stuff you only ever get the idea to do if you don’t engage the game in good faith in the first place. Everything around this card was cringe and i will not be shedding a tear.

Finishing Up

The document then follows with some Ultimatum and Boon business, but that’s just suggestions for house rules. Basically, you can do what you want and if you want to slap a label on it, sure why not. Nothing worth discussing, though. The “Beta Environments” are reiterated again, but on a chapter 1 base i don’t see any point to them, so i got nothing to say about that either.

So … was this really the last FAQ for chapter 1 then? Overall this was solid, some good rules clarifications and tweaks that overall make sense. Not a huge fan of the “No cost means you have to pay costs, actually” thing, but aside from that the rules stuff all felt reasonable enough. No huge surprises that really shake something up, but things like defining the word “collection” and enshrining the sequencing for Massive attacks are appreciated.

On the side of the optional taboos, we got some cards get enough of a shot in the arm that they might see play now: Quick Shot, Wither, Spiritual Echo and On their Heels do all get a considerable upgrade that puts them in contention. Rod of Carnamagos taboo is a travesty and actively offensive. Bum’s Rush taboo is irrelevant and bizarre. The rest likely doesn’t matter too much… but if the unchaining makes someone consider Monster Slayer(5) as an option now to kill shoggoths in EotE or the Bull in Innsmouth, then more power to them!

*Shrug* Not the worst, not the best FAQ we’ve had. I was half expecting something big for the end of chapter 1, but maybe that’s on me.

Hot Take Edition

This set is very new, the review was written before holding the cards in hand. I will eventually go back and revise many of these ratings, once we are all a bit more familiar with the cards and the new baselines set forth by Chapter 2.
Until then, take these comments as what they are, hot takes fueled by first impressions and I’ll give you a headsup on when i update this in like half a year or so.

Introduction

On this page, i go over all of the player cards in the Core to evaluate them. The goal is not only to find out how playable the cards are on an individual level, but also to see how well set up the classes are to build coherent and capable decks that can tackle a campaign.
This evaluation will be mostly self-contained to the Core Set, so chapter 1 references will be kept to a minimum.
The ranking I use for cards is Bad < Okay < Good < Excellent with each of those spanning quite a range. I use something like “Okay to Good” or “Good to Okay” when I want to specify whether it’s on the upper or lower range of that rank. Cards that are particularly important because they can slot into many many decks, get the Staple ranking. Being a Staple or not is often not just about individual power, but also about opportunity cost, favoring cards with low XP and resource costs.
Please don’t take these rankings too seriously and more as a guideline, cards need to be evaluated in context and compressing these contexts down into just one word is really unprecise. I still find it useful for this overview as a shortcut to put the cards into relation quickly.

The Investigators

Investigators in the Core Set all follow the same deckbuilding rules, they can play any card level 0-5 from their main class and a limited range of level 0-2 of a specific subclass. These are big and flexible card pools that allow for a good amount of variety.
Daniela Reyes: The primary Guardian, secondary Survivor. She supports a tanky playstyle where you intentionally get in harm’s way and retaliate on the enemies while protecting your teammates. As a 5 combat investigator with full Guardian access she is definitely able to play the role of the main fighter.
Joe Diamond: Seeker first, Guardian second. His statline and card access has him split between being a fighter and a seeker, but both his main class and his investigator ability makes him lean greatly towards seeking. What you end up with is a good main seeker that can also defend himself from monsters, but is somewhat vulnerable to the encounter deck. His card draw makes him even more consistent than Seekers usually are already.
Trish Scarborough: Rogue with Seeker. She makes for a compelling main seeker that like Joe is also able to handle herself, but through evasion instead of combat. Her free evasion action per round can be enhanced further through various evasion payoffs in the card pool, giving both ends of her skillset some range.
Dexter Drake: Mystic 0-5, Rogue 0-2. Like Daniela, he sports a 5 in his primary attribute, immediately putting him in a spot where his competence is not really in question. His ability to manipulate assets in play and play multiple cards in one action supports a more traditional spell based game while also leaving room for shenanigans. He is a flexible investigator that can both fight and investigate, as long as he has the right spells in play.
Isabelle Barnes: Finally, our Survivor who also has Mystic access. The one in the lineup with the least clear defined role. Her investigator ability allows re-use and recursion of skill cards which allows her to spike her flat statline to whatever purpose she needs at the moment. With access to lowlevel spells she can immediately flex into all roles and her signature weapon does give her at least one compelling reason to consider taking up an enemy handling role as well.
Something that can be said right away about these investigators is that they aren’t necessarily “watered down” or “introductory” characters. Like in the original Core, the abilities will keep these investigators relevant even when down the line, dozens of other ones will be introduced. The only one with a somewhat basic looking ability is Joe Diamond, but he does at least stand out from other Seekers through his combat capabilities which will always give him a niche to shine in – fighty Seekers are quite rare even in the full chapter 1 pool.
They also all seem reasonably powerful, i don’t think any of these will be as initially problematic to get to work as Skids was in the old Core Set.

Guardian

Bodyguard: Okay to Bad. If you manage to fully make use of his soak and also save an action through the damage trigger, then you are actually getting solid value for your resources. But this is going to be hard to line up in a consistent way, your ally slot is very likely to want something better than this.
Endurance: Okay. The initial investment of 2 resources keeps this from universally desirable, but once its in play the conversion rate of money into skill bonuses is quite good. Who has the money though? Guardians usually don’t.
Logan Hastings: Excellent, Staple. Allies that provide +1 to a primary skill are always at least playable, and Logan comes with a nice ability too. That extra income will often do very little more than just pay off himself, but that’s perfectly fine of course.

M1911: Excellent to Good, Staple. The new gold standard for Firearms.
Machete: Excellent to Good, Staple. Unlimited ammo when compared to the M1911, but can attack for 2 damage only once per round. Which one you prefer will depend on your deck, player count and how many enemies the campaign throws at you. You might want both.
Resilience: Okay. Slightly overpriced. But additional soak that doesn’t take up an equipment slot can have a place, especially if your strategy involves intentionally tanking attacks, like Daniela does.

Lesson Learned: Okay. A card for a clue. Likely won’t solve a location, so it’s just some incidental clue gain that would require more redundant cards to really make a difference. Among those cards, it’s likely going to end up as one of the weaker ones.
Right Tool for the Job: Good. Allows finding your big weapons you invested into … or just any weapon at all, which is important considering how much a Guardian can falter if they don’t draw a weapon. The ability to also find a Tool gives it some flexibility, but the main job here is definitely making sure that you get a weapon in hand. Will lose importance as the card pool grows with redundant options.
Scene of the Crime: Good to Excellent, Staple. Sometimes slightly awkward due to its timing, but getting 2 free clues without a test for one card is something quite special in Guardian. A very easy to include way of getting a little flexing into your otherwise combat heavy decks.

Vicious Blow: Excellent, Staple. One of the key cards that makes Guardian good at their job. The capability to spike up your damage output from the usual 2 damage to 3 damage solves all sorts of problems, saves actions, makes them competent at their thing. You rarely leave the house without these.
Counterattack(1): Excellent, Staple. Like Vicious Blow, this is an extra damage for a card. It does cost a resource and won’t boost your attack, but in exchange you get to cancel an attack. This even works against attacks of opportunity, which makes this a lot less conditional than it looks at first glance and gains further utility through working on attacks against other investigators. A great way to spend a single XP.
Bodyguard(2): Good to Excellent. A massive glowup from the level 0, the additional soak makes this version of Bodyguard a lot more likely to eat up enough damage and/or horror to be worth his price. That he also deals 2 damage instead of 1 on his way out means that he can even take down small enemies all on his own.

Sledgehammer(3): Okay. Does the job, but between 3xp and being two-handed this weapon asks a bit too much just to get a repeatable 2 damage fight action without a combat bonus. The full swing is fine, but eats up your actions in a way that is uncomfortable.
Winchester Model 12(5): Good. The big gun of the set which promises 3 shots with up to 5 damage each. Getting there is unreliable due to the test involved, but the amount of damage you can do with this in a short time when you unload it completely into a boss monster in one turn is hard to beat. Makes excellent use of extra ammo effects.

Most useful: M1911/Machete, Vicious Blow, Counterattack
Least useful: Bodyguard(0), Lesson Learned, Sledgehammer

Verdict: There’s two main parts to the Guardian class here, fighting and taking hits. The fighting part is further split into melee and firearms. Each of these three things has some solid support here, including both level 0 and upgraded cards that allow some investment even on just the Core Set.
Daniela can use all of this pretty well of course and is in turn very well supported here. No complaints on that front at all.
The other investigator in the box that uses Guardian cards is Joe and he will find enough to like in here as well, enough even to take the part of the main fighter if he has to. Since he’s 7 health and 7 sanity as a base, he could even get cute and use some of the tank/retaliate pieces. The Sledge and the Winchester are out of his pool, but everything else is up for grabs and potentially of interest for him.
Overall, the Guardian pool looks quite good. Bodyguard(0) is the only very questionable card here, while a lot of the other cards are proven staples from chapter 1 or staples in the making with the rest mostly still ending up somewhere in the Good to Excellent range.
I wish the class was a bit less one-dimensional, but there is little room to complain about what we get here.

Seeker

Dorothy Simmons: Excellent, Staple. Seekers love their primary skill bonuses even more than Guardians, so Dorothy immediately has a place as a way to get +1 intellect from the ally slot. She only costs 3 and has a resource ability to boot, which makes her easy to include in most decks.
Fingerprint Kit: Good. 3 Deductions in a box is great value for one card to provide. There is of course the matter of having to pay 4 resources upfront which keeps it from being played more.
Laboratory Assistant: Excellent, Staple. Card draw and horror soak in a very tidy and cheap package. Having one or two of these in your deck is just never wrong.

Local Map: Okay to Good. When it works, it’s giving you a good payoff with a bonus to investigate and free movement. But it’s a bit awkward to use, requiring that the target location is already revealed. It also can’t be used just for the bonus on the location you are already at.
Magnifying Glass: Excellent, Staple. There are more impactful things that you can do with your handslots, but all of those do require a lot more from you than just a single resource. Mag Glass is nearly free, not even asking for an action to play it, which makes this a very easy way for Seekers to beat shroud value through their intellect and basic investigate actions.
Sharp Rethoric: Good. Most likely you are only interested in the ability to investigate at +2 here, but that’s already enough to give it a very solid role.

Gather Intel: Excellent. The condition is not one you need to engineer, it’s one that just happens on its own eventually. Actionless card draw is great at keeping your deck consistent. I think this plays second fiddle to Laboratory Assistant as level 0 card draw, but in many cases you’ll just run both.
Through the Cracks: Bad to Okay. Emergency evades as a clue getter are a thing, but I really don’t see this effect ever be worth 3 resources.
Working a Hunch: Good. Two resources are a lot for a clue, but it’s completely unconditional. What really saves this card however is the two intellect icons, which are often a way to gain a clue with this that doesn’t cost anything.

Deduction: Excellent, Staple. The archetypical “card for a clue”, this doesn’t cost anything. Actually, it even helps you with your initial test, although you probably only want to use this when you are sure to pass already. In any case, a signature seeker card.
Mysterious Grimoire(2): Good to Excellent. Digs four cards out of your deck with some selection behind it. Revealed weaknesses are drawn, but note that this is actually a good thing in most cases. Card draw is card draw, even if it’s bad cards – those are cards you aren’t drawing later. Two XP isn’t a huge ask for this and 3 resources are fair too, but the hand slot is going to be a limiting factor.
Through the Cracks(2): Okay. Two resources is much more reasonable to pay for a heavily buffed evade with emergency move. It’s still a fairly fringe card and paying 2xp for it hurts, but it does the job.

Studious(3): Good to Excellent. This extra card is drawn before deciding on mulligans, which means it also can be part of the mulligan. You also can have two of them that stack with each other. As a result, Studious does give a great deal of consistency when it comes to having specific cards in your opening hand. This is a great way to dump any XP once your deck has the basics cared for and will hugely improve those first crucial turns of a scenario.
Unbridled Knowledge(5): Good. This is a lot of card draw and card selection. It even allows you to put any weaknesses found this way under your deck and out of sight for at least a bit. 5XP is however a lot to ask for and i would probably go for double Studious first in most cases.

Most useful: Deduction, Dorothy Simmons, Magnifying Glass
Least useful: Through the Cracks… and uuuh… nothing else really.

I can’t really in good conscience put something like Sharp Rethoric and Local Map on the “Least Useful” list, those are perfectly fine cards. Well then, looks like Seeker simply doesn’t have any bad cards except for Through the Cracks. That one is kind of niche and overcosted to matter and i feel like especially the two investigators that can use it – Trish and Joe – already have ways to evade or fight any enemies, so they need this sort of effect even less than someone like Daisy might have.
Seeker gets its usual mix of card draw and investigative power, both through intellect bonuses and acceleration. There is little doubt here that both Joe and Trish can find enough to make them excellent at being primary seekers.
So yeah, this is all just very good and looks even more universally useful than the Guardian pool did.

Rogue

Lucky Cigarette Case: Excellent, Staple. A cheap assset that will keep feeding your cards all throughout the scenario without having to do much for it. If oversuccess is part of your main game plan, this gets really incredible, but LCC is perfectly fine even as just a value play.
M1903 Hammerless: Okay. Since this requires you to evade first, this still makes you spend 2 actions on killing a 2 health enemy. Or 3 actions on a 3 health guy. This makes the weapon rather ineffective unless you want to evade the enemy anyways or can do it without an action. In the right hands, this is a good weapon, but there are few that can use this well.
Olivier Bishop: Excellent, Staple. Getting a free movement per round is not quite a full action gained, but about as close as you will get for 4 resources. He is also the +1 skill ally for this class, giving him further value for those that want to invest into agility.

Silver Tongue: Okay. I’d rank this below the other talents because it’s a lot more limited in its application. Evasion usually has better enablers and Parley is not all that common, at least for now.
Sticky Fingers: Good. A nice complement to the Lucky Cigarette Case that gives you trickle income that goes towards affording the extra cards you draw. As long as evasion is part of your plan, this does pay off quickly.
Thieves Kit: Good to Excellent. Gives flexibility at the very least, enables investigation for those with low intellect at its best. All the while it pays off its own cost and then some. The lack of a straight skill bonus means you won’t be cracking high shroud locations with this alone, but as a flexing tool to support a different main seeker this is great.

Breaking and Entering: Excellent to Good. A problem solver that can either provide a safe evade or break through something like an Obscuring Fog or just a high shroud in general. The evade works on Elites which is very relevant. It’s also a great oversuccess enabler. It barely misses the mark on being a staple, but it’s definitely a very good card.
Paint the Town Red: Okay to Bad. For this to be worth it, the fact that you are pulling out an extra enemy needs to be an upside for you. If it is, then this pays you for getting what you want, but at least for now there is little reason to want more enemies.
Prestidigitation: Excellent to Good. A tricksy card that allows you to hold back playing an asset until you actually want to use it while also potentially recovering uses on a spent asset you return to hand. The card respects the costs of the asset you put into play, stopping overly powerful shenanigans from happening.

Out of Sight: Bad. This really doesn’t do a lot and when you need to do it, it isn’t consistent enough.
Sticky Fingers: Okay. Doesn’t provide enough of an upgrade over the level 0 to be worth bothering with. It still does the job, but not any better than it did before.
Decisive Strike: Good. The range of investigators that can use it well is fairly limited, but for those that can the extra income on a kill event is pretty good. In chapter 2, this is still waiting for an investigator that really wants it, but the numbers on the card are very much good enough to make this a good deal.

Another Day, Another Dollar(3): Good. Two extra resources don’t sound like much, but you get them exactly when you need them the most and without having to do anything for it. I don’t rate this as highly as Studious which gets a lot of extra value from its interaction with the mulligan, but this is still a fine card. It tends to fall out of favor once other more punchy options for your XP become available however.
Out of Sight(3): Okay. Unlike the level 0 which barely gives you enough to justify the card slot, this throws three icons towards your test which is not nothing. The bonus movement is restricted to revealed locations which severely limits the usecase however. That together with the relatively high XP cost makes for an unattractive pickup, but the raw impact is there, at least on a small card pool.

Most useful: Lucky Cigarette Case, Olivier Bishop, Breaking and Entering
Least useful: Paint the Town Red, Out of Sight(0), Sticky Fingers(2)

The first thing that jumps at me looking over the rankings i gave here is the low count of things that i’d consider Staples when compared to Guardian and Seeker. Even if we consider Thieves Kit and Breaking and Entering, both of which are on the cusp to that, there is not as much here that is firmly anchoring an archetype or role. Partly this is because because Guardian and Seeker simply have more defined narrow roles. But a big part is also because something like a Hammerless just isn’t that great when held next to a M1911 or a Mag Glass, even when it manages to get the job done.
Oversuccess and Agility Matters are fairly well established as main archetypes nonetheless and we are definitely able to build solid decks with these cards. Trish is an innately very strong investigator that can use a lot of this well, especially the evasion based things while patching up any lack of investigative power with her yellow cards. Dexter will probably not find too much here, however? Traditionally, we’d expect Dexter to look at his green access to fix the lacking economy of his purple cards, but the main pieces of income here are either agility based and thus not really in his wheelhouse (Sticky Fingers, Thieves Kit) or just out of reach of his Rogue access (Another Day). I am assuming that a Dexter that is built on only the Core is going to mostly have to stick to his Mystic cards with a LCC thrown in. And Prestidigitation of course, that card pretty much has his name on it.
Overall this is workable, but far from the same level of quality that the Guardian and Seeker cards have to offer.

Mystic

Cloak of Resonance: Good to Excellent. Not every enemy deals horror on attack, so as a plan to defeat enemies through taking their attacks of opportunity, this is a bit more limited than chapter 1’s Guard Dog. That being said, the ability is still very good and interacts with a lot of Mystic cards, so you are likely to get your resources’ worth here.
Cosmic Flame: Excellent, Staple. While it only comes with three charges, these only get used up on successes (and skulls). Flame can also be used without spending a charge at all to basic attack with your willpower which is definitely relevant. This is a great combat spell.
Jim Culver: Excellent, Staple. Like the other three classes before, Mystic gets a +1 skill ally and it’s the best one yet. Willpower is a very key component to almost every Mystic, giving Jim importance just on that alone. But he also comes with a draw ability that is brilliant to have in a class that so much depends on drawing the right cards to do something proactive.

Lucky Charm: Good. This is a neat card that can turn direct damage/horror into normal one that can go on soak. It also lets soak you play apply retroactively which is nice. Any investigator that somehow uses damage or horror as a resource will get good use out of this and while it doesn’t provide actual healing, it does at least come with two points of soak on its own.
Second Sight: Excellent, Staple. Even if you never end up spending a charge on this and just keep the charges banked to ward of the cultist token, you get a way here to basic investigate with your willpower. Mystics are very interested in this sort of thing and you get a lot of uses out of this card before it runs out. If you draw a second copy or just feel the need to pick up some tempo you can even generate extra clues with it. Another great spell.
Spiritual Intuition: Okay to Good. If you have spare resources you can make all your spellcasting near fool-proof as just a +2 on a presumably high base willpower will already put you in a good spot. That being said, spare resources are not something i associate with the Mystic class, so unless something fundamentally changes there, this probably will not see too much play.

Premonition: Good. Improve your odds of passing tests through telling you the token in advance and has some neat uses to optimizing player turn sequencing. This has a lot of subtle positive effects, but sometimes they are too subtle to justify spending a card slot on this when you could run something more obviously impactful or an extra skill with good icons.
Ward of Protection: Excellent, Staple. Canceling the shenanigans of the encounter deck is an immensely powerful effect that can do anything from saving a couple of actions that would otherwise be spent on handling whatever came up to saving an investigator from getting defeated by a damage treachery.
Will of the Cosmos: Good to Excellent. As long as you can find a way to get rid of that doom after the fact (like putting it on a Premonition that’s in play or an asset that you plan on discarding or returning to hand anyways) this is just two easy bonus clues. There are plenty of ways to make this work out in your favor.

Soul Link: Excellent, Staple. If you can nail a treachery test with this, it does the exact same job as a Ward of Protection. Except it doesn’t even cost a resource and it can be committed to other player’s test. Ward does hit more treacheries than Soul Link, but of course Soul Link isn’t restricted to treacheries in the first place, it can just secure any important test. This card is fantastic.
Mask of Silenus(1): Good. A way to improve your odds on three upcoming tests that doesn’t really ask much of you as it only costs 1xp and uses an uncontested slot. The resource cost is the only issue here, but if you can fit this in, it will likely be worth it.
Fearless(2): Excellent. Two icons for your willpower tests while also healing horror? Yes to all of these. Especially good if you use sanity as a resource for something, but even just as a counterbalance to your Soul Links and Wards of Protection this does a lot of heavy lifting.

Augur of Elokoss(3): Good to Okay. Pretty brilliant if you can make all parts of the card work, but that will probably require further investment in cards like Premonition and Mask of Silenus to feel comfortable. Worst case, it’s a good investigation spell, but at 3xp you really need to get that anti-treachery effect to fire for it to feel worth it. Notably, this can hit weakness treacheries too, which gives it an interesting niche that might keep it relevant.
Cosmic Flame(5): Excellent. A near-infinite source of attacks at +2 skill and +1 damage that takes only a single slot is pretty massive. And when required, this can even deal an extra damage, which doesn’t even have to go at the same enemy. This is super powerful, very worth it and the only thing that’s keeping it from getting the Staple rank is the opportunity cost inherent to level 5 upgrades.

Most useful: The spell assets, Jim Culver, Soul Link
Least useful: Spiritual Intuition? Augur of Elokoss maybe? Honestly, this is just straight up all good.

What a great set of cards for Mystic. It covers the bases they need to be useful during the game with several options for discovering clues and fighting while also giving them utility through token manipulation, cancels and great skills. The investigative side has more cards to it than the fighty one, but in exchange the combat side has a peak level 5 asset that immediately transforms them into a main fighter.
With the notable exception of a resource card, Mystics are eating very well in this Core Set and Dexter will have no trouble finding everything he needs to function well here. Isabelle can also use a bunch of these very well thanks to her high base willpower, and of course Fearless(2) is just the best chapter 1 reprint she could have hoped for.
Overall outstanding card pool.

Survivor

Aleksey Saburov: Good. Gives a huge survival boost, the amount of damage and horror he can filter out is outstanding. The ally slot is usually expected to deliver something a bit more proactive, so Aleksey does require ways to turn that soak into a gameplan that helps you win. Both characters in the Core that can take him have that, but i am a bit more sceptical for his overall place in the pool as we broaden our range of investigators.
Bandages: Excellent, Staple. One of the best bits of damage healing in even chapter 1. Negating three points with a cheap card that doesn’t take a slot is great utility, as is the ability to use it on others and even ally cards.
Hunter’s Instinct: Excellent, Staple. Another cheap card that doesn’t require a card slot and just gives incremental value. Even if you don’t do anything degenerate with it, just returning the likes of Look What I Found is good payoff and well worth putting into most decks as just a value piece. The ceiling of this card remains to be determined, but is likely very high.

Jumpsuit: Good. Solid utility here between cheap soak and recursion. Nothing exceptional happening here, but the flexibility makes it work.
Levelheaded: Good. Alongside the Seeker one, this is the best of the talent cycle. This is a blanket joker card that can fix a lot of problems for you and might even make or break a blind run where you encounter a showstopper test (like an important parley on a story asset) you weren’t prepared for otherwise. But even just as treachery protection, this does good work.
Meat Cleaver: Good to Excellent. A consistent way to attack is great, but don’t underestimate the price that comes with having to repeatedly take horror and keep your sanity low. There are ways around this, but they will leave you more vulnerable to the encounter deck. Still, a very solid weapon.

Look What I Found: Excellent, Staple. A reprint of what’s legitimately one of the best investigation events of chapter 1 and a mainstay of Survivor identity. Two clues for a low price, this will rarely be wrong to include.
Shove Off: Okay to Bad. The lack of a skill bonus makes this card barely worth the spot it takes in the deck. You get to tack a damage onto an evasion and that’s fine, but hard to apply in situations where that damage actually matters.
Slippery: Okay to Good. The “double-evade” goes a long way towards making evasion a suitable way to disable enemies. This is still slightly low impact for a card slot, but the icon and lack of a resource cost makes all the difference when held next to Shove Off.

Timely Intervention: Excellent, Staple. Turning close fails into close successes after revealing the chaos token is a fantastic reassurance to have and universally so, no matter what sort of deck you are playing.
Scrape By(1): Excellent, Staple. And for just a single XP you can turn almost any fail into a success, not just the close calls. Either a significant upgrade to Timely Intervention or a card you run in addition to it to feel extremely comfortable about taking risks while testing.
Old Compass(2): Excellent to Good. A relatively cheap investigation tool that never runs out is very nice to have. Note that you can still use it when exhausted, so it will always provide at least the 1 point of shroud reduction.

On the Brink: Bad to Okay. I can’t straight up call this Bad because it does at least have 2 wild icons, but i can’t ever see myself pay 2xp for an Unexpected Courage. Yes, it replaces itself if you happen to fail the test, but there is no shot this has any combo potential you can reliably use with other skills or anything. Weirdly, this card would be better (but still fringe) if it had no icons at all.
Meat Cleaver: Excellent to Good. A significant upgrade over the level 0 and comes with no added costs on the horror/sanity requirements. You get straight up a better return for the hoops you jump through here and while expensive at 3xp, that is very worth it. That one extra combat icon is huge on a melee weapon you rely on to do everything for you.

Most useful: Hunter’s Instinct, Timely Intervention/Scrape By, Look What I Found
Least useful: On the Brink, Shove Off, Slippery

We get a little bit of everything in this Survivor pool: some recursion, healing, evasion, a weapon, an investigation tool and a double helping of test manipulation. While this may appear a bit all over the place, it’s pretty on brand for survivors actually, and their two main themes of turning fails into successes (either literally or through something like LWIF) and recursion do have a notable presence here.
We get two red cards that aren’t really all that great, but for the most part this looks quite good with plenty cards that are useful in a broad way and will be a good base going forward.
Izzie can build a solid flex deck here, but notably the pool is lacking something really nice for her skill recursion to focus on. She gets that to some extent in Mystic and the neutrals, but i feel like we are missing something a bit more special than just throwing Soul Links, Courages and Fearlesses around to really make her sing. Something that isn’t just icons.
Obviously Daniela finds a lot of soak here that she is definitely interested in.
Overall, this Survivor card pool makes a good impression.

Neutral

Hand-Crank Flashlight: Good to Okay. I quite like this. The discard ability isn’t super relevant, but just as a cheap investigation tool for investigators that don’t have Mag Glass available, this is rock solid.
Fedora: Bad to Okay. Two points of soak in an uncontested slot isn’t fully useless, but it’s also not worth a card slot and two resources.
Emergency Cache: Good, Staple. You kinda don’t want this, it has no icons and only gives you a couple resources. That being said, you need resources to play your cards, so what are you going to do? Just stop playing cards? Take resource actions? If your class doesn’t offer you better, just play these… it’s not great but it’s at least better than resource actions.

Broken Bottle: Okay. If you can’t fight with your innate combat value, this won’t get you there but as a stand-in weapon you could do worse. Hopefully you can do better as well, though.
Guts and Manual Dexterity: Excellent, Staple. They aren’t called “Core Skills” for nothing. The two most important of the five core skills, these cover the two attributes that the encounter deck tests most often. So they have value as encounter protection, even if you don’t use willpower or agility as part of your active gameplan. Unless you already have only 1 or 2 base skill, these are just always useful.

Overpower and Perception: Excellent, Staple. The next two Core Skills in the hierarchy. While these don’t ward off the encounter deck (exceptions exist, of course), they do support the two main ways to progress the game: Fight and Investigate, usually through Combat and Intellect. If that’s what you do, you pretty much always want the skill that matches.
Unexpected Courage: Excellent to Good, Staple. The final member of what we know as the “Core Skills”, this one doesn’t have the card draw that makes the other four such easy inclusions in any deck and i’d rank it last among them for that reason. This slight loss of tempo is compensated with flexibility however and that is very often worth it as well. In many cases, decks specialize enough that this flexibility isn’t necessary. But while there are sometimes cards that are better than Courage, Courage is never bad or useless.

Charisma and Relic Hunter: Excellent, Staple. A key part to the balancing of ally and accessory assets is that each investigator only has a single slot for them, which allows those assets to be more powerful than a slotless one or even a handslot asset. Charisma and Relic Hunter break that balance by giving you the ability to have multiple of these powerful cards in play. This significantly increases the ceiling of your decks power. Charisma is definitely the more important one of the two, due to allies being a more frequent type of asset than accessory and because of the extra soak that these extra allies represent. Relic Hunter requires a bit more built up card pool before it starts going off.

These neutral cards mostly consist of a range of staple cards from the old Core, reprinted to form the backbone of decks once again. This isn’t unexpected and does make sense. Of the three cards that aren’t reprints, only the Hand-Crank has a place as a playable card beyond just deck filler. Fair enough, i suppose.

Spoiler Season is dead, Long live Spoiler Season

Well then, here we go again. FFG just dropped the announcement article for the new set of five investigator decks on us, with a look at all of the investigators, their sigs and weaknesses. And three more cards from each class in addition to that. A good and plentiful start into our next spoiler season! Speaking of … community previews are starting soon, according to what Liv said on the MB Discord we can expect five weeks of previews, with one week per investigator deck. So likely those are going to be packed with reveals! Exciting stuff.
Oh, and there have been some in-company leaks, as is tradition by now.

The Evergreen Investigators

Just so we are all on the same level, here’s the article where the cards are from:

Ever Investigating, on FFG.com

We aren’t given images of the investigator’s backsides, but it is known that they are all mono-class, meaning they have deckbuilding of their class level 0-5, Neutral cards 0-5 and no subclass at all. In exchange, they all get an extra sanity or health, just like the old starter investigators did. Except for André Patel, who has three different one-off signatures, there is also no weirdness with anyone’s signatures or weaknesses. So we do basically have the full info on all of these investigators.

The Leaked Weaknesses

As we are getting used to by now, the Asmodee Store pages can’t help themselves and put stuff on their images that was actually meant to be previewed later. This time around it’s the five new random basic weaknesses, one in each of the investigator decks. For the source, check out the Asmodee Preorder Pages, here’s Carolyn Fern as an example:

Carolyn Fern Investigator Deck, on the Asmodee Store

Alright, let’s get into it. I’ll do the investigators first, then the rest of the player cards and finally the weaknesses. This is a lot of cards to go over, so this is going to take a while.

Tommy Muldoon

Tommy is our Firearm specialist and whenever he plays a gun, he can either pay one extra or discard a spent weapon to put two extra ammo on it. That does go a long way towards making the various guns more resource efficient, especially once you start replacing old guns – i suspect that paying extra on the first gun might sting a bit and often you might not even want to do that sometimes. With a rather flat statline and an ability that you’ll not use all that often per scenario, he doesn’t immediately strike me as very strong, but to his credit the extra ammo is indeed quite nice and does solve a very typical Guardian issue related to their somewhat hamstrung economy. As long as the guns he gets are good, he’ll manage.
One of those guns is Becky, his signature rifle. Comes in with 2 ammo (or more likely, 4 ammo with Tommy’s ability) and offers a solid Fight ability. High-XP weapons outclass it eventually, but especially during the first few scenarios that +2 combat is pretty clutch. In addition, it can ignore aloof and retaliate keywords and that is actually quite good throughout. Especially if you can use this against Aloof enemies, this saves you an action right there.
His weakness dumps all Firearms, unless you can pay 5 to keep them in play. Having those 5 resources is no easy task, so while you will want to try and keep that in mind, it might often just be better to lose your firearms and play new ones… especially if you already spent some of the ammo on the ones in play. Either way, while it’s not quite as awful as Michael McGlen’s Confiscation weakness, it’s still an annoying one that can come at really inopportune times. [EDIT: Apparently you are able to pick the resource option even if you don’t have 5 resources on hand, just as long as you have at least one. That does soften this weakness significantly!]
Overall feeling on him is that he’s a bit of a middle-of-the-road investigator in terms of power and interest. Pigeonholed into a certain playstyle, he lives and dies by the quality of the cards in that niche while he himself doesn’t bring a whole lot of individual power to the table.

Carolyn Fern

Speaking of individual power… someone really took a look at Rex Murphy and thought “What if we take the ability to gain a free clue per round, but put it on a 5 intellect Seeker.” Carolyn is very powerful. She doesn’t even share that one weakness that Rex has where he can only get a bonus clue on locations he can already oversucceed on. Carolyn can just get the clue wherever she currently is. Doesn’t even need to investigate in the first place. Add what is probably the ideal Seeker statline (previously seen on Mandy) and you have one bombshell of an investigator where the worst thing you can say about her is that she can “only” run Seeker cards. Of course, if you are using actions on healing (something you usually don’t want to do), then that takes some of the tempo away that is generated by her ability, so in a direct race for clues Rex will likely still pull ahead as he gets his clues as a reward for getting clues…. But there is no doubt that Carolyn does provide a lot of power here.
Her signature is of course one hell of an enabler for this, as it allows healing horror for a mere intellect(2) test. Combined with her ability it means she can find a clue for an int(2) test at any location, no matter the shroud or if there’s Locked Doors around. The investigator that gets healed also gets a skill bonus to boot. This can be herself, of course. So you can do your first quasi-investigate action through this book, then your second through your now 7 intellect. Seems strong.
Her weakness does cancel out 4 investigations which does slow her down a good bit unless you are willing to just eat the 2xp penalty. Personally, i have a huge disdain for XP reductions on weaknesses and will make sure to cancel it out unless it’s one of the final two scenarios, but i suppose there are people who are actually fine ignoring it.
Overall feeling… she’s very strong. A 5 intellect Seeker with a good ability has no other place to be than at the top of the rankings. The only question that you have to solve with her deck is how you can make sure that there’s a horror to heal somewhere every turn. And once you figure that out, she kinda just consistently does her thing. Well, i suppose you need a way to actually heal the horror as well, but i think it’s safe to assume that Caro’s deck will provide more than just her signature to achieve that.

André Patel

When i get extra actions, i am a happy person. That’s an ability that’s just always going to be useful, but still requires me to build my deck to solve the actual problems the game asks. I like this a lot. André blends “oversuccess” with “agility matters”, both large chunks of Rogue’s identity during chapter 1 and for all we’ve seen so far, in chapter 2 as well. Seems like a great flex investigator to me that uses agility to investigate and fight through specific assets while reaping a bunch of benefits on the side.
His trio of signatures further enforces this flexible side, as they do only get their full value when committed to specific tests. As a flex rogue, wild icons are of course always something you appreciate and Know The Line does stand out as a 3 wild skill that can take his willpower to 5 against treacheries. Just having a free Savant in your deck is already plenty nice and the two other skills are at least fine and will likely result in your investigator ability triggering, so that’s all solid.
Weight of the World looks nasty at first glance and reminds me of Lucius’ highly impactul signature… but the fact that André comes with a monumental 8 sanity takes a lot of the sting out of the signature. I think we will mostly be able to just tank it unless a specific scenario or campaign really has it out for punishing a lack of willpower with horror.
Overall: I like him. This distills a lot of things that i like about the Rogue class into one efficient investigator. I don’t think he does anything exceptionally powerful the way a Winifred or Lucius does, but he is simply well suited to use the rogue card pool to its full extent.

Marie Lambeau

Marie Lambeau goes for both card selection and card draw, which is a great way to solve the classic Mystic issue of having to find the right spell before they can do the thing they need to do. That ability definitely goes to solve a key problem with how the class operates which should make Marie play quite smooth. It’s also a way to keep her fueled with cards in hand if you decide to go into a more event- or skill-heavy direction with her. I feel like her statline that is split between willpower and intellect has always been a bit underrated in chapter 1, but notably Marie’s new version here doesn’t have access to seeker cards to make the intellect go further than randomly solve the occasional shroud 2 location. So i wonder if she’ll be able to leverage that 4 intellect somehow through the chapter 2 card pool.
Her signature is very good. Triggers her investigator ability reliably, while also refilling charges. And the three soak go a long way towards making her self-harm tendencies not catch up with her. This signature is a huge boatload of value. And if you don’t need it because you already have some other way of repeatedly triggering your ability on the board, then it comes with three willpower icons. Excellent, and worth digging for.
Her weakness seems relatively harmless to me. You will need to discard it eventually, but with the card advantage from her ability the cost to do so is perfectly fine. And there is usually not going to be a huge amount of urgency behind it – if you are able to heal you probably do it before you get low enough that this would put you on death’s door.
Overall, Marie is quite interesting to me. I appreciate how open-ended she is which is important considering that the Mystic card pool, at least as we’ve seen it from the new Core Set is quite diverse and dynamic as well.

Miguel de la Cruz

First i went out of the Core Set spoiler season confused because against all expectations i had going in, i went out liking the Mystic card pool the most. And now i go into the Investigator decks and the survivor is the one that i like the most here? Seems like chapter 2 is really defeating some prior notions I had. So yeah, i like this guy. The announcement article kind of made it sound like Miguel is all about traps and that itself would be more of a negative for me, but thankfully looking at the actual card, there isn’t really much need for trapping at all to enjoy this guy. As long as you do an event focused playstyle, you are just getting a free action every turn – hard to argue with that! Now, with the sort of events we are likely going to get in the red investigator deck (and there not being much in the Core), it might very well be that the way to go for a start is indeed Trap cards, but again i appreciate that this was kept open-ended enough to allow for all sorts of shenanigans down the road. Or in Legacy, of course where the cycle of Improvised events immediately jumps at me. And the ability to pull Glimmer of Hope out of the discard turn after turn after turn.
Miguel is another investigator that got a very good signature that significantly ups the potential of his investigator ability. If you want to play events every turn, you need card draw and the Knapsack handily provides exactly that. Alternatively you can use the Knapsack to play events into connecting locations which is a MAD ability to put on a basic investigator like this. The “as if” interactions that Luke Robinson has with his version of this ability are legendary and could fill a rule book of their own, putting this here is wild. I do love it though, that ability is very fun and i enjoyed Luke for his shenanigans into connecting locations more than for his teleporting. Obviously it does work very well with traps, too.
The weakness is easily the worst one we’ve seen today however. It is immune to player card effects, which includes all sorts of weapons, fight events and the like. So it’s down to basic attacks, Miguel’s 3 combat vs the Cat’s 3 combat. And when you hit the first time, it takes only one damage and bounces to a location over, ready to hunt into you again. So even if we assume that all tests are successful, we are looking at at least 3 actions to defeat this thing (fight-> move -> fight, or evade-> fight -> fight). This gets significantly easier if you have a proper fighter on the team who can deal with this menace for you, but in solo this is going to be a rough time.
Overall: Exciting possibilities with this investigator. How boxed in into a specific playstyle he is going to end up is going to depend on how the card pool evolves. If it mostly stays Traps as relevant events (relevant meaning they aren’t reactions or triggered, but ones that you’d play through his bonus action) then Miguel is going to stay in a specific corner similar to Nathaniel for a while. But once the card pool branches out more with investigate events, card draw or other more interesting things, then Miguel can branch out into a more diverse role as well. Initially i see him on a similar level as André: Not outstanding in any notable way, but uses his card pool well and gains power through that.

And with that, we move onto the rest of the player cards.

Guardian

At first glance, this is a weaker version of the Survival Knife from Chapter 1, but there is a notable difference here that makes me think that Service Revolver will play very good actually: It can trigger outside of the enemy phase, most importantly during your turn. That is pretty huge as it means you can now, after drawing an enemy, just take a move action or whatever and trigger an Attack of Opportunity which will then allow you to fire the Revolver as a reaction. You take an attack along the way that way, but you do gain an action from not having to stop and shoot the enemy before doing what you wanted instead. Add to this all the soak and retaliation synergy we’ve already seen in the Core from the Daniela-coded cards and i can easily see a home for this. 3 shots for 2 resources is also perfectly fine and while i think this is more of a Daniela weapon than one for Tommy, i could see him going for this too. 5 shots for 3 resources with his ability is pretty good too and he could run on the tankier side as well. This isn’t really much of a main weapon, but an excellent sidearm and i could even see it outperform the Survival Knife(0) in Legacy.

It’s a bit pricey, but if you need your Firearms, then you got to do what you got to do. I very much like that guardians at this point already have two cards that dig through their deck on the search for weapons (this one and Right Tool for the Job) as it immediately addresses how much they rely on getting that first weapon out. With the heavy focus on getting hit that the Core and even the Service Revolver seem to suggest for Guardian, those 2 health soak on the Protective Vest are also very relevant. It’s priced somewhat conservatively at 3 resources, i feel like with its trait restrictions it could probably have digged 9 cards deep for that cost… but considering how overpowered Backpack was in chapter 1, the designers likely played it safe on this one and i think that caution is not completely misplaced. This is playable for sure, but one you probably want to upgrade out of rather sooner than later.

This however is pretty bad, i think. Spending extra actions on skill value is not something you usually plan on doing, this would only be necessary if you can’t solve your combat value in other ways – in which case i’d wonder what you are doing handling firearms in the first place. There is a small niche where i could see using this on a shotgun where the +3 skill value has a good chance of translating into up to 3 extra damage and where each bullet has enough value that you really don’t want to miss. But i don’t see a world where i put this onto a M1911 or Tommy’s Becky, for example.

Seeker

If you are Carolyn, then taking a horror here is an upside which immediately makes this look pretty good. Outside of Carolyn however, we have to hold this next to the very similar Fingerprint Kit which is right in the Core Set. Compared to the Kit, we get an extra use on the thing, but we take horror for getting the extra clue and we have to commit an extra card to get the +1 skill value. First impulse, I’d expect to usually go with the Kit unless the type of use (secret vs supply) ends up being relevant for my deck. For Carolyn specifically, this is quite good of course. A way to take horror on demand is good to keep having excuses to use your investigator ability which serves up even more clues. And with 5 intellect you might not even feel pressed into committing the card here as you can often just rawdog those tests with just your base intellect and +1 from an ally and/or Mag Glass.
I don’t foresee this being hugely relevant outside of Carolyn, not because it’s bad by itself but just because FPK provides close to the same effect without having to jump through extra hoops just for an extra use. If horror healing does become a larger part of Seeker beyond just Carolyn, then this opinion will need to be revised of course!

This guy is good. Very good, even. Medical Student is one of my most played allies from chapter 1 and while Psych Student isn’t *quite* as universally useful, he is also better in his chosen field. Paying 2 resources to undo 2 horror, soak another upcoming one and maybe even soak a damage as well is very good value. This is easy to include in any type of deck unless you already overstuffed your ally slot. Which to be fair might be the case if you are already doing for example Dorothy and Lab Assistant. That Lab Ass also soaks 2 horror is probably the biggest strike against the Psych Student, there is a bit of redundancy here but the ability to come down after the fact and heal horror that already happened (or trauma) is absolutely relevant and this is an efficient little package overall that i wouldn’t be surprised to see all over decks from now on.

I don’t know. It’s fine, i guess. As long as you are consistently healing every turn, this pays off rather soon and if you play it in the first turns, it can easily net you 10 or so resources which is nothing to scoff at. That being said, the “Limit 1 per investigator” is once again super annoying as it makes me not want to run two of them – which in turn makes it less likely to come down early on. I really don’t understand this fetish with restricting all these cards to 1 per investigator throughout all of the recent sets. So many of those cards would get a serious glowup from “fringe at best” to “solid” just from being able to stack with each other.
Leaving that somewhat personal grudge aside, this is a payoff card for horror healing, which would act as a reward for investing into this archetype as someone else than Carolyn. I don’t think it’s quite enough on its own, but as a part of an archetype that has more parts to it, this could play a solid role. The main issue with healing is usually that it costs some tempo. Carolyn herself already solves this issue by turning her healing actions into clues. A resource isn’t quite enough to offset the tempo loss you gain from spending your action on heals instead of something proactive, but it’s a start.
I think this is a one-off in Caro almost always as it’s not asking anything out of the ordinary from her specifically, but i’d be hesitant to go further than that before knowing more about the room this archetype now takes up in the yellow cards.

Rogue

This works well enough to make me interested in it and with this one, i even understand why the limit 1 is there. With this one, the limit isn’t even a problem. 3 resources is a bit of a steep investment upfront, but if you can leverage it into getting +3 or more to three different tests, that was worth it in the end. Even more so if this doesn’t just secure a test, but also gets you some tasty oversuccess bonuses.
It’s a slight bummer that this is pretty much blank during the Mythos phase where rogues often are really hankering for generic skill bonuses, but i suppose that’s just the rogue lifestyle for you. At least, it helps with every rogue’s archenemy treachery, Frozen in Fear, if something like that does indeed make a return in chapter 2.
Good card, plays well into what Rogue already does. Calculated Risk was never a huge hit, but drawing three of them for one card does make a huge difference.

Sorry, but this is simply unplayable and easily the worst card in chapter 2 we’ve seen so far. This guy is struggling to stay alive long enough to pay off himself. And even if he eventually does 3 rounds later, be it because the rogue is running hot on their skill tests or because Marcus is being babysat by an allied Carolyn, he still needs to pay for the slot he’s occupying and the action we spent on him which is going to take another 3 or so rounds depending on how much you value your action and ally opportunity cost. There’s no shot that Marcus goes into any of my decks, and that’s before even considering what other ally rogue gets at level 0.

Thankfully, this is pretty good however. Cheap Shot is an event that i play a lot and this is an asset with unlimited charges of Cheap Shot. Very useful both as an enemy disabler and as an oversuccess enabler. Doesn’t work against Elites, but with a repeatable source that’s perfectly understandable, that’s when you pull out your events like Breaking and Entering or just have to evade “the fair way”.
Very neat addition to the cardpool that does something special that doesn’t even have a super close approximation in the chapter 1 card pool. So i could see this make a small splash there as well.

Mystic

Very good! Much better than i hoped for, actually. Mists of R’lyeh is the gold standard for this sort of evade spell in the old card pool and i am confident that this is even better by a solid margin. For just 2 resources you gain the ability to evade with your willpower for almost forever (unless you get really unlucky). And if you deem it necessary or have a second copy in hand, you can cash in some of those charges for extra moment too.
This is exceptionally good for what it does. Evade as an action is generally considered a lower value action than Fight and Investigate, so i am pleased to see that the Evade spell got pushed a good amount here to have it catch up at least in this context. Very happy about this one.

Meeeh. I mean, in the context of Marie the healed damage will translate back into cards, but still… i’d have to be scraping the bottom of the barrel for healing options pretty hard to reach for the 4 cost event that heals 3 points once. That’s just not a great rate. It’s nice that it can be split up between allies and investigators i guess and if you can gain some extra value out of that, then maybe you start coming to a point where this looks attractive.
Thing is, we’ve not really seen a lot of other healing options in chapter 2 to compare it to, but i really hope we get something better than this to keep Marie fueled. Outside of Marie i see very little hope for Infuse Life, it’s just not a card that most Mystics are able to afford in addition to their typically already precarious resource situation.

Here’s something that helps with that resource situation at least a bit. However, since it will most often just give you 2 resources, it’s definitely not a card to rely on for that purpose. It’s main purpose lies in grabbing and engaging enemies from connecting locations which can save movement actions, beats the Aloof keyword and provides utility against Hunters and Elusives. That’s a lot of enemy keywords and some of them will usually be relevant in any given scenario so this seems like a solid pickup for any Mystic deck intent on fighting enemies.
This looks like a good card overall with plenty of utility to it. Just don’t think of it as another copy of Emergency Cache, this is an enemy handling card you use this to pull a Cultist from a connecting location into your arms and just gain 1 resource as a little cherry on top.
Little chapter 1 specific sidebar: Did anyone have “Rita card in Marie’s investigator deck” on their bingo card? I didn’t. Fun to see though!

Survivor

This is such a fun effect, attacking into connecting locations does solve so many things. As before with the Spiritual Charm, you have your chance here to bypass Aloof, you can finish off Elusives (unless they are immune to player card effects -.-) and might even catch a Hunter before it strikes. Adding Evade as an option into the mix can also be very useful in the cases where a single point of damage won’t fell the enemy. The value of this card skyrockets when you are able to tack Vicious Blow-like effects to it that increase the damage dealt by the attack. These do exist aplenty already in chapter 1, giving Guerrilla Tactics a lot of potency there from the get go and are something to look out for in chapter 2 in this context as well. I’ve always liked Marksmanship in chapter 1, and giving it to Survivor, making it level 0 and adding evasion on top of it while also decoupling it from Firearms? Yes, please. Very good card to have in the pool, versatile and useful with lots of room to grow.

This is a bit too scenario dependent for my tastes, especially as it doesn’t even come with any icons in cases where its textbox doesn’t do anything useful in the situation. Its usefulness is also scaling wildly with player count. In a four player game, you can just drop this on the starting location, everyone sets up and doesn’t move, then draws an extra card. That’s 4 cards drawn right there, well above the level 0 curve. In lower player counts this relies much more on having multiple rounds worth of payoffs to be worth it and that starts to get dodgy as many scenarios don’t really allow you to durdle around too much or you risk falling behind the doom clock as you lose too much tempo. I am sure there’s going to be some scenarios where this shines as sort of a silver bullet on very specific locations, but if i am including this in my deck i am already knowing what i am doing, i am not taking this just in case.
Has potential, but is very niche. In four-player games this is good, though even then you’d probably be hardpressed to find a use for it if you draw it on turn 5 or turn 9 instead of turn 1. I wish it had a wild icon. Or at least *any* icon.

And just in case you were wondering where all the icons went, it’s because Lie in Wait just snatched all of them up. This card is playable before even looking at the text box, i have definitely put both Cunning Turkey Dinner and Thorough Inquiry into decks before that had no intention of ever playing them just because the icons were exceptional for a level 0 card.
With that in mind, we can excuse any sort of only situational benefit from the card’s actual game text. For two resources (and no action) you get to attach it to a location and from now on you can keep attacking any enemy that enters it. It’s just a basic attack, but since it’s all free actions, that’s still extra damage you are sneaking through. And if at some point you decide you don’t need the trap any further, you can cash it in for a +1 damage on the final attack you make with it. That all sounds pretty great. You even get the option to use your agility to fight instead of your combat and you get a +1 on top. Yeah, that’s all around great. Even if you just drop this at your feet the turn before a Hunter moves into you and then use it to punch that Hunter for 2 damage before it can attack, that’s good.
Excellent card at a baseline and some scenarios that have enemies repeatedly go through the same locations (Longest Night would be an extreme example) will allow you to reap bonus attacks from this card close to every round.

Weaknesses

There’s some things still obscured in the card fans these are visible in, but we can get the main gist of them, i think.
Overconfident: Take <something> after you fail a skill test, i’d assume a damage but i’d not be terribly surprised if it’s a horror. Either fits, i guess. Looks like the traditional double action to discard at the bottom. Seems fine? Might ping you once during Mythos right after drawing it before you get the chance to discard it, but once there you can make your own risk evaluation of how long you can ride this out. Seems fair. [EDIT: It’s been pointed out to me that the horror version already exists, so this is very likely simply the damage version of Atychiphobia]
Lethal Curiosity: For each point you fail on a will(4) test, either drop a clue or lose a life? This is not a huge problem for Carolyn who has this in her preconstructed deck – although an autofail dropping 4 of your clues sucks, that should be acknowledged as well. The real issues start once you randomly get this in your investigator that doesn’t actually plan on getting clues and suddenly you are staring down a potential truckload of damage every so often. Are you a low willpower rogue that was planning on fighting? Sucks to be you!
Unaware: Oh, if i interpret this correctly, this draws extra encounter cards whenever you fail a test for the first time each round. And only discards once it serves up an enemy. That’s definitely spicy. While it doesn’t come at you with the brute force of an Overzealous, it has the potential to draw more extra encounters than Overzealous does… and depending on the contents of that deck, this can be a horrifying prospect.
Hemophobia: I’m guessing “Take a horror the first time each round an investigator at your location takes a damage. Double action to Discard.”? Sure, that’s perfectly fine, that’s standard basic weakness fare. Has some extra spice in the Marie deck of course, but that just means you have to spend the two actions rather sooner than later.
Blood Drinker: Hunter on an enemy that spawns on you and has 4 evasion is pretty much blank text. Retaliate on a 2 combat enemy is often also not super relevant, but it should be noted that Miguel who has this as his standard weakness in his deck only has 3 combat which is still risky enough even if you get a +1 from somewhere. So there’s at least a little something there that will at the very least get you to overcommit to avoid the consequences. I’m not sure how often the Life Drain ability of the Blood Drinker is going to trigger, but just 3 health alone puts it out of many one-shot effects, so that it’s not trivial but does eat up two or more actions of your time. Fair enough enemy, nothing too special (unless you are solo Miguel in which case those two extra enemies he has are going to hurt like hell).

Jump to: Guardian – Seeker – Rogue – Mystic – Survivor – Neutral

Guardian

Seeker

Rogue

Mystic

Survivor

Basic Weakness