Month: June 2026

Posted on

Making the Most out of your Mulligan

Intro

Arguably the most important turns of any given scenario are the first few ones. You’ll be using them to set up your initial board, establish assets that are meant to pay off over the next rounds and get into gear to perform your role (or roles) in the group of investigators. One important tool you have to make sure that these early turns work out is the “Mulligan”, a one-time opportunity at the start of the game where you can redraw cards from your hand to hopefully improve your starting position. Let’s talk about how to get the most out of that opportunity. And how we can make sure during deckbuilding that we have good choices to make during the mulligan in the first place.

Why the first turns are so important

There are largely three things coming together that make the start of the scenario critical:

  • While there are some scenarios that might make concessions to an easier start (like setting aside some nastier encounters until an agenda advance), the general assumption should be that the encounter deck waits for nobody. If a card is in the deck, it can turn up on the first mythos phase, so you need to get your ducks in a row as soon as possible or you might just lose your scenario to an early Deep One Bull, Agent of the King or Boa Constrictor. For cluevers, locations do tend to start with a more mellow 2 or 3 shroud on the starting location, but again there’s no guarantee for that. And enough scenarios do use randomized location placement that your seeker needs to get their kit online fast enough as well, even if the immediate pressure is a lot more predictable than it is for fighters.
  • Your board is at an all-time low at the start of the game. You may have a permanent card or two in play that give you something to work with, but it’s those first assets that you play to the board that really unlock your capabilities for the near future. Later in the game, you play cards to raise your ceiling, to get better at what you are doing. But in the early game, you are making sure that you can do your thing in the first place and that is a lot more important.
  • Your available resources are at a high at the start of the game. That includes both resource tokens and cards, as you start with 5 of each, an amount equal to five turns of passive income. That is a huge deal and the reason why Arkham deckbuilding and early game feels a lot different from other card games where you’d often start with nothing and only turn by turn are allowed access to your bigger cards. Arkham gives you access to those big cards right away and the sooner they are on the table, the longer you can profit from them. The concept of a “mana curve” like in M:tG or Hearthstone doesn’t exist in Arkham, at least not in the same way.

The Mulligan itself

Here are the full rules for the mulligan, as per the Grimoire (Link):

After a player draws a starting hand during setup, that player has a single opportunity to declare a mulligan on any number of the drawn cards they do not wish to keep in their starting hand. These cards are set aside, and an equivalent number of cards are drawn and added to the player’s starting hand. The set-aside cards are then shuffled back into the player’s deck.
Players take or forgo the opportunity to mulligan in player order.
As when drawing a a starting hand, if a weakness is drawn while taking a mulligan, set it aside, and draw another card in its place. It will be shuffled back into the player’s deck along with any other cards set aside during this process.

Some quick takeaways from this:

  • Mulligans in ArkhamLCG are free and very generous when compared to mulligan rules from other games.
  • You do not have to mulligan your whole hand, but can pick and choose any number of cards to keep.
  • Cards that are mulliganed away are shuffled back afterwards, so they are not discarded like in some other games.
  • The whole process ignores weaknesses.
  • For many decks, the mulligan is the single strongest draw effect they will use all game.

Goal of the Mulligan

There are two principal goals you can have with the mulligan:

  • Seeing how important the first turns are and how generically powerful the mulligan is, the goal can be to ensure that you can make the most out of your first turns and hit the ground running with a strong setup turn.
  • Alternatively, you are looking for a specific card that you depend on or want to increase your chances that you have access to a powerful one-off in your deck (like a single copy of a high-XP card, your signature or maybe an Exceptional where running two copies is not even possible)

There is a certain overlap to these two goals, but not necessarily so. For example, if you spent 8XP on a copy of Double, Double for your deck and find it in your starting hand you will probably not want to mulligan it away even though it is a card that is generally not going to become super relevant before a later turn.

Goal 1: Ensuring a strong setup turn

In any scenario, your first priority at the start of the game will be to be able to fulfill your role. Often that will mean playing assets that allow you to boost your relevant skill values to where they need to be to comfortably test within your role (Intellect vs Shroud for a cluever, for example). Secondary to that, but still important is playing out assets that pay out over time as soon as possible. If a card gives you a resource per round, you’d rather want to play it turn 1 than turn 6 and the mulligan can help you make that happen.

When looking at your first hand of five, you can map out how your first and maybe even second turn might look. If you are Dexter Drake and find yourself with a starting hand of Olivier Bishop, Jim Culver, Cosmic Flame, Second Sight and Cloak of Resonance, you might look at this and think it has everything you want to play to the board, so you don’t mulligan at all. However, this set of cards leaves you little opportunity to actually get these cards to the board because it lacks any economy. Even with generous use of the resource action, this hand will mostly be dead weight that can only be saved by a lucky draw of Emergency Cache or Blood of Baalshandor from the top. This can work out… but the chance is low enough that it’s not worth gambling on. If it fails, you can basically play one of the spells and then sit on a bunch of bricks in your hand with little else to do than spend more resource actions in the first two turns than you’d want to spend over the course of the whole game. You may even find yourself pressured by the game to commit some of these excellent cards to tests just to make ends meet.
The big point to make here is this: You need to be comfortable to mulligan away good cards. Keeping only Jim and one of the spells while tossing the other three cards to give you a better chance of getting that ECache or Blood to replace them will allow you to perform at a better level much earlier as it will allow you to play both the ally and the spell on turn 1 and be ready to take an excellent turn 2 that uses those cards to their fullest.

Do also not underestimate the role of skill cards in this context. You have limited funds and those will usually go towards a few key assets early on, meaning that playing fancy events is often not in the cards until you have your general economy sorted out. Skills allow you to bridge that gap and get strong punchy effects without having to pay for them. An Overpower securing your first combat test before you were able to get a combat ally in play alongside your weapon will do a fantastic job of smoothing out your early turns.

Another classic case related to the goal of hitting the ground running is specific to fighters. Unless you are playing one of the few event/skill based fighters, you need a weapon. The game is set up in a way that doesn’t allow fighters to be good at their job if they only deal a single point of damage per action, so finding a weapon is of the utmost importance. Because as i said earlier, the encounter deck doesn’t wait for you to be ready, you need to plan for something of the caliber of a Yithian Observer to come down on you in the first mythos phase. This need for a weapon usually supercedes all other concerns.

To illustrate, here are some numbers, taken from the Odds Calculator on arkhamdb. Assuming an effective decksize of 31 (including the signature, but ignoring the weaknesses), the chances to draw at least one weapon within your opening 5 cards is:

  • with 2 weapons in your deck: 30%
  • with 4 weapons in your deck: 52%
  • with 6 weapons in your deck: 69%
  • with 8 weapons in your deck: 80%
  • with 10 weapons in your deck: 88%

If we include a full mulligan, replacing all five of our cards in case we don’t find a weapon, we can assume getting to look at 10 cards instead of only 5. The chances to find a weapon with a full mulligan are then:

  • with 2 weapons in your deck: 55%
  • with 4 weapons in your deck: 81%
  • with 6 weapons in your deck: 93%
  • with 8 weapons in your deck: 97%
  • with 10 weapons in your deck: 99%

Okay, so what can we learn from this. Well, if your deck is leaning hard on finding a very specific weapon, like for example desperately wanting one of your two copies of Runic Axe, then even with a full mulligan you have a failure state of 45%. So you do need backup weapons of some kind, just two additional copies of something else (like a Machete) more than halves the likelyhood of being completely without weapon down to 19%. Add two more weapons on top and you are already looking at only 7% chance to be without something to fight on turn 1. Six weapons for your fighter deck is a good rule of thumb to start with. More than that and you risk drawing too many redundant cards, a Machete with a Runic Axe already in play isn’t really worth a whole lot. If you want to minimize the remaining 7% chance of failure further, consider events that might be able to cover you in the worst case. Having a pair of Toe to Toe (or even better, Sweeping Kick) is great insurance for a mulligan gone wrong and the encounter deck coming down on you to punish you for it.

Not all decks have this luxury of running six weapons however. Especially on a more limited card pool, like the chapter 2 environment, someone like Dexter or André might just not have more than 4 weapons/combat spells available to them.

Goal 2: Finding the lynchpin card

There are many investigators and decks where the performance of the whole deck changes dramatically as soon as a certain card enters play. Examples are high value signature cards like Charlie’s Bonnie and Miguel’s Knapsack, but also Exceptional cards like The Red Clock(5). Other examples are key allies, accessories or other assets that don’t have redundant options like Daniel Jameson, Lucky Cigarette Case or the “Researched” card you want to translate.

The latter examples allow you to run two copies, but we’ve already seen that even with two copies the chance to miss them after a full mulligan is still a concerning 45%. That being said, the mulligan is doing good work here, without it the chance to not get that card in your opener would be 70%.

For the former examples, where you can only run a single copy, the numbers are predictably dire. In a 31 card deck, the chance to get your one signature card in the opening five before mulligan is 16% (=84% to not get it). A full mulligan doubles it to 32%, which is still a chance fo 68% to miss it.

The lesson here is that you can not count on having these cards available from the start. Your deck needs to function without those assets, as powerful as the mulligan is it will still leave you with roughly a coinflip to find at least one of two cards in your thirty card deck.

When Goal 1 and Goal 2 compete

Due to the high likelyhood of not finding your lynchpin card even if you throw your full mulligan against it, the focus should be on making sure your early turns work out. And if in the process of taking your mulligans towards making that happen, the signature (or whatever you’d be looking for) turns up… great, even better. But compromising your first turns because you are dead set on digging for that Cigarette Case is generally not a great idea.

Now, what happens if our goal 1 and 2 compete more directly? Say, we are playing a fighter deck. Our opening hand has no weapon in it. Oh-oh, we are steering towards a full mulligan to ensure we are able to do our thing. However, one of the cards in hand is a card that is valuable to us. It could be our signature, it could be our Double, Double. It could even be an Emergency Cache where we are considering to keep it and only redraw the other 4 cards because it’d be really good to have. We are lowering our chance to find a weapon by only looking at only 4 more cards instead of doing a full mulligan, but by how much and is it worth keeping that special card? Again we are assuming a 31 card deck, but we are now not focusing on the total chance to succeed, but only on the mulligan itself. At this point, we have not seen a weapon in our initial five cards, so the weapons are somewhere in the remaining 26 cards. Here are the chances to find our weapon, depending on weapon count in the deck and whether we take a full mulligan or take the greedy option of keeping the “special card” in hand and only take four new cards:

  • with 4 weapons in your deck: 60% (full mulligan) vs 51% (redraw 4)
  • with 6 weapons in your deck: 76% vs 68%
  • with 8 weapons in your deck: 87% vs 80%
  • with 10 weapons in your deck: 93% vs 88%

So even with 10 weapons in your deck, you are increasing your failure chance in this circumstance from 7% to 12% which seems significant considering how much depends on you getting that weapon now. It only gets worse with fewer weapons. There are of course factors that can still make this gamble more appealing (scenario knowledge that there is no immediate pressure, heavy card draw in your deck,…). But as a general rule, if you need that weapon, you take the full mulligan. The only exception here is card draw and card filtering. Obviously it makes sense to keep a Right Tool For The Job in hand and only redraw 4.

Multiplayer concerns

The mulligans are executed in player order, so you do not resolve them simultanously and you also do not resolve them in an order of your choice. For convenience, many groups will just do it simultanously, but consider that there are real gameplay advantages to taking the extra minute of doing this properly.
The mulligans are taken in player order, starting with the lead investigator, then going around the table clockwise. Since the mulligans do happen one after the other, you can have one player’s mulligan result influence what the other does. If your fighter fails to find a weapon, any other players that still have to do their mulligan can prioritize finding something to fight with to create breathing room. Or the other way around, if the main fighter gives the thumb up, the flex will now be able to lean more towards clues and accelerating the game than he’d otherwise need to. Especially if you have investigators like Dexter in your lineup who frequently find themselves having to decide to keep either a combat spell or an investigation spell, this bonus information is very helpful.
Also, keep an eye out for draw effects that can be used on other players. Even a somewhat low power card like Psychoanalysis can suddenly become a gamechanger if it allows the Seeker to help the Guardian to find their stuff. It only gets better once you get to the cards like Thorough Inquiry in chapter 1 that are actually good as a baseline.

The Mulligan starts at Deckbuilding

The moment when you are drawing your starting hands and decide on what cards to send back from your hand shouldn’t be the first time that you think about the Mulligan. During deckbuilding, you will want to already be keenly aware of making it so your deck can play strong early turns. The starting hand should have a huge influence on the numbers of cards in your deck, both with regards to counts of a specific card and to total counts of assets, skills and events.

Assets: Assets stay in play which often means that they are cards that accrue value over time. The earlier you play them, the more value they will generate for you over the course of the game. That seems obvious, a card that generates a resource per round will be a lot stronger for you if you get it down on turn 1 than if you do so on turn 8. This is definitely not true for all assets, especially those with a limited amount of uses muddle the water a bit, but as a general rule of thumb it holds up.
The tradeoff is in the cost, of course. A hand with only assets is unlikely to be a good one. But as a general rule of thumb, you likely want as many assets as you can reasonably play out.

Events: Events that fight, investigate or otherwise have proactive effects usually have a higher immediate impact than assets do, but at the cost of being a one-shot effect. For the early turns that can be useful if the scenario is particularly demanding in the first rounds, but generally this points towards events being better in the second half of the game when assets might not be able to generate their full value anymore. As a result, often the role of events during mulligans is going to be limited to finding and playing more assets and you will want to send back your events to try and hope to get something you’d rather play early for a more lasting impact.

Skills: Skills can do a similar job to events where they allow an investigator that isn’t fully set up yet to spike their capabilities to fulfill their role anyways when necessary. The key difference to events is that they do this without taking away resources that could go towards the more valuable assets. They make for excellent fourth and fifth cards in your starting hand to hedge against nasty surprises from the encounter deck that will still be fully playable on turn 2 even if you spent all your resources to set up on turn 1.

Now, there are plenty of investigators with unique outlooks on the card types, but just for your most generic starting hand, you probably want something like one resource boosting event, two to three assets that you can play with the resources now available to you and a skill or two to help with the first mythos phase.

However, if you were to go ahead and just implement this 3:1:1 ratio of assets:event:skill into your deck, you may find that after a great start your hand starts accumulating cards that don’t do much for you. Assets are great when you have the resources to play them, but once your initial 5 resources are spent, drawing another gun of the top of the deck while you are at only 1 or 2 resources left in the pool isn’t great.
It is the role of the mulligan then to give you an effective way to get that 3:1:1 ratio during your start hand selection without having to align your whole deck to it.

Consider not just how the mulligan shapes your first turn or two, but also how your hand is going to look after you executed that first turn. Does your deck run excellent resource events that will allow you to play your hand to the board on the first turn? If so, you will want card draw to be able to fuel back up. If however your plan is playing just two high impact assets to the board and keeping two to three cards in hand, then this is much less important.

Finally, there is a group of cards that bypass the whole mulligan topic completely. Permanent cards are always in play and are particularly strong for the early turns because of that. Studious and Another Day, Another Dollar are both in the Core Set and strong boosters to your early game and all it costs you are a couple XP. Especially if you find your first turns lacking, investing your XP here can help you out greatly.
The Starting keyword, introduced on a cycle of cards in the evergreen investigators, guarantees that a card to be in your hand after you resolved your mulligans. The specific cycle of cards in the investigator decks is not all that great, but potentially the keyword could allow you to include cards that safeguard against a bad mulligan. If we for example ever get a resource event or something like a Right Tool For The Job with Starting, that’d be a pretty huge deal. Fingers crossed for future additions to the card pool!

What to do if the Mulligan went bad

However, unless you can use a particularly powerful card like Stick to the Plan to cheat your way past the mulligan, you always run the risk of just striking out. So what do you do when the Elder Gods conspire and leave you with nothing but garbage in your hand?

Well, there’s two things here. First is to solve the immediate problem. You got a scenario to play after all. After the scenario you may want to think about if you can make sure this doesn’t happen again. If you find yourself having garbage in your start hand, you may want to question why there is garbage in your deck in the first place.

Immediate solutions include:

  • The Draw Action. This is your primary guard against a bad mulligan. If there are no better options available, then you can always just draw two cards and hope to find something that you then want to play with your third action. Your start will be relatively slow, but if you can pull through that will leave you with a grip of cards in hand that may just be able to help you turn the scenario around with a strong midgame that allows you to make use of those cards.
  • Card Filters. The card Right Tool For The Job has been mentioned several times now and that’s no accident. It’s sort of the archetypical idea of a card that exists to safeguard against a bad mulligan. Sure, you’d prefer to just have that weapon or critical tool in your starting hand, but if push comes to shove, then a card that allows you to look at a chunk of your deck to search for outs is worth losing some card and resource efficiency for.
  • Card Draw. Just generic card draw can help as well, of course. While playing a generic “Draw 2” or “Draw 3” effect won’t beat a proper card filter in getting your desired card, it does still beat taking basic draw actions. A Laboratory Assistant isn’t super useful by itself on turn 1 and as a Seeker you’d usually want to play something that boosts your intellect or works towards a longterm engine instead… but if those aren’t in your hand, the extra cards might just get you there.
  • Just do the best with what you have. This is especially an option if you can rely on other teammates to make up for your struggling. How that looks in practice is going to depend on your cards of course. Maybe you just end up generating a lot of resources without them having somewhere to go until you draw into your big cards eventually. Maybe you spend your actions on something on the act or agenda that furthers your goal. Or maybe you just play down whatever you got in hand and hope it’s enough. Generally, i would steer you towards the draw action instead as a general rule, however. Spending your first turn drawing two, maybe even three cards to get your stuff together is usually going to be preferable to just stumbling around and getting carried by your mates.

Once you are past the scenario, be it with a success or fail, you can review your deck and have an honest discussion with yourself. Were you just plain unlucky? I mean, it happens, you can run eight weapons and two Tool for the Job and still end up without a gun on turn 1. But more often than not, a bad start into the game is either the result of bad mulligan decisions or of bad deckbuilding. No making excuses here. If we want to get better, we pick ourselves back up from the ground, fix our tiara and move on while thinking about how we don’t repeat our performance.

  • The bad mulligan decisions are something you can only address through learning from your mistakes. Especially if it happens more often, chances are that you need to think about sending back cards more aggressively. A card that you only need to play by turn 8 is not one you need to keep in your starting hand, no matter how good it is. Some cards are good in your starting hand, but can still be sent back to get something better. Generally speaking, you are more likely to not exchange enough cards than you are to send away too many. I said this earlier, even put it in bold, but let me repeat it once more here: You need to be comfortable to mulligan away good cards. If a card doesn’t directly contribute to getting ready to perform in the first turns, it goes back into the deck. You’ll draw it again later.
  • The bad deckbuilding part is something you can now try addressing through spending XP. Luckily, you can make some big swings here because the approach is two-pronged: You can add something that helps you with setting up, but at the same time you can also improve your early game through the choice of card you remove. Even if the scenario went south and the team got defeated, you likely still got a couple XP out of it. Consider that even just a measly 3xp means you can remove three high cost assets from your deck and replace them with 3 low cost ones. That is a huge swing with regards to the makeup of your deck and can make a real difference for your next scenario. Especially with a small card pool, you may also want to consider the option to spend XP for level 0 cards here. It does kind of suck on a psychological level to do this, but it can be the right play to just suck it up and pay 2xp to put an extra pair of Machetes into your Tommy deck that just failed to draw a gun for the first three turns.

Some Cards From The Evergreen Pool

Alright, i hope that gave you a bit of insight into my process when it comes to mulligans. To close out the article on a somewhat cozy note, let’s take a look at some cards. First a few from the Core and the Investigator Decks and I’ll talk a bit about them with regards to their mulligan decisions.

Guardian
Right Tool For The Job: It’s inefficient and feels janky. It even can whiff and that feels super bad. But that doesn’t stop it from sometimes just being the card you need. Here’s a fun thing to think about: Let’s say you have no weapon in your starting hand, but you do have Right Tool and you want to maximize your chances to play a weapon with your third action. In that case you want to spend your first action drawing a card and only then play Right Tool with your second action. This will give you a lower chance to fail to find a weapon than if you were to play Right Tool first, then draw after missing with it. Again, it doesn’t feel great to do that, but if you are absolutely depending on getting that weapon, this is how you do it to maximize your chances.
Vicious Blow: I usually don’t keep it in my starting hand. But if it ends up there after the mulligan, it’s not bad at all. This is the sort of high impact one-shot effect that you can play without taking away from your setup efforts. It can even be a super janky fight event for you if you failed to get a weapon to the board before the first enemy is upon you.
Protective Vest: It digs for a Firearm or Upgrade, but the cost of the Vest makes it so you may not have the resources left to really consider this for your starting setup. I like this card more than most (especially the upgrade) but i consider it a one-off midgame play to find your second or third gun.

Seeker
Studious: Being the best at everything is part of Seeker’s class identity, so it should come at no surprise that they are the best at mulligans too. Studious gives them ability to very directly influence the mechanic like no other class. It will not by itself fix a deck that is built badly, but as long as you did even a halfway decent job of making sure you can draw good starting hands, this will improve your chances to do so considerably.
Psychology Student: This guy can become a very hot card to draw early on once an investigator has some mounting trauma accumulated on them. Medical Student from chapter 1 is a fantastic card to draw during the mulligan to offset trauma and while Psychology Student isn’t quite on that level, he (or other healing cards) can still end up being cards you definitely keep. Or, if the situation is particularly dire, even hard mulligan for.

Rogue
Lucky Cigarette Case: This is a card you just always love to see in your opener. It’s one of those cards that gets better the longer it stays in play thanks to using no limited charges. And it’s also reasonably cheap. I often tend to mulligan my card draw away, but LCC is one that i keep almost every time.
Watch This/Out The Door: We obviously like extra resources during setup, but these both do require a test that you can succeed at. That will require some thought sometimes during your mulligan, where you consider how these will play out. They can even push you towards keeping a certain card to enable a way to play these skills. For example, as André you might keep a Thieving Kit that gives you a way to reliably test agility and stick your Out the Door. For Watch This, things get more complicated as you do require some resources to invest into it. So you need a way to test a good skill of yours without having spent all your resources before. Depending on the rest of your hand, sending back Watch This may very well be correct when you would have kept Out the Door in hand.
Well Connected, Black Fan, Red Clock…: Rogue is the class that is most prone to having high impact cards in their deck that they invest a bunch of XP into and that then are absolutely transformative for their gameplay… but are at the same time complete bricks during the early turns. These are the cards that scratch at the “be comfortable sending back good cards” mantra, especially if you aren’t blessed with good card draw then you might not see these cards again if you send them back.

Mystic
Arcane Initiate: The new Jim Culver ally is the talk of the town these days, but old faithful Arcane Initiate is still the platonic ideal of a powerful ally that you want in your opening hand. She’s cheap and she finds the rest of the setup for you. I’d rather play Initiate and have the resources left to play down my spells than drop Culver and be out…
Jim Culver(4): …however Jim Culver(4) is ridiculous. By not just giving cards, but also resources, he quickly pays for himself and lets him be a great ally to drop on turn 1 after all. My general outlook on the Mystic ally situation in chapter 2 kind of boils down to “Start with Initiate in your level 0 deck, upgrade into Big Jim”, something that is pretty much entirely motivated by mulligan related decisions.

Survivor
Bandages: A card that is surprisingly high on my list of cards that i will probably keep in hand when i see it. If feels kinda weird to hold this in similar high regards as something like a Lucky Cigarette Case, but that’s how it ended up being for me. I’ll rarely toss a Bandages from my initial draw.
Hidden Shelter: I feel like the best use of this card is to drop it on turn one while everyone just stays at their starting location. Probably not worth specifically looking for with your mulligan, but i’d likely keep it unless i am really desperate to find something specific.
Respite: This is a good example of a card i just never want to see in my opener and where i’d specifically run only a single copy because i only ever want it with a game that is already progressed ahead and a deck that is near empty.

Neutral
The Core Cantrips: I love myself a Guts or Manual Dexterity in my starting five. That being said, they are rarely crucial enough that i don’t send them back. Smoothing out your start hands with that little bit of card draw whenever they end up in your hand after the mulligan is however just another good reason to play these.
Charisma: I find that Charisma has a surprisingly high impact on the lines of play available in the first couple turns. For example, in a Seeker deck i might play both Laboratory Assistant and Dorothy, planning to play Lab Ass first, then replace her with Dorothy later. In Mystic, i might do something similar with Initiate and Jim. That gets awkward when i draw Dorothy or Jim first as playing them down first will create dead cards in those other allies in my deck. Charisma then doesn’t just allow me to have the allies in play at the same time, but more importantly it opens up the order in which i play them which has impact on my first turns even if i haven’t both allies in hand yet.