A first look at the new encounter sets

Intro

I want to give a quick overlook over the new encounter sets from the 2026 Core. Don’t expect any deep insights here, it’s way too early for that anyways. In the end it’s all going to be about how the sets are used in the campaigns to come… and it’ll take a bit before we get to that point. I am also not going to talk about direct comparison to the old encounter sets, that’s going to be its own article.
Mostly, this is an excuse to get some photos of the cards on my site and give a few first reactions about how they felt in the Brethren of Ash campaign i played.

The Encounter Sets

The Arcane Locks set has two of its namesake treacheries. It drains an action or two, depending on player count and whether the scenario makes you backtrack it could be more. You can discard it with willpower or intellect, and while the difficulty is higher than usual, a Seeker should have little problem with that. Not super impactful by itself, but it’s one of those cards that just takes away some actions to slow you down just a bit.

The Ashen Pilgrims set is all enemies, two Hellhounds and two Cantors.
The Cantor of Flame is the only enemy in these new sets that i would classify as a filler enemy, something that just not all that threatening. Retaliate means very little with 2 combat and 1 damage, so the most relevant text on his card is probably the Cultist trait.
The Hellhound is a lot more impactful, as it comes after your assets. A 3 health, it’s usually not going to go down in one swing, so this slows you down. A high evasion means that the Hunter is rarely going to come into play, with that Forced ability you wouldn’t want to keep the Hellhound around anyways.

Bad Weather has two treacheries, two copies each. It’s themed around slowing down your investigation.
The +4 shroud from Flash Flood is a huge number and can stop an investigation at your location alltogether. You can still bypass it with things like Scene of the Crime, but even just a lowly 2 shroud location jumps all the way up to 6 shroud which is a tough ask. This ended up a free encounter draw for me a few times, when i either didn’t intend to investigate anyways or the location was even already empty. But when it’s relevant, it’s very tough to beat.
Downpour is a near-reprint from Hemlock Vale. The original version tested intellect, now it tests agility. As a result, Seekers can’t just shrug this off and non-Seeker clue finders don’t get disproportially punished by it. Instead Downpour now is equal opportunity terrifying for everyone! Oh joy. From personal experience i can tell you that Joe Diamond hates this card. Drawing this while you don’t have clues means it threatens to have you skip your turn which is very dangerous as well. This is a card that you will want to be aware of and that is worth keeping a Manual Dexterity or Courage in hand for.

Bystanders is a set consisting of three of these guys. Unless you are ready to eat the doom from them dying, you need to evade them or disable them without defeating some other way. This is a very cool enemy that can be used in very interesting ways in scenarios beyond just the surface level text on them. Brethren of Ash for example has the Fire! treachery which also threatens to kill them if you don’t save them. Raising Suspicions and Dark Magician are cards from other encounter sets that would also interact with them in a nasty way. Lots of potential with this guy, it will be interesting to see how he gets used in the future.

Yeah, this works. Cosmic Evils is the new version of the treachery i named my blog after, and as with the classic Ancient Evils there are three of them in the encounter set. Cosmic offers a sadistic choice of either having the doom clock march on or having to take damage, horror and a new encounter card. As long as the campaigns keep the pressure on the health and sanity values of our investigators (and Brethren of Ash definitely does), this choice is very much not obvious and an actual thing to think about. For reference, during my play of BoA i drew this treachery three times, i picked the doom on all three occasions and i believe those choices to be correct in hindsight too. I think a lot of people are going to pick the damage/horror/surge option when it’s not necessary because they overestimate the impact of a doom.

The Cultists set has six cards in total, providing enemies based on doom mechanics.
There are three Zealots in the set. They spawn at your location and are easy to defeat, but Aloof makes this at least a bit of an ordeal. They are a good argument for players to bring some sort of Aloof tech, but aren’t terribly threatening by themselves.
Their leader, the Dark Magician is a one-off. He’s a lot tougher and more resilient. If not defeated till the end of the round, he starts putting doom into play. First on himself, then on other enemies. Since he spawns directly on you, that should be preventable – but it is a huge priority, you don’t want this dude to start putting doom on Bystanders or big Elites.
Finally, there’s two copies of Blasphemous Invocation which can either put a bunch of doom into play or searches up a Cultist from the deck if none is around. It can at max put one doom on each enemy and only on Cultist enemies, both conditions which severely limit how bad this can become unless you left a lot of Cultists that don’t already have doom on them running around. Mostly this just conjures up a Zealot if you fail the test.
The doom generated by the cards in this set seems mostly easy enough to get rid of, but they do gain some spice if the scenario also has Elite Cultists (like BoA has) or if it has ways to spawn these guys on different locations than your own.

The Dead Ends set has another four treacheries in total, two of each one pictured. The two cards are not as mechanically linked as the ones from most other sets are, they both kind of do their own thing.
Raising Suspicions puts doom into play, as long as there is an enemy around to carry it. As with the cultists, this doom can’t go on an enemy that already has doom. So it has to spread out, making it more difficult to remove. This can be a real annoyance if you thought you could just leave a Whippoorwill or similar around and outrun it, if the doom lands on an Elite or on a Bystander.
Red Herring punishes you for hoarding clues with a higher test, but failing this isn’t all that bad in the big picture. Picking up the clue again will eat up an action and the horror isn’t nothing, but looking at the likes of Downpour the mythos phase could get a lot worse than this.

With Eldritch Lore, the encounter deck wants you to drop your clues and make it harder to pick up new ones. In both cases, it makes you take horror if you want to keep your clues.
Forbidden Secrets tests intellect and makes you drop clues if you fail. This sort of effect is a huge pain for non-Seekers who collected their few clues through means like Look What I Found, but there is at least the ability to pay horror to keep the clues. This is a tough card for some investigators, but the player choice behind it makes it a lot more bearable.
Unspeakable Truths does the same thing that many basic weaknesses do, where it puts a debilitating effect on you and asks you if you want to spend two actions to get rid of it. Or if you feel like you can keep it in play for a bit. I like when the encounter deck has a card or two like that in it, it just can’t be too many of them because that action cost is quite huge. The two times i drew it, i actually kept it in play, preferring to take a couple of points of horror here. But this could really go either way, depending on *when* you draw it as well, of course.

The Fire! set has seven cards in it, five of them being its namesake, the other two being Noxious Smoke. While there’s in principle nothing stopping a scenario from just using this set the regular way, the instances in BoA where it got used, the Fire! treacheries were set aside at first, following special scenario mechanics. And only Smoke went into the deck right away.
Fire! is quite dangerous. Since it deals damage to each card with health at its location, it will rapidly burn through your soak alongside your health. And more importantly, kill your ally assets whch is where i think the real danger of this card lies. The fire can be put out with an agility test and an action at least and that may very well be necessary in many cases.
Noxious Smoke lets you test with your best defensive skill, willpower or agility. That will already curb much of its impact in most cases, but especially with Joe i had at least two situations with this where i didn’t only sit on 2 willpower and 2 agility, but also nothing but intellect and combat icons in hand… But that’s really classic Joe, most investigators will find this a lot easier.

The Flying Terrors set has two copies each of an enemy and a supporting treachery and that enemy is quite scary for a non-Elite. We get 2 of each of these cards.
The Bat Horror has 4 health which makes it tough to take down, but even more tough through its Elusive keyword which will make it flee to a connecting location after being attacked. That does mean that a low combat investigator can shoo it away even if they miss, but it also sets the Horror up to swoop in for a Hunter attack later. The basic answer to Elusive is evasion, but at 4 difficulty that’s not trivial either. This is a significant enemy. It doesn’t hit super hard, but it’s going to take some time to deal with it.
Aerial Pursuit always surges, so even if it does nothing, that’s not a lucky break. The potential to move an enemy into you for a free attack is rough and the fact that it works on any non-Elites, not just those that have Hunter, has some potential for nasty surprises as well. Note that the enemy doesn’t automatically engage you if it has Aloof, so this will put a Whippoorwill on top of you, but won’t engage it with you (also it won’t attack you, of course).

Not all threats in Arkham are supernatural, and the Gangs of Arkham set does provide a nod to all the underworld dealings that go in in that city as well. Again, there’s four cards in total, 2 of the enemy, 2 of the treachery. As we’d expect from a set that isn’t based on extraplanar beings trying to eat us, this set is a bit weaker than many others.
The Rogue Gangster doesn’t hit very hard, but he’s tough enough to take most of your turn away if all you have is a Machete. He also rudely steals one of your resources which is mostly inconsequential, but going to be very frustrating when it matters. That this dude isn’t a 2/2/2 as i’d have expected but a 3/3/3 is a big indicator for me that 3 health is going to be the new normal for enemies going forward.
Crossfire is a bit of a breather in many cases. It could scale up in a multiplayer situation to become more painful, but the agility test that threatens damage is something that is well expected. Getting through a mythos phase with just a damage dealt is pretty much taking a break.

The two treacheries from the Hallucination set attack our hand of cards, and they do so with random discard which is definitely something to be afraid of.
Extraplanar Visions gets harder to test with more cards in hand. This creates a strange dynamic where usually you’d want to keep many cards in hand if you expect random discard to hit you to lower the chances of randomly having to discard whatever you care about. But with Extraplanar Visions it could also be valid to keep a small hand and protect your thing that way as it’ll make the test trivial. The end result is probably that this will feel fine most of the time, but random discard still always has a chance to screw you over even if you have eight cards in hand.
Wild Compulsion could make you discard multiple cards at random which is horrible, but you can also pay resources instead. I had Joe fail this by 3 three times, i paid the resources every time. Woe is you if you don’t have those resources!

First off, what the fuck is that artwork, get that out of here D:
Mad Science is another 4 card encounter set, with two copies of an enemy and a treachery. The name of the game is taking a mix of damage and horror here and provide some multiplayer scaling.
Mutated Experiment is a relatively generic enemy, with a 3/3/3 statline and 1/1 damage and horror. The Forced effect on defeat does give it some spice and might influence the order in which your team takes turns, hoping to get out of the location before the fighter takes out the enemy. Usually you have your fighter go first, so that’s a neat incentive to change things up just a little bit.
The Mutated! treachery has a lot going on, kind of befitting a Mad Science card there’s a couple levers and conditionals here. Depending on if there’s an enemy around and whether you have other investigators at your location, this might end up in different ways. That being said, as long as you don’t have an enemy on you, this is just a willpower(2) test, nothing terribly scary. The flipside is that this matters the most when you are already under pressure… even if it’s just a Whippoorwill.

The Reeking Decay set comes after your assets, with 4 cards in total. I’ve long been of the opinion that players feel too safe about keeping their assets in play, so this makes me happy to see. We can do more, but it’s a good start!
I’ve had to discard my only weapon to Putrid Vapors in the first mythos phase of the BoA finale… good times. If you don’t happen to have a spent asset around, failing this agility test definitely sucks big time and the point of horror on top just adds insult to injury. I like that this is an agility test as opposed to the willpower test on its closest equivalent from the old Core.
Willpower does help with Unnatural Decay, but it’s not an easy test. The choice of doom vs 2 damage is pretty lopsided towards the damage in general, i can’t imagine taking the doom here unless i am already near-dead or i have a way to conveniently get rid of the doom right away. Still, getting smacked for 2 damage because you failed a tough willpower test isn’t great either!

The Torment set has three treacheries in it, two copies of each. It messes with your ability to play or commit cards of certain types.
The namesake of the set, Torment, has some multiplayer scaling built in, potentially forcing all players to discard a card of a certain type. It has Peril, so there’s no table talk allowed during the resolution of this card.
Languor is the other card from the Core encounters that acts like a weakness, impeding the bearer until they do the double action discard. If your investigator is mostly asset based, they can potentially sit this out for a turn or two, but even they will feel the weight of not being able to commit some of their cards. More often than not, this probably ends up being a priority to get rid of before it causes some pain down the road.
Finally, Dissonance looks mighty scary, threatening to cost you an action and several cards from your hand. Since you are allowed to choose any card type, including one you don’t have in your hand, this mostly will cost you just one card, sometimes even none. Still, the lost action will always make this card matter.

Finally, the last encounter set is the Whippoorwills, a straight reprint from the Dunwich Legacy and one of my favorite encounter sets (both in theme and mechanics) from all of chapter 1. We got 5 cards here, 3 copies of the bird, 2 copies of the treachery.
Whippoorwills are the most annoying a small enemy like this can be. They follow you around and impact all tests you do. They only have a single health, but thanks to Aloof you need to spend considerable time out of your turn if you want to get rid of them. Things get really bad once you have two of them stack… As long as Whippoorwills are part of a campaign, any card that lets you interact favorably with Aloof shoots up in value, these things are annoying as hell.
Eager for Death deals horror for failing a willpower test. That’s not super unusual, but the scaling difficulty on how beat up you already are lets this card ramp up the pressure on you if you are already struggling.

That’s it for now, more to come

There’s a total of 23 encounter sets in the new Core. I looked at 16 of them now. Four more are the scenario specific ones for the Brethren of Ash campaign. And three are location sets. We’re going to take a closer look at everything in time, but for now i will leave it here. The next thing coming up is that i want to take that chapter 1 <> chapter 2 encounter replacement chart from the Grimoire and hold the new encounter sets next to their old versions and see what the comparison brings. Should be interesting.