Best-Laid Plans: The Feast of Hemlock Vale

Spoilers

This page doesn’t hold back anything. There are detailed spoilers for the Hemlock Vale campaign ahead. I highly suggest that you stop reading now if you have not played this campaign once or twice before. Give the campaign a try on your own first, then come back once you got beaten down by some killer crabs or eaten by a house.

Introduction

Tasked with surveying the curious changes to flora and fauna on the Hemlock Isle, the investigators find themselves in the middle of the preparations for a big festival. During the buildup to the big feast, they uncover all sorts of weird happenings on the isle while talking up many of the residents.

This article takes a deep dive into the challenges posed to the players as they make their way along the campaign with all of its twists and turns, special mechanics and recurring themes. As in previous Best-Laid Plans, i will also give some suggestions for investigators and player cards that might work particularly well in The Feast of Hemlock Vale.

This article is not going to look at each encounter set and each scenario in detail, this site already has pages for those. Please refer to those for more zoomed in views on the single cards that make up the encounter sets and encounter decks.

Non-linear campaign

The campaign comes with a total of eight scenarios. Player will play three days, with a scenario each during daytime and nighttime, for a total of six scenarios. During daytime, the players can pick any of five scenarios, in any order. The first two nights are each associated with a scenario, Twisted Hollow and The Longest Night respectively. These can be skipped in favor of one of the unplayed daytime scenarios, but there is little reason to do so. The final nighttime scenario is the finale and is always played.
This means that two scenarios are unplayed for each campaign. Even if you accept that there’s only very few reasons to skip one of the nighttime scenarios, there is a good amount of flexibility in the choice of what to play during each of the three daytimes. They all change in terms of which residents are around in the scenarios depending on which day it is, so you gain variance both from which scenarios you play and from the order you play them in. We will look at suggested scenario orders later when looking at the different residents and how to unlock their storylines.

Preludes

Each scenario has a prelude preceding it. For the daytime scenarios those are playable preludes where the players move around the village and spend actions to parley with residents and prepare for the scenario that is coming up. These playable preludes are intended to work as if they were the first couple turns of the actual scenario and as a result of this, much of the gamestate carries over. The steps 1-8 of scenario setup are skipped for the proper scenario, which notably includes taking trauma, preparing the chaos bag and drawing starting hands. So, let’s go over the implications in detail:
Health/Sanity: Your health and sanity is reset at the start of the prelude and not the scenario. Trauma is also only applied at the start of the prelude. That means if you heal yourself during the prelude, you can enter the actual scenario in better shape.
Starting hands: You don’t take starting hands or mulligans at the start of the scenario, instead you carry over a number of cards equal to your normal starting hand from the prelude. This gives you the opportunity to craft a good hand in preparation. Any cards over your normal starting hand size (usually 5) are discarded and shuffled back into the deck at the end of the prelude.
Starting resources: You don’t gain your starting resources on scenario start, but can carry up to your normal amount (usually 5) over from the prelude. Any in excess that you have at the end of the prelude are discarded.
Chaos Bag: The chaos bag stays as it is from prelude to scenario. This means that any blesses or curses you add to the bag during the prelude carry over.

There are two notable exceptions aside from the aforementioned limitations to starting hand and resources, however:
One asset: You get to keep one asset in play, in addition to any that would always start in play. This gives you a great head start, like having a key ally or weapon already in play at the start of the scenario while nonetheless being at 5 cards in hand and 5 resources in your pool.
Discard shuffles back: At the end of the prelude, you shuffle all cards in your discard pile (including those you discarded due to holding more cards than starting hand size) back into your deck. This is usually a plus, but can notably be annoying for investigators that proactively use their discard pile for recursion and the like.

Skipping a full eight steps of some of the most basic core rules can’t really be done without some implications and edge cases that lead to rules problems with some cards. Most of them (like Stick to the Plan) can just be solved by applying the “act as if the prelude was the first few turns of the scenario” intent that was stated by the designers and smoothing the rough edges over through ruling by intent. But some cards, like Geared Up, straight up don’t work. You could always try to come up with some house rule to make those work somehow anyways, but honestly the best course of action here is probably to just accept that like 5 cards out 1500 aren’t playable in this campaign.

The preludes aren’t all about crafting your perfect hand and board state while still having max resources, though. There are locations to explore, residents to meet and parleys to perform. Doing this will reward you with relationship points for residents, story hooks and progress towards certain campaign paths that can ultimately unlock different variants of the finale. What you will need to do then is balance your preparations for the coming scenario with what you want to achieve during the prelude.

Resilient Enemies

The scenarios are fairly diverse, but one thing that can be said when looking at the enemies overall is that they are often resilient. Either because they have a lot of health, high fight values, damage prevention effects or even a combination of those, you shouldn’t expect to be able to just punch your way through the campaign the way you usually can. Or at least not unless you bring considerable firepower that is able to both put out lots of damage in bursts, but also consistently apply pressure. The Aloof and Elusive keywords also feature very prominently, giving enemies more staying power. As a result, evasion becomes quite strong throughout the campaign and is often able to take the sting out of powerful Elites or relieve the pressure from swarms of enemies. Cards that can hit multiple targets, like Dynamite or Storm of Spirits, are also helpful in many cases.
Some scenarios have a lot of enemies in them and for that reason I would strongly advise to have some enemy handling capabilities on your clue getters as well.
Even though there are enemies that reduce damage dealt to them, being able to hit for 3 or more damage is rewarded in many cases. There is a lot of 3 and 4 health enemies around, giving you plenty of opportunity to get the most out of your Spectral Razors, Chainsaws, Gang Ups and “I’ve got a Plan!”s.
A final concern is one specific enemy, the Miasmatic Shadow. It is immune to damage from anything that isn’t Spell, Relic or Science traited so you require one of those or a non-damage way to defeat or discard it. It’s possible to handle it for most of the campaign just through evasion and avoiding its discard trigger, but you will want a way to get rid of it by the finale for sure.

Direct Damage and Horror

The campaign mechanics try at many points to throw wrenches into typical player tactics and part of that is limiting the usefulness of soaking damage through assets. A good amount of treacheries deals direct damage to players, bypassing those assets. At the same time, other treacheries deal their damage specifically to those assets, possibly forcing you to discard allies or assets that you would have preferred to keep around.
Finally, there is a suite of treacheries that scales its difficulty down when you are harmed. Or to say it the other way around, they are most difficult when you are unharmed.
This leads to situations where you decide to put some damage on yourself instead of your leather coat to lower the difficulty on those treacheries that scale by damage on you only to then have direct damage from other treacheries catch up to you.
These interactions between the different types of damage/horror treacheries are spread across different encounter sets, so not all scenarios have these dynamics present or only in parts. But it’s something to keep in mind and that adds some extra decision points whenever you get damaged or horrored.

Discard theme

A major mechanical theme of this campaign is discarding cards from players hands, with many effects of this kind on locations, treacheries, enemies or wherever else the designers found some free space. Much of this discard is also random.

In turn, any strategy based on events or on hand size fights somewhat of an uphill battle in this campaign. Event based investigators like Diana or Nathaniel already run the risk of running out of steam if they can’t find ways to draw more than they spend. Adding the potential to have cards flushed out of their hand by the encounter deck applies more pressure on them and can cause a downward spiral where they aren’t able to get back on track or only through spending an excessive amount of actions on the basic draw action.
A hand-size deck will have even more problems. While keeping 5 cards in hand for something like Higher Education is certainly possible, you shouldn’t expect to be able to uphold an 8 card threshold to keep Farsight or similar cards online at all times. That being said, this type of deck does tend to have copious amount of card draw and that will help absolutely help you to keep a solid amount of cards still in hand. Any investigator should be prepared for the Hemlock Vale campaign by bringing what they can to have something that can bring their handsize up faster than basic draw actions would be able to do.

There is also a good amount of cards that will have triggers based on investigators discarding cards at their location. These can add serious injury to the insult, mostly through adding damage and/or horror to the discard effects. Miasmatic Shadow, which was mentioned earlier already, is a particularly notable of these discard payoffs. It’s an enemy that just follows you around and can be avoided as long as you hold onto your cards but as soon as you have to drop something from your hand, this thing will pounce on you with an immediate effect and engage you. Some of the discard effects are forcing multiple cards to be discarded in seperate instances (as notified through the “for each” templating) which will indeed cause these triggers to happen for each card discarded this way. In a really bad case, this can mean having to discard 3 cards to a treachery and then also for example suffering 3 attacks from Miasmatic Shadow! Luckily, these sort of extreme interactions are rare.

One treachery in particular deserves its own mention and that is Captivating Gleam. Part of the Refractions set, it is used in several scenarios, including the finale. It is inspired by Beyond the Veil, a treachery from Dunwich which ended up being a campaign-defining threat that every player needed to build their decks around. Captivating Gleam is not quite that intense, but it certainly is a card that deserves some consideration. Its effect is simple: should you ever hit zero cards in hand while Gleam is in your threat area, it will deal 5 horror to you. Immediately, this sets up dire consequences that you will want to avoid. Unlike Beyond the Veil, which is ultimately inevitable to trigger eventually, you can keep Gleam at bay forever. This will however limit your options when choosing modes on treacheries (choosing damage/horror instead of discard) and force you to take actions to draw cards when your hand goes too low. All these little costs can add up over time and make Gleam a very impactful card without ever triggering.

All of this can be a consideration when picking investigators to tackle this campaign with. To take the most extreme example, Patrice Hathaway will at the end of her turn discard all of her cards, then draw a new grip of five. Since she goes to zero cards in hand there, she will trigger Gleam. Even without Gleam in play, she will activate those discard triggers on other cards at the end of each of her turns. This is a very serious drawback of course. This actually gets a shoutout in the achievements of the campaign which list “Win with Patrice” as one of the harder things to do. On the other hand, Patrice is generally not bothered much by the actual loss of the card, as she’ll always draw up to full every turn anyways. But while Patrice is the extreme case, there are at least some consequences for other investigators or builds that you may want to keep in mind. Just to name some examples: Wendy and Ashcan might find themselves with additional costs to pay for their investigator ability. A deck that is using Forced Learning will have a forced discard every round that can similarly trigger stuff. If your investigator regularly draws an obscene amount of cards while on a full hand (Like Wini or Harvey might), even the discard down to handsize during upkeep can become a concern.

Asset hate

Not only will your assets run the risk of being discarded from your hand before you get a chance to play them, but they aren’t as safe as you may have gotten used to once in play either. Our old friend Crypt Chill is around, but so is Fungal Rot which deactivates whatever asset it attaches to. Both of these cards are frequently used, Longest Night even uses both together. There are a couple scenario-specific cards as well that will similarly try to disable or discard your assets.

What that means is that during deckbuilding you need to be aware of this. You can’t just go all-in on one asset and hope that it works out. That’s generally a bad idea anyways, because you always need to be prepared for the case that you don’t even draw your key piece… but in this campaign it’s even more true as discard from both hand and play can just dump your treasured Cyclopean Hammer, Ancient Stone, Becky or whatever else your deck revolves around to the discard.

Adressing the issue can mean running backup assets that can stand-in for your primary plan, running cheap decoy assets that you can feed into these treacheries instead or running recursion like Salvage or Well-Maintained to regain your things. It may also have an impact on how you upgrade your deck… having to discard something from play can already be a pain, it gets downright demoralizing if you paid 5XP for it.

Skill tests

The encounter cards make sure that all four skills are tested with some frequency, so every investigator will have their moments where they run into encounter cards they can’t easily ignore. Willpower and agility are of course still the most common tests, but having low combat or intellect values will almost certainly have some impact on the Mythos phase, too.

The difficulties for the tests are generally fairly tame, especially when compared to the previous campaign (Scarlet Keys). Location shroud sticks to ranges of 2-4 and most enemies keep their fight and evade values in those ranges as well.

This means that a generalist approach to the game is very possible in this campaign, you almost never have to grow your skills higher than 6 or 7 to expect passing tests on Standard. This also means that oversuccess decks are quite consistently able to pull off their big numbers. Oversuccess is actually an important mechanic in the final scenario which comes a bit out of left field after a campaign that has been rather generous with its test difficulties. You will want to be able to spike some tests higher than usual for that reason, using cards like Jury Rig, the Masks or similar ways to repeatedly push your skill values.

The Chaos Bag

There is an important bit of variance to the chaos bag that can make a huge difference on Easy and Standard. During the setup for preludes 2 and 3, two randomly drawn numerical tokens in the chaos bag get worse. So, for example if you pull a +1 and a -1, those would be replaced by a 0 and a -2 for the rest of the campaign. This can have a rather dramatic impact if you happen to pull any of the tokens that are already highly negative. The chaos bag starts out (on Standard) with two -3 and a -4 token. If you are unlucky, that -4 can turn into a -5 and then even into a -6, either a notably oppressive thing to have around on Standard as anyone who played The Forgotten Age will know. Of course, you might also luck out and instead replace only your 0s with -1s which barely has an effect on your chances to pass or change your -2s into -3s which is at least easier to plan for than having that extra random spike in the bag. On Expert and Hard, this random modification of the chaos bag is going to matter a lot less as the bag is already hell.

Depending on your choices during the campaign, the makeup of symbol tokens in the bag will end up very differently. At least on Standard, i would say that the numerical tokens are a bigger threat to your tests than the symbol tokens however. The symbols mostly stick to being -2s or -3s, so fully within range what you prepare for on Standard.

Of special note is the cultist token. If you cozy up with the cultish side of the Vale (so mostly Mother Rachel), you will get a few of these instead of tablets or Elder Things that you’d have gotten otherwise. Cultists are notable because for most of the campaign they actually come with positive effects. They are still negative modifiers, but if you pass you usually have something nice happen that can be surprisingly helpful. This does however come to an end during the finale where the Cultist token is among the worst things to draw from the bag. Pretty interesting mechanically and can be something you may even feel like making use of through token manipulation. Nkosi Mabati for example can help you farm Cultists during the campaign and then help you avoid them alltogether during the finale which can end up pretty powerful.

The Residents and the members of the survey

The Vale is home to a group of people that you can interact with, both during the preludes and during the daytime scenarios. Doing so is rewarded with them joining you as story assets and with unlocking different versions of the finale.

You can find all the information on these people and what they unlock in a seperate article, here:

The Hemlock Residents

The Curse of Hemlock Vale

The Curse of Hemlock Vale is a weakness you might pick up as a result of an early decision. At the evening of day 1, each player has to decide whether they eat their fill from what they are offered. Alternatively, they can go hungry.
Should they decline to participate in the feast, they gain a physical trauma as a result of starving themselves. Otherwise they gain this weakness:

This is on the high impact end of campaign weaknesses we’ve seen so far and can end up being rather ghastly. When it triggers its end of turn discard, this can often have other associated consequences, like having to engage a Miasmatic Shadow. But just the random discard itself is relevant, especially when it happens multiple times. Notably, you can get lucky and the Curse can just randomly discard itself. But that is rarely going to be a gamble that you want to intentionally go for.
You can get rid of it by committing it to a test where it will count as -1 skillvalue… but you better be sure that you can pass that test because otherwise you will have to discard your whole hand which would be brutal. And thanks to the autofail, this is almost always a possibility. The threat of this alone elevates Curse of Hemlock Vale above what we would usually expect to see from a weakness. Having to discard your hand is bad enough just taken for itself, but in a campaign that thrives on keeping your handsize down and even features cards like Captivating Gleam, it’s even worse. It can be very hard to recover from this.
Ways to mitigate the worst case happening on Curse include token manipulation to dodge drawing the tentacle. Another way would be initiating a test that is “automatically successful” but still allows committing cards. There are however only very few opportunities for this in the card pool, like on Toe to Toe or any of Ms. Doyle’s cats.
Honestly, this weakness seems to be slightly too punishing to me, i would almost always prefer the trauma. The only exception would be an investigator with only 5 base health, like Daisy or Luke where the physical trauma would just be too risky. But for everyone else, this weakness is a bit too much of a pain to deal with in my opinion.

Experience

A playthrough of The Feast of Hemlock Vale spans three days with two scenarios each, for a total of six games played. Despite being shorter than the usual eight-scenario campaigns the experience handed out by the scenarios is pretty good, so you aren’t limited too much in your options of what to play. Since a lot of XP are tied to the preludes, failing a scenario will not even set you back as much as it usually does, allowing to plan out a deck with some consistency. Here are the experience counts for each of the eight proper scenarios:

Daytime scenarios:
Written in Rock: 3 (locations) + 2 (Crystal Parasites) + 2 (saving Simeon/Leah or killing the Beast) + 1 (helping River, only day 1) = 8 XP (7 XP on days 2 and 3 and during the night)
Hemlock House: 2(locations) +1(Shapeless Cellar) +2(resolution, 10 seals or defeats) +2 (parleys) =7XP (only on day 1, goes down to 6 on day 2 and 3).
Silent Heath: 2 (Brood Queen) + 2 (Crystal Parasites) + 3 (Crystal Remains) +1 (Rachel, only on day 3) = 8XP (7XP on days 1 and 2)
Lost Sister: 1 (Fungal Cave) + 1 (parlaying Helen/Theo or William) +2 (resolution) +2 (Limulus Hybrid) + 2 (Crystal Parasites) +1 (Gideon, only day 2 and 3) = 9XP (8XP on day 1)
Thing in the Depths, Day 1: 3 (resolution, escorting Shelly) + 3 (locations) = 6XP
Thing in the Depths, Day 2/3: 2 (The Thing in the Depths) + 1 (River) + 3 (locations) = 6XP

Nighttime scenarios:
Twisted Hollow: 1 (Twisted Hollow location) + 2 (Ursine Hybrid) + 1 (save Bertie) + 1 (resolution) = 5XP
The Longest Night: 5 (no damage on The Captives) + 2 (Ursine Hybrid) = 7XP
Fate of the Vale: 2 (Crystal Parasites) + 5 (Main Emissary, requires a willpower(100) test) + 3 (the other three parts of the Emissary) + 5 (resolution R1) = 14XP on v1 of the scenario

So, with a successful scenario paying out somewhere between 6XP and 8XP, you can expect around 35XP from scenarios going into the the finale. In addition to that, you also gain a good amount of experience in the pre-/interludes:

Morning 1: No extra XP can be gained here.
Evening 1: One XP per choice except for sitting alone. The number of choices scales with investigator count, from 2 to 4.
Morning 2: 1 XP per parley with: Rachel, William/River, Gideon, Judith, Theo. River and William can not both be earned. River actually gives 2XP. You can also gain 1XP for running an errand and for gifting something. All of this totals to a maximum of 8XP, basically a full scenario’s worth.
Evening 2: 1 XP for dancing alone.
Morning 3: 1XP per parley with Rachel, Leah, William, River, Gideon, Judith, Theo. Gaining the XP from River, Gideon and Theo requires them having “stood by you” which depending on player count might not be possible for all three. Leah can earn you 2XP instead of 1, if Simeon is alive. Running an errand can earn you another bonus XP. All of this totals to a maximum of 9XP.
Evening 3: 1XP for parleying with Leah. Up to 2XP (conditions apply) for parleying with Simeon, William/River, Gideon, Judith, Theo. Even if the conditions aren’t met, you usually can gain at least 1XP from those… as long as they are still alive, of course. The maximum to gain here is a whopping 11XP, but realistically expect about half of that because you are unlikely to meet all the requirements.

Throughout the campaign, there are also some passages of text that can’t be reached the regular way (some act/agenda backsides and codex entries). Those also give a few points of XP (among other things…), but since they only take effect through some fourth-wall-breaking, they aren’t considered in this XP guide.

When all is said and done, going into the finale with around 40-45XP is expected and 50XP is not uncommon. That is rather generous and makes up for assets like Charon’s Obol and Arcane Research being less powerful here due to the reduced number of scenarios. Note that a large part of this XP will come from the scenarios and interludes played on day 3, so your deck needs to be able to function on moderate investment already. But you do have the option to plan some luxury upgrades and high-end tech cards for the finale.

Investigator Choices

As in previous installments of this series of campaign deep dives, i want to end with a bunch of suggestions for investigators and player cards that can help you meet the challenges of this campaign. We want to be able to defend ourselves against the horror and damage coming from the encounter deck and we don’t want to suffer too much from the discard theme. Fighters should be able to address both chunky enemies with lots of hit points and smaller ones that prevent damage dealt to them. Evasion is strong, too. Seekers should be able to contribute to the enemy management as well. The preludes reward efficient movement. All stats are tested, a dump stat is going to catch up to us. With all of these things in mind, here are some investigators that should do reasonably well. As usual, i am limiting myself to 2 mentions per class and favoring the underdogs over the obvious picks like Mark and Daisy that are just good in any campaign.

Lily Chen: She is very flexible and can mold her statline towards whatever is needed. Her intellect Discipline can give her a fantastic safeguard against the discard shenanigans in this campaign and you pick up XP fast enough that you will likely have three Disciplines in play by the third morning.
Tommy Muldoon: He can take a lot of punishment and survivor access goes a long way towards shoring up any blind spots when it comes to testing. Just a generally good allrounder.
Harvey Walters: Notably resilient for a Seeker, his stamina and sanity pools can take a few treacheries on the chin. His card draw ability also directly counteracts the discard theme. I wouldn’t go big hand with him, but as just a general seeker he can do quite well.
Minh Thi Phan: The interludes give you a couple extra turns that you can use to mold your hand. Use them to find your signature.
Finn Edwards: A very good statline for this campaign. Make sure you are able to fight reasonably well and your mix of evasion and combat will go a long way towards defusing enemies… while still able to also contribute to the clue effort.
Alessandra Zorzi: Almost too obvious to mention. There is so much parley in this campaign that Alessandra can really shine bright. During the preludes she will usually be able to take her bonus action every single turn, giving everyone more time to setup while still advancing the villager-related plots.
Agnes Baker: There’s a decent amount of Aloof in this campaign and Agnes is pretty good at solving that. Her horror pings are also great against the enemies that reduce damage dealt to them down to one. Finally, her high agility can be super useful as well, both for encounter protection and to evade enemies.
Luke Robinson: Hunter, Aloof, Evasive… there is a bunch of enemy keywords that Luke can simply bypass or interact with favorably. Notably there is one scenario that doesn’t allow him to enter his Dream-Gate (Written in Rock) but even there it’s very useful to be able to shoot into adjacent locations. Two scenarios and all of the preludes start with revealed locations, empowering his Gatebox shenanigans.
Rita Young: Her ability to both fight and evade is very useful here, as is her damage ping for evading. Or her additional movement. Actually, her set of abilities seems to almost be perfectly tailored for this campaign specifically.
Daniela Reyes: Not only can she take some punishment, she invites it. As with some other investigators that were previously mentioned, her ability to evade or ping enemies for a point of damage is very, very useful. I think she is one of the top picks for a pure fighter in this campaign.

As always, i want to encourage you to play whatever seems fun to you. But if you struggle with the campaign, these suggestions can give you some pointers towards what could help you get there. But by no means are these recommendations to be understood as something you absolutely should do or need to do to get through the campaign.

Notable Player Cards

Here are some player cards you might want to consider for your deck because they play well in this campaign. What we are looking for are ways to get movement or general action efficiency. Or some tech to bypass enemy keywords. Again, i will limit myself to two suggestions per class.

Marksmanship: A real all-star in this campaign. Deals extra damage for the big chunky enemies, bypasses Aloof, allows getting at Evasive enemies that ran away… you’ll wish you had four of them.
Brand of Cthuga: I am putting this here specifically for guardians, not so much for mystics. For many guardians, this is the cleanest way of dealing with the Miasmatic Shadow, something you at least need to be able to do when the finale comes around.
Confound: This is a good example for a card that lets you handle an enemy as a Seeker without really stopping to do your clue thing. This is an absolutely insane card in The Longest Night and Hemlock House specifically, but will do a great job in any of the scenarios.
Mind over Matter: Most campaigns have *some* use for this card, but FHV really stands out with its many fight and agility tests on treacheries. It can also act as enemy handling by evasion. You will find no shortage of opportunities to use this card. Consider the upgrade as well.
British Bull Dog(2): Calling out the upgraded one specifically because of its ability to shoot at Aloof enemies. That is very often relevant, especially when it comes to Black Amanitas and Forest Watchers which easily go down from just one shot from the pistol.
Decoy: Both the ability to evade multiple enemies and the one to evade into connecting locations is quite useful.
Mind Wipe: There are a good number of really impactful non-Elites around that are a pain to kill. No matter if its the mutated Stag, one of the birds or slugs in Longest Night, a Miasmatic Shadow or a Crystal Mimic… just slap a Mind Wipe on it and it’s pretty much handled. If this stops Aloof or Evasive from mattering, it already paid off.
Storm of Spirits: The campaign likes to spike enemy counts at several points, leaving you with multiple enemies on the board at the same time even in low player counts. Having an ace up your sleeve to defuse these situations can be worth it. Other classes might similarly consider their equivalent (Dynamite Blast, Stir the Pot, Elaborate Distraction).
Nothing Left To Lose: Resets your hand back to 5 cards, a great counter against all of the discard effects around. Between Take Heart, At a Crossroads and a copy or two of Nothing Left, your (non-Patrice) survivor shouldn’t have anything to fear from the discard theme. If you can’t run level 3 survivor or if 3XP is too much for your taste, then A Glimmer of Hope can be fairly strong tech against the discard theme as well. With Glimmer, you don’t even mind having to discard the event itself.
Alter Fate: Persistent treacheries are very plentiful and range from things that disable your assets over damage/horror triggers to Frozen in Fear. Due to how all stats are tested on these treacheries, you will likely find yourself unable to deal with some of them. This is your silver bullet.
Fine Clothes: I had mixed success with this one. On the one hand, there is definitely enough parleying going on in this campaign that Fine Clothes is worth a slot or maybe even two. On the other hand, not drawing it during a prelude, then drawing it in the actual scenario is annoying as hell. I think this is overall worth running just a single copy of if you don’t already use the body slot for something else.

Surge

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