Hey, it’s been 6 months since the last Irregular Evils post. This really lives up to its name, huh.
Anyways, i wanted to take a short moment to talk about something concerning the direction of this site. As you may or may not be aware of, Ancient Evils was created by me because i wanted to explore the design choices behind the encounter side of AHLCG. So that’s where the focus has been pretty much exclusively. Now, we just finished up with a rather interesting spoiler season for Scarlet Keys, where we got a steady drip feed of new cards presented all over the various content creators (that managed to ask to be included in time…). I have been following that with weekly recap posts, basically doing my own part to spreading the good word. Thing is, while doing so i sort of got a taste for talking more about player cards…
I also posted my version of an Arkham Buying Guide recently. To be honest, when i started that i wasn’t aware that reddit has a rather exhaustive one as well. I thought they had “only” (and i don’t mean that in a negative way at all) the short and concise one that is part of the community FAQ. Had i known about the big one, i probably wouldn’t have done my own. Oh well, i was trying to fill a niche but it turns out that we now have (at least) two Buying Guides that go into much detail and are written content (as opposed to YT videos or podcasts). Despite that, the Buying Guide has gotten positive feedback, which i am quite happy about.
So that leaves me with: 1) A desire to do more player card reviews. 2) A reason to expand on that Buying Guide. And 3) two or three more months before the Scarlet Keys Campaign box even hits shelves. To make a long story short, i will do a review of all cards in all released expansions because i apparently hate having free time. One article per expansion, going over all the cards, checking out the total card pools per class and i will be doing all of this as an extension of the Buying Guide. The questions i want to answer with each of the Expansion Reviews are things like “Can i make this work as my first buy after the Core”, “Is every investigator in this box properly playable with just this box + Core” and similar questions that you might ask yourself when trying to determine your first/next buy.
When new players ask about which box to buy first, the answers often are still based on the old release model. Accordingly, they are often not based on the player cards at all, but on the scenario content. “Get Carcosa, it’s awesome!” “I wouldn’t buy TFA, it’s very hard!” Now that player cards and campaign are decoupled, we can look at this better and tell players to maybe go for TFA player cards with Carcosa campaign or something. Finding out whether that makes sense is going to be a result of what i want to do with this new article series. I’ve already got the articles for Dunwich and for the Investigator Starter Packs ready to go and they are going up in the very near future (probably Sunday). These articles take a truckload of time to do, but i found that they were very interesting to write. Hopefully they are as interesting to read.
In any case, the reason i am doing a News post for this is that this is sort of big for me because it is indicative of a change in the direction this site is going. Expect more content from the player card side in the future, maybe some archetype discussion or talk about fancy decks i built. We’ll see. The majority of my focus is going to stay with the encounter side of course. I am going to do all the stuff for Scarlet Keys that i did for Edge of the Earth. But i will also see if i can’t squeeze some player card stuff in between on a semi-regular occasion from now on.
Before i am done here, i’d like to come back to the upcoming release of the Scarlet Keys Investigator Expansion real quick. The official previews are ending today. I expect the full list of cards to drop any day now (either official or leaked) and i will dig into that as well of course. Probably make a post or two going over the cards and giving some quick takes and initial reactions. I also am definitely going to finish the Customizables series.
So i don’t anticipate any lulls in content for next couple weeks, even though it’s probably going to be another 2 months or so until i can dive into the new campaign and get back to what this site was created for.
The only thing that i am a bit worried about right now is the navigation menu at the top of the site. That thing is getting seriously cluttered and adding new entries for the player card stuff is not going to help. I am not sure how, but i am going to have to do something about that. I already did some cleanup and moved some stuff around, but that will probably not last forever.
Alrighty, that’s all i got. Enjoy the previews, enjoy the content (not just mine, everyones) and have fun gaming. Cheers o/