Resources and Economies

Intro

Over the course of a couple articles we learned how to not lose at Arkham, and even more importantly how to win at Arkham. Twice. However, we can’t just take the best cards at every job, jam them together into a pile of cards and call it a deck. Because just like everywhere else, everything comes with costs attached and we will need to figure out ways to pay for them. Some resources we start with and their count is fixed. Others are hard to come by. Some we automatically get new ones every round. There are many little sub-economies running in parallel and figuring out where we land in each of them is a major part of deckbuilding skill. So let’s take a sort of deep dive on the different resources available to us, where to get them and how to evaluate them against each other.
Afterwards, i again want to end on deckbuilding tips derived from these observations.

A note on the term “resource”

When i talk about resources here, i mean more than what the Arkham rule book defines as resource (the stuff you spend to pay the resource costs of your cards, the thing represented by the tokens showing brown boxes). Any sort of thing that is available in limited quantities and that we spend or reserve to have an effect on the game is a resource for the purpose of this article. This is a bit unfortunate as far as terminology goes, but i think we can deal with it. For most of the article, assume that when i mention resources, i mean it as a collective term for all sorts of things. Hopefully it’ll be obvious when not.

A note on resource conversions and “the click economy”

Since we have multiple parallel economies running in this game, it should come to no surprise that much of what we are doing with cards or actions can be expressed as some sort of conversion of one resource into another. We aren’t players of a Euro Game that trade different colors of wooden cubes for other colors of wooden cubes in the hopes of gaining victory points, but we have enough in common with them that we don’t get to talk shit about them either ;) Many things we do in this game come down to trading actions for cards, cards for resources, resources back to actions, actions to resources again in constantly shifting ratios.
There’s a bit of a tendency to shortcut card evaluations by assuming fixed values, trying to assess if one card is better than another by normalizing it to a value, no matter if it’s in resources, actions or “clicks”. Personally, I pretty firmly reject that idea, the ratios are way too much in flux from deck to deck and even turn to turn for any conversion table to hold up enough to be worth using. As a community we’ve thankfully come a long way from the days of awful takes like “Leo de Luca costs 6 resources and gains you an action a turn, that means he takes 9 turns to be worth an Emergency Cache” but less extreme versions of this do pop up everywhere still. But no matter whether you assume that a card equals 1 action, 2 actions or 1.648 actions, by assuming it’s a fixed ratio in the first place you are already starting on a bad base. Instead we’ll try today to get a feel for the various resources, how they relate to each other and what circumstances might change their value for your specific case. That’ll allow you to make much more informed decisions than relying on cheap shortcuts.

Actions are a resource

I went over the basic action economy in the “Combat and Actions” article, so let me refer you to that one for a more detailed look. As a reminder, the bottom line was that we get three actions per round and spend roughly half of that on dealing with whatever the Mythos phase dredges up. This leaves us with one or two actions per turn which we can spend on advancing the game in some fashion, stretched by the use of Fast cards, triggered abilities and other ways to squeeze in effects that don’t take up what might arguably be the most precious resource of them all. Actions are the major bottleneck for not only what we can achieve in a round, but over the course of the game and gaining extras is often very expensive. We aren’t able to save them up over rounds, they are a resource that needs to be spent in the moment.

Resources are a resource

Well, let’s get this one out of the way then, let’s talk about the brown boxes. When we think about the cost of the card, then the resource costs are the obvious first thing. You want to play an asset or an event, you need to be able to cover the resource cost with resource tokens from your personal supply.

Some basic observations first:

• We start the game with 5 resources.
• Resources persist through rounds, you can stack up on them over time.
• We gain one extra resource per round during upkeep, as a basic passive income.
• We have the ability to trade in an action for a resource during our turn. Ignoring the possibility of this triggering attacks of opportunity for a moment, this can be used as often as we need and gives us a floor for the value of the action and a very basic way of having further income even if we don’t have any cards available for that purpose.

So what does that mean? It means that we start with what is actually a pretty solid pile that immediately allows us to invest into one or two impactful cards. But the way to get extra resources is slow or prohibitively expensive if we don’t have any cards in hand to help us out. Unless your plan is spending less or equal to an average of 1 resource per turn, you will want extra sources of income. This inverts how many other card games work which have you start at zero or one of their main resource and allow you to build up over time.

Here are two less obvious observations about the value of resources, this time also taking the card pool into account:

• Resources vary in value between classes. Rogues have more efficient ways to acquire resources. Survivors have cheaper cards. For the other three classes, resources are often more of a premium.
• Resources fluctuate in value over the course of the game. Especially investigators that want to set up early with assets will require a large burst of resources in the first couple turns while needing very little afterwards. Others might need a more consistent income to fund continuous play of events.

Depending on the makeup of your deck, the second point can severely devalue the passive income to the point of almost being meaningless. If your fighter wants to put an ally, a weapon and another supporting asset into play, this will likely total up to 10 or more resources. Without help, that’ll take 5 rounds, more time than you have considering that enemies can show up as early as the first Mythos phase. This is why Guardian and Mystic feel so damn strapped for resources all the time, they don’t have great income in the first place but then also usually run heavy on enabling assets that need to be paid for somehow. That income they get over the course of the game doesn’t help them much when they are pressed by the game into developing their board of assets in the first three turns.

The flipside to this is when you have a deck that is actually able to put out the required resources during the first turns, you may find yourself with more resources than you need as the game goes on. If you have your stuff on the table and keep drawing your cards that generate more resources, then you will want to be able to spend those productively. Events are great for this and Talent assets like Sharp Rhetoric are actually quite decent at giving your lategame resources more value than they’d have otherwise.

When considering your options for additional resource income, few investigators can afford to overlook Emergency Cache. As a neutral card, it’s available to everyone and is basically the gold standard when it comes to converting cards to cash and often we’ll plan our deck around the assumption that during the first two turns, we’ll have nine resources to spend on our basic setup. 5 to start with, 1 from the first upkeep phase, 3 from playing an ECache. I’ll also note the lack of commit icons on the cards, continuing the thing i just mentioned about needing ways to spend resources productively over the course of the game unless you are fine with ECache becoming a dead card.

As mentioned, the other option available to everyone is the basic resource action. Spend an action, gain a buck. This isn’t worth doing for the most part, as we’ve learned these actions are super valuable for progressing the game and our most coveted limited property that we can spend. However, while we don’t want to plan on using the resource action, it’s one that is important to keep in mind. For example, if it allows us to drop a weapon or other important asset a turn earlier, then the action might well be worth it – not because you gained the resource, but because you gained another turn of benefits from the asset.

Cards are a resource

That’s the other obvious one. Anything beyond basic actions and whatever is printed on your investigator is limited by cards as a consumable good that is available in limited quantity – which makes them a resource. We might actually even consider the investigator card under this framework as the first card you play each game and that you only get to choose one of. For ease of discussion we’ll ignore the investigator card here though and limit this discussion to the cards in your hand. Yes, that means we’ll ignore Permanent cards as well for now.

Let’s start with the basic observations again:

• We start the game with 5 cards in hand.
• Cards persist through rounds, you can stack up on them over time, up to a maximum hand size limit of 8.
• We draw one extra card per round during upkeep, as a basic passive income.
• We have the ability to trade in an action for a card during our turn. Ignoring the possibility of this triggering attacks of opportunity for a moment, this can be used as often as we need and gives us a floor for the value of the action and a very basic way of having further card draw even if we don’t have any cards available for that purpose.

If you are having Deja Vu right now, that’s because this is hauntingly similar to the basic observations we had about resources! However, the surface similarities end there, as a card has a much higher potential impact on the game than a resource has. During our first turns, we often will not play out our hand because rarely we use up more than one card per action. Often, we can actually sustain our game with just the basic income of one card per round.

Another very important point about cards when compared to other resources: They aren’t uniform, they vary greatly in value on an individual base. Many times, drawing cards isn’t actually about quantity of the cards, but about quality. Arkham isn’t really a game where “card advantage” versus the opponent or game engine is a huge deal, so an effect that lets you select a specific card can often outperform one that draws multiples.

For resources, we noted that their value fluctuates a lot during the game. For cards, this is similar to a point. The value of card quantity also falls off, but not as much thanks to the presence of skill icons that gives them an alternate use. But once you factor in card quality, the picture becomes less clear. Sure, drawing extra cards during the first turns is still going to be more impactful than later on, usually the first copy of a certain card will be a lot better than the second one. The cards we have in our opening hand are particularly valuable thanks to the mulligan mechanic giving us some limited form of card selection that we’ll never have access to again after the game starts. But at the same time, key cards are sometimes so important that finding them even at a later point can dwarf many other concerns we have.

Something that i find interesting is that we’ve never gotten a neutral card that simply draws two or three cards, to set a baseline similar to how Emergency Cache does it for resource tokens. That lack of a fallback option that any investigator would have access to means that the class identity (or identities) of your investigator will have even more of an impact on your draw capabilities. Seekers and Mystics are both great at drawing and filtering cards. Guardians don’t really draw much, but they have a couple cards that let them search specifically for certain traits (like Weapons or Tools). Rogue and Survivor draw capabilities are propped up by some standout cards (like Lucky Cigarette Case and Rabbit Foot) but i wouldn’t really call card draw a part of their class identity.

This means that if we were to consider the value of converting resources and actions into cards, the evaluations shift drastically as all three sides of the equation depend on the class and most investigators have multiple classes to further muddle the waters. An event that costs 2 resources and draws 3 cards would be quite desirable for Guardian and Rogue – the former because draw is particularly valuable to them, the latter because resources are relatively plentiful for them. But in Seeker where the card actually exists it’s merely fine and sees little play because they value their actions higher than either of those other two classes.

So how good is the draw action then? Well, setting aside the difference based on class identity for now, the draw action is definitely more attractive than the resource action. By a lot, actually. There’s plenty reasons for that. For one, a card is by itself more impactful than a resource. Often you will need multiple resources to do something, while one card is usually enough to make a difference. The other thing is that cards are different from each other, while resources are uniform. You might have six cards in hand and still want to draw because the specific one you are looking for is missing. That gives the draw action a lot of extra mileage that the resource action simply doesn’t have. Drawing cards either to dig for specific cards or to increase your options on how to proceed is a common thing to do and if you aren’t able to do that with some card in hand, then the card draw action is a perfectly viable way to get where you need to be. Obviously it would be preferable to spend that action on progressing the game by finding a clue or moving or fighting an enemy – but when those options aren’t there, then the basic draw is a very good floor for how to spend your action.

Uses are resources

A lot of assets don’t actually provide infinite uses, but are instead limited by some amount of tokens (ammo, charges, etc.) that are spent whenever the card is triggered or activated. We could look at this as a resource, but for the most part it’s just an extension of “cards as a resource”, we are simply getting the effect two or three times for our card.
There are some very few cards that treat these use tokens as an actual resource, but they are rare and we probably don’t need to go into them too much now. Examples would be Torrent of Power in the chapter 2 evergreens or Warning Shot, for a card from the Legacy card pool.
Mostly, uses are just an extension of “card as a resource” however, scaling how often you get the effect out of a single card. That means you can look at cards that replenish uses, for example Stock Ammo Reload, as extra copies of whatever card they are reloading.

Health and Sanity are resources

We usually think of our investigator’s health and sanity values as something we need to protect from being depleted by the encounter deck. And for good reason, after all we likely lose the scenario after defeat and even suffer some long-term consequences in the form or trauma. More about all of that in its own article, no need to reiterate all of that here. That being said, there’s definitely ways for us to be a bit more reckless with our health and sanity and use it proactively too.

The chapter 2 card pool actually puts a pretty big emphasis on this notion. We have an investigator that spends horror as a resource to fuel her investigator ability in Isabelle. We have Marie who gets benefits for taking damage and a card pool that lets her (and other Mystics, of course) spend health for stronger effects. Daniela thrives on letting enemies attack her so she can retaliate. All these things either directly or indirectly let the player budget some of their health and/or sanity, basically shifting it over from being a resource used to “Not Lose the Game” to one that is used to “Win the Game”.

The biggest difference between health/sanity as a resource and one of the other resources we looked at so far is that health and sanity aren’t self-replenishing. You get a pool of them at the start of the game. But if you spend some of it, no matter if voluntarily or not, you won’t be getting new health or sanity to spend unless you convert some other resource. This is a considerable effort, usually requiring a mix of cards, resource tokens and actions and is usually not going to be something you just dabble in. Running a healing card or two to ward off the dangers of the encounter deck is one thing, but committing yourself to using cards like Offering Bowl is going to require some extra effort because you are otherwise going to heavily compromise your survivability.

Since there are no basic healing actions or other ways to naturally replenish health, the viability of using health and sanity as a resource is going to heavily depend on your class and available card pool.

Note that this doesn’t just include the use of specific cards or investigators that actively allow you to take damage and horror tokens in exchange for other benefits, but really any way you have of trading survivability for tempo. For example, having spare health can allow you to take an attack of opportunity to achieve something faster than if you had to wait for the enemy to be handled more safely. The whole topic of balancing survivability vs tempo can fill its own article and maybe i will do that at a later point. For now, let’s just take in the basic idea that we can spend our health and sanity for progress as well as simply using it as a buffer against the Mythos. But that it also requires considerable investment in the form of other resources for you to keep this up.

Equipment Slots are resources

Here’s another interesting resource, one that works very different from the others. Our investigators have a limited amount of fixed equipment slots that can be filled. Certain assets will occupy these slots, blocking them for other assets we might want to play. This creates a significant opportunity cost for these cards that will need to be considered both during play and while deckbuilding.

What makes them work so differently from other resources are two things primarily. For one, they aren’t completely spent on use, merely occupied. That means you will get them back if the asset leaves play and you can immediately use the slot for something else. You can even play an asset that uses a slot, kicking a previously played asset out in the process. The other thing is that it’s relatively difficult to gain new ones. There’s a couple cards that allow you to create new slots, but they are expensive and often come with high XP costs.

The base slots as defined by the Core rules are Hand, Arcane, Head, Body, Accessory and Ally. Hand and Arcane you each get two of, the others are limited to one by default. The Ally and Accessory slot stand out as particularly valuable, the assets that go into these slots are often among the more impactful cards you can play.

The interaction with this resource during actual gameplay is limited, you aren’t constantly gaining and losing this resource the same way you might have cards in hand or remaining sanity fluctuate from turn to turn. The biggest consideration you should give for these is during deckbuilding, making sure you don’t end up with too many cards trying to occupy card slots that are already taken.

Deck Slots are resources

While we are on the topic of deckbuilding… we can’t just jam everything into our deck that seems worth playing. Even if that were beneficial to us, we wouldn’t be allowed to because there’s a fixed deck size limit that is set by the investigator. Usually that’ll be 30 cards, but there’s some variation here as well.
Considering that we are trying to gain enough survivability, have all the cards available to progress the game and also need to juggle all these different resource systems, this space of 30 cards very soon becomes very tight. Many decks won’t be able to fit cards for all the equipment slots or will end up without a way to draw extra cards or gain extra movement. Trying to fit in some cheeky events for flexing some clue gain into your fighter might collide with your needs to ensure survivability, combat capabilities and the need to pay for all of that. You may consider running not every card as a two-of, but instead use certain cards only as singleton copies to conserve space in your deck for other things.

There are cards that increase your decksize, for example the Collector card that is rewarded for finishing Brethren of Ash has a +5 decksize increase as an additional effect to its primary one of allowing you to add something outside of your normal deckbuilding options. This is priced as a cost however, and we indeed generally consider a decksize increase as a negative. While it does allow us to possibly add another new aspect to our deck that’d increase the power ceiling for our deck, it comes at a cost to consistency and reliability during the crucial first rounds of the game. Depending on the level of card draw and card selection available to you this can be more or less of an issue and as experience with the chapter 1 card Versatile has shown, the payoff from adding that extra aspect to your deck needs to be considerable to offset the negative impact.

Experience Points are resources

Another thing we spend for ingame effects, another commodity that is available in limited quantities which creates opportunity costs for us. And yet another completely different system behind it.

Experience Points (XP) allow us to buy stronger cards for our decks, swapping out lower level cards for those better ones. So this is another resource system that doesn’t come into play during the scenarios themselves, but during deckbuilding. You do however need to earn these points during gameplay.

Much of our interaction with XP can be understood as resource conversion again. This is sometimes pretty obvious, like when we buy Relic Hunter to convert XP into an equipment slot. Sometimes less obvious, like when we spend a round investigating a location not because we need the clues but as a purely optional goal because it has Victory, converting actions (and possibly cards, uses, resource tokens…) into XP.

Other considerations

I think this works as a pretty solid rundown of different resource systems in the game. There’s more that i did gloss over here. For example Permanent cards which could be understood as a means to convert XP into a game effect. We could go deeper into more nebulous terms like conditionality and opportunity costs. Or even pick up the “Tempo” term again and talk about how you can spend Tempo, gain Tempo and generally try to frame this abstract idea like a resource. But it’s probably best for now to stick to things that we can actually put numbers on.

Deckbuilding Tips

To cap off this article, i’d like to go over some deckbuilding considerations related to the three resources that primarily matter at that point: Resources, Cards and Equipment Slots.

Resources: This might be the most important one, so let’s spend some time on this.

There are broadly two ways to approach making sure that your resource situation works out. The first is seeing what number of resources you can muster, then choosing your cards based on what that resources can support. The second route is choosing the cards you want to run, then adding the resource support you need. Depending on the options available to you, these options might not be equally viable for you. If you are a Guardian who builds a deck on a chapter 2 evergreen card pool, your resource options are more or less limited to the basic income that everyone gets, ECache and Bounty. Knowing that, you can work out what asset base and events your economy supports. Rogues are on the other side of the spectrum, they have the means to start with the cards they actually want to run, then shape their resource support to those needs.

Since a nice chunk of resources is frontloaded and available right from the start, the concept of a resource curve isn’t really something we need to care about much. That being said, there are two breakpoints that i consider important enough to give some consideration to and both relate to how much resources you have on your first two turns. Without any extra income, it’s six resources. With an Emergency Cache on hand, it’s nine resources. This is something you will want to consider when you think about how your deck will end up playing its first few turns. If you are the fighter and spend your first turn playing an M1911, an ECache and Logan Hastings, that’ll leave you with two resources to spend on your second turn, enough to get a Service Revolver but not a Machete. This might point towards the Revolver being a better fit for your deck than the Machete. Or, if you are Daniela and want the Machete as a sidearm, maybe consider a 3 cost ally like Aleksey or Daniel instead of the 4 cost Logan. What if you don’t draw ECache and have to get by on six resources? Do you take a resource action to play M1911 and Logan over the course of two turns? What else beside dropping the gun are you doing turn 1 if you decide to save up your resources for the turn 2 Logan? M1911 + resource action + Logan isn’t an option, you are 1 resource short there.
This sort of consideration is of course not only relevant during the initial deckbuild, you might also want to consider it when upgrading your deck. That Thompson looks great, but it does cost 6 resources. You could play it turn one following a resource action, but that’ll leave you with a single resource to spend on turn two. Again, what’s your plan here if you don’t draw ECache versus if you do.
One of the most common pitfalls of deckbuilding is overstuffing your deck with relatively expensive assets without the resource backbone to support it. Now of course not every asset in your deck needs to fit within this 9 resource framework, for many of them it’s perfectly fine to hold them until you had the opportunity to cash in a Bounty, had your fellow rogue help you out with an Out the Door or simply let some of that basic income stack up. You don’t need to drop that Thompson round one, you can just fight with something cheaper like an M1911 at the start and then get the big gun out when the small one is empty and you had the opportunity to develop. But do go over the assets in your deck, especially ones that cost more than 2 resources, and question how and when they fit into your gameplan.

The other common thing that i think many decks get wrong is that they are underestimating how great skills are. Skills are a whole type of card whose sole gimmick is that they don’t cost resources beyond the card they are printed on, so if the goal is making sure your deck works within the constraints of the overlapping economies, then running a decent amount of skills is a no-brainer. Obviously they don’t have the same impact on the game that a good asset or even an event has, but since they come at a fraction of the total cost they should be a mainstay of your deckbuilding under all but the most extreme circumstances.

While we are on this train of thought, comparing the different card types, let’s also talk events. Events are somewhere halfway between assets and skills, typically costing resources and/or actions while providing a one-shot effect. The relative value of events versus assets starts out strongly in favor of assets at the start of the game, but continuously shifts towards events as it goes on. This is because assets stay in play, so if you play them early on they stay in play for more turns, giving you more value in return. An event may cost less, but usually the pure resource to effect ratio will still be in favor of the asset. For example, the M1911 gives you 4 attacks for 3 resources while a fighting event will only give you a single attack. Even if you factor in that the gun costs an extra action to play before you can make your first shot with it, it wins out on pure value. But as you come towards the end of the game, the events benefits start to overtake the gun slowly as you may have your equipment slots filled, want to stack the bonuses of the events with those of your assets, have to rely on the drip income from the upkeep step or simply only have two more turns to play during which you may not even get to empty out the gun for its full effect.
Long story short, there is an opportunity to save on resources here by finding the right amount of events to supplement your assets, not only the resource tokens but also actions. Again, you will want to consider how and when you are planning on applying those events however.

Among assets, there is one group of cards that i also want to mention here. I don’t really like talking about cards like Logan Hastings or Thieves Kit as if they were part of your resource generating economy. While they do generate resources as part of their effect, they do take considerable time to pay off their own costs. I’ve used Logan earlier in examples as a card whose resource cost of 4 introduced significant questions about card choice, opportunity cost and just general issues of making the resource economy work. And no amount of gametext on him about gaining resources after defeating enemies is going to change that. His resources will be nice to enable an extra event or two in the later turns than would otherwise be possible, but you simply can’t look at him as if he costed nothing or even just as if he was cheaper to play than he is.

With resources, the goal in the back of my head is usually to make it reasonable to play the game without taking resource actions. It’s not an earth-shattering sign of defeat if you have to convert the occasional action into a missing resource so you can keep rolling, but if it turns out during gameplay that you are relying on that option a lot, then you probably can improve your decks performance significantly by addressing this issue. Maybe you need to lower the total cost of your deck, maybe you need to run some extra income cards. Or just keep it in mind when upgrading your deck, so you can gauge whether your current resource situation can support an expensive card you are considering or if maybe upgrading into a high impact skill or event can work out better.

Cards: As mentioned, the availability of (good) card draw varies a lot based on the classes of the investigator. There are a couple things that everyone can do, though.

There are a bunch of cards around that do draw a card as an addition to their effect, mostly skills and events that basically refund their innate card cost this way to offset them being one-shot effects. We often refer to this sort of card as Cantrips (a word that M:tG players took from D&D), basically they are the card economy equivalent to one that costs zero resources. Chapter 2 doesn’t actually have anything in this regard within the class cards, but there is of course always that all-powerful cycle of neutral skills i can not praise enough: Guts, Perception, Overpower and Manual Dexterity all not only don’t cost an action and don’t cost any resources, they also refund their card cost with a new one. They are about as close to free as it gets and having a couple of them in your deck will have a noticable effect on the quality of the cards in your hand, leading you faster to whatever card you are currently looking for.

Beside the obvious card draw which literally says “Draw X cards” on them, there are other ways to make your drawn cards last you longer. Assets may require more resources from you than events or skills do, but they do require fewer cards. If you for example play an M1911, this in a way does draw you four attack events, one for each ammo on it. Now, those attacks are weaker than a dedicated attack event would be, but you do get a bunch of them for just one card. Similarly, all sorts of repeatable effects that don’t require you constantly investing cards from your hand will allow you to make the most of your card economy. The flipside of this is of course that an investigator or deck that wants to focus on event or skill based play will need a constant income of cards, like a Lucky Cigarette Case that keeps feeding you more fuel to do things with.

Most decks will want to focus on card quality instead of quantity however, and this is where some alternate ways of acquiring cards start to shine. If you are just doing the beancounter thing, then The Right Tool For The Job looks pretty awful: You are spending an action, a resource and a card… and you are getting back a card for a net negative. This is of course a very flawed way to look at it however, the card is easily worth it for you if the card it fetches up is important enough. And considering how important it is for Guardians to find their weapons, this is very often worth doing.
Another example for something that trades card quantity for card quality is discard recursion. A staple of the Survivor class, these are effects that let you take a card from your discard pile back into your hand. If you are spending a card like Do-Or-Die to achieve this, you are just trading a card for a card, but you aren’t just getting a random card back, you are getting your best card (for the situation, as chosen by you) back. Obviously, if you can find cards that give you both card quantity and card quality, you know you struck gold.

All that is to say that there are other ways to maintain a number of cards in hand than just explicitly using card draw effects. The other possible takeaway here is that most decks don’t actually need card quantity, the base line of starting with 5 and gaining one extra per round can absolutely be sufficient… as long as they are the right cards and that is much more worth caring about. If you find yourself having to rely on the draw action a lot, ask yourself if it’s actually because you don’t have enough cards. Because chances are that you actually do have plenty of cards in your hand, they are just not the right ones. Instead of trying to brute force it with draw, a better way to address the issue might be fixing the root issue. Too many redundant cards can be a problem, but so can not having enough tools for your essential jobs. Identify which cards are essential and which ones are just “value”. You may not need two copies of your non-essentials. You might be able to run a couple cantrips instead. Or cards that can do multiple jobs. If a card is flexible enough to do multiple jobs, it can feel like you drew multiple cards at the same time. This sort of thing is usually going to be better for you than spending chunks of your action and resource economy on playing a mediocre card like Preposterous Sketches. If you run card draw, try to see if you can either make it card selection or if you can find card draw that also does other things, like maybe University Archivist or Laboratory Assistant can do a better job for you than the Prep Sketches can. Protective Vest does come at a premium, but it is a card that does give you great card selection while also fulfilling two other jobs at the same time.

Equipment Slots: Let me get one thing out of the way first: You don’t need to use every equipment slot. While it’s probably a good idea during deckbuilding to specifically ask yourself what you are going to do with a certain slot, the answer might very well be “Nothing.” Arcane slots and Body slot are often staying empty, as does the headwear slot. But there’s been plenty of times where i had nothing in my accessory slot either, despite it generally being one that can house a lot of power.

The question of how many cards to run at a maximum for a given slot is going to depend on a couple circumstances, the most important being whether the assets you plan on putting in the slots are temporary ones or if you plan of keeping them around for the rest of the game. If your plan for the Ally slot is putting Logan Hastings in there, you maybe don’t even need another ally. In fact, due to Logan being as expensive as he is, the concerns about the resource economy will already push you towards not including further allies.

However, slots are unique among the different resources we looked at today in that they aren’t actually spent, they are only occupied. So you always have the option of reclaiming the slot later on. This means, if you are putting down low cost allies like Laboratory Assistant, then it’s feasible to also plan for other allies in the deck to replace her once you gotten from her what you wanted. Some allies, like Bodyguard and Rookie Cop are even designed specifically to take hits for you and be replaced. Similar things hold true for other slots of course. If you want to run melee weapons, you will need fewer spares than if you are doing firearms that will need to be replaced once they are spent.

The goal here is to not end up with dead cards in hand that you can’t play. There’s a bit of a push and pull with your card draw capabilities. If you can draw more cards, you are more likely to see those additional copies and run into a situation where you have more cards for a certain slot in hand than you can use. On the other hand, decks with this sort of draw capability are also the ones which are least impacted by the occasional dead draw. If you are relying on just your base draw or possibly spending actions on the basic draw action, then getting doubles of your Dorothys or Bloodstones is going to be a lot more annoying than if you had gotten them as just one of the many cards handed to by Lab Assistant as your third card for the round.

My own rule of thumb for starting a decklist is to find two cards per deckslot that i want to include, then go from there. That means 4 hand items, 2 accessories, 2 allies. And then modify this baseline depending on the type of assets i find. Do my weapons use ammo? Then i want more than four. Does my accessory stay in play? I might get away with using a single copy. How likely am i to replace my ally down the line?

Gaining additional equipment slots is possible, but there are two considerations here. One, they are expensive. Either they cost a chunk of XP or they come with significant costs to play out. In the latter case you also have to consider that you might find your additional assets that you want to play out before you find your slot granting card which can be awkward. The other thing is that they usually do increase your power ceiling a lot more than your power floor. In other words, they will often not be a huge help during the first couple turns and instead allow you to scale your power higher later on instead. That’s not true for all equipment slots to the same degree of course, but do consider that running Charisma for an extra ally doesn’t just come with a cost of 3xp. It also comes with the extra strain on your resources and cards from having to budget for another ally. Your plan of putting both Jim Culver and Olivier Bishop into your Dexter deck provides you with an incredible top end once you have everything in play. But how do you get there and how do you also pay for the spells you likely want to play in addition to those two. I am not saying this is necessarily a bad plan… i am saying this does need some more thought behind it than taking the good cards and putting them together into a pile.

Next Up: ???

This concludes what i had planned for this series of articles. The goal was pointing out what you need to achieve in the game to win a scenario and the two main challenges you face when trying to go for that: Staying Alive. And paying for all of that. I spun each of the articles into some deckbuilding tips that i hope are helpful.
The idea of having an archive of deckbuilding resources available on the site appeals to me and these articles have been fun to put together, so i very likely will expand further on the topic. Not sure where i am taking this next, though. Maybe something less abstract and more hands-on like a look at archetypes per class or something? If you have any suggestions, let me know!