Week in Review
The main review for this week was Before The Black Throne, the final scenario of Circle Undone. It’s a scenario that has a lot of rough edges, combining huge monsters and an encounter deck focused on throwing doom around with a variable location grid that involves a good amount of luck to traverse.
Leading up to that scenario was the review of Inexorable Fate, the little brother of Dunwich’s Sorcery set.
I also made another custom replacement set for the ARES series, this time an alternative set for Anette’s Coven. I always thought that the original set was lacking, so i took it upon myself to spruce it up a bit with Anette’s Favored. Expect a few more ARES submissions for TCU in the next weeks, there are at least two or three more sets that i want to do.
Soapbox
As part of this year’s Arkham Nights event, FFG hosted a stream where the viewers could vote their way through designing/deciding a few upgraded cards, to be released at a later point. This stream created two cards, a level 2 Guard Dog and a level 3 Flashlight.
You can find the stream <here> and the cards <here>. It should be noted that the cards are still tagged “Beta” and might change in playtesting until they finally get their proper release.
Let me start by saying that i thought this was a great format for such a stream. It moved fast, viewers got a reasonable amount of influence on the cards created, but MJ and Jeremy still got to push the discussion in whatever direction they wanted. Just as it should be. The cards that came out of it were also very reasonable and something that can easily go into many decks. I feel like many other community created cards (Burn After Reading, Council’s Coffer, Ikiaq, …) are just too weird and gimmicky for their own good.
As for the cards themselves, i am a huge fan of both of these.
Guard Dog is one of my most played cards, having an upgraded one with even more health is going to be fantastic. That engagement ability on it is also nice, even if its existence means that Riot Whistle is even more of a dead card than it already was.
That Flashlight is cool enough on its own, but really shines (heh.) in combination with other cards. Using charges from Flashlight(3) to make sure my Pilfers do their thing is just great. At the same time, they are expensive enough to buy at 3XP that they don’t just go into every deck.
So yeah. For future “community designs” i would very much prefer this new format over the old one. Having cards like better Guard Dog and Flashlight is much more useful for the cardpool than some Shrine of the Morai nonsense ¯\_(ツ)_/¯