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Just ran well-connected(3) Sefina through a custom campaign. C. R. E.A.M. Preston and Jenny build up money much more slowly (albeit steadily) than Sef can. Double double pairs so well with all the $ cards. 21 or bust is wild, even better with token manipulation. +$7 for an action is wild. Doubling it for using it and something else via painted world is even crazier. Cheat the system is a zero action ecache, and it’s easy enough to get 4 traits. (Unscrupulous loan is survivor, the new seeker/mystic spell is level one). You get to a point where you just can’t spend the money anymore and your bonuses are letting you pass two checks a round… the issue is that stars of Hyades is a rough weakness and you can’t really avoid it forever. Maybe with a seeker any upgraded scroll of of secrets it would be easier to ditch. Golden Bee fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Nov 28, 2021 |
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Nov 28, 2021 05:14
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Return to TCU is great for the tarot cards, they make replaying old campaigns more interesting. Occult Lexicon 3 is great, and Observed is the best use of 4 XP that you didn't know exactly what to do with anyway.Golden Bee posted:Just ran well-connected(3) Sefina through a custom campaign. C. R. E.A.M. Preston and Jenny build up money much more slowly (albeit steadily) than Sef can. That's why I don't like Sefina. Actually my opinion of an investigator goes way down if their weakness is unavoidable and nearly impossible to get rid of, and it's hard because event-based investigators are one of my favorite archetypes.
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Nov 28, 2021 07:13
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Now that I've gone through the Night is there Zealot 2 player, Dunwich is next. Cho and Winnifred destroyed Devourerer Below. I just took all the testless clue gathering, and Winni just blew through with a switchblade the whole time. Probably going to just use the Return To the first time through. Problem is deciding on which investigators to play (other player might be indecisive)
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Nov 28, 2021 16:24
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I would go with Jim/Jaq and Zoey taking two copies of “you owe me one“. She instantly can become a back-up mystic, and it’s different from the combo you just played.
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Nov 28, 2021 17:20
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If you must play Jim (why though?) I'd save him for Carcosa on account of the bag being more favorable for him.
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Nov 28, 2021 18:48
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Was thinking Yorick would be fun. Dark Horse and Schoeffner's Catalog for paying for items while not having resources. Scavenge literally everything. Edit: It's looking like Ursula and Yorick (Mateo maybe?) Douche Phoenix fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Nov 28, 2021 |
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Nov 28, 2021 22:52
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I just got the Revised Core set. To sleeve them, it seems like I only need 63.5x88 to have a nice snug fit? Is that right?
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Nov 29, 2021 01:45
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GreenBuckanneer posted:I just got the Revised Core set. To sleeve them, it seems like I only need 63.5x88 to have a nice snug fit? Is that right? The official sleeve is Gamegenic, but Dragon Shield sleeves are the best quality. Don't get cheap sleeves and have them all slightly miscut or have the tops of the cards right up against the top of the sleeve, it sucks.
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Nov 29, 2021 04:59
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LifeLynx posted:The official sleeve is Gamegenic, but Dragon Shield sleeves are the best quality. Don't get cheap sleeves and have them all slightly miscut or have the tops of the cards right up against the top of the sleeve, it sucks. The only thing I like about dragon shield is that the back is textured so the cards don't slip around, otherwise I dislike that they're so big. I also never double sleeve my cards.
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Nov 30, 2021 02:04
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The FFG sleeves are even bigger and I grew to prefer them, so when they announced they weren't going to make them anymore I stocked up. I have enough for at least another full cycle, maybe two, then I'll have to consider my options. Apparently Sleeve Kings are coming out with a range that perfectly clones each of the the FFG sleeve options but I'll believe it when I can inspect them myself. I did start using the clear, non-matte Dragon Shields recently because I started playing Marvel Champions and a local shop here had them for a great price. I'd be happy to replace all my FFG sleeves with them if I didn't already have, you know, thousands of AH cards.
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Nov 30, 2021 02:37
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I'm writing up my RtTCU campaign now that it's finished and I decided to crunch a few numbers. I thought this was pretty interesting : It's a very rough plot of the bag for The Witching Hour (Hard) with the 'call bullshit' choice. The black line is the standard chance of success, while the dark red line is Jacqueline Fine's ability. It's really good! And it also validated my feeling while playing where it seemed like covering the most common negative modifier in the bag (in this case, -2) had an inordinately high chance of success. This is also why Crystal Pendulum is a particularly good pick for her...
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Nov 30, 2021 05:04
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I have a super fancy iPhone and those lines look identically colored.
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Nov 30, 2021 05:24
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Top line is clearly red? I’m using an iPhone as well.
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Nov 30, 2021 05:34
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Funny you should say that, I removed the words 'barely perceptible' before 'dark red' after I posted the preview because it was like that on the original but in my browser it showed up clearly.
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Nov 30, 2021 05:39
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Here's another sim, same bag, 100k pulls, this time for Voice of Ra : Jacqueline's line is the dark red again and it should be a bit more visible. Bonus comedy option : Jacqueline with her weakness out playing Dark Prophecy (nine token pulls, none cancelled or ignored) :  If there were more eligible tokens in the bag (there's only five at this point) we could be looking at a new archetype : Big Money Jacqueline!
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Dec 2, 2021 08:00
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Most likely get to start Dunwich tonight, grabbed a Gotta Clue Fast Ursala deck online and made myself a janky short supply/geared up bless token Yorick deck. Should be fun, should not go insane for at least a few scenarios.
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Dec 3, 2021 14:07
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Make sure to pack Delay the inevitable in Yorrick. You’re going to be happy you did.
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Dec 3, 2021 19:00
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Yeah, that looks like one hell of a card. I'll probably pick that up after the first scenario. Depending on our exp gain I may grab versatile for a few extra event slots.
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Dec 3, 2021 20:17
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Douche Phoenix posted:Yeah, that looks like one hell of a card. I'll probably pick that up after the first scenario. Depending on our exp gain I may grab versatile for a few extra event slots. Versatile is a trap about 99% of the time. Start with Delay, otherwise it'll cost 1 xp to add to your deck. You'll want a single copy for Dunwich.
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Dec 3, 2021 21:03
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Yorick with bless tech is one of my favorites. I don't think you're using the taboo list, but he's one of the two characters that actually gets better because of the buffs to taboo cards. The other is Gloria because those Scrolls no longer cost an action to use. Yorick gets to use Favor of the Sun to always get a positive symbol on the .35 Winchester, making it almost as reliable and hard-hitting as Cyclopean Hammer for much less XP. I finished my two-hander of Edge of the Earth, and it was fantastic. It's a little easier than most campaigns, and the partner mechanic really brings you into it more than other campaigns where your only interaction with NPCs is a paragraph of dialog between scenarios or an ally card where it doesn't matter if they die. It was agonizing to put damage and horror on them, even though - slight spoilers for how easy/difficult it is to lose a partner - it was easier to keep them alive during a scenario than I expected. I didn't like the amount of times their fate was out of my hands though. The first one, fine, just means you can't rely on a specific character the first playthrough, but that keeps happening. Would have liked to see a test, or a heroic sacrifice option, etc. One of the endings requires a specific character to be alive, so, literally, good luck getting that to happen. There were some well balanced rewards/penalties for keeping them alive/getting them killed, respectively, but they aren't all equal. Really inventive scenarios also, there are some creative ways they use the traditional format and some good improvements on scenario archetypes that go all the way back to Dunwich. The road chase in Innsmouth was good, but the mountain climb was an intense take on Essex County Express. I ended slipping down the mountain so much that the first agenda flipped and I had to do a mad dash up, leaving all my supplies behind. The tekeli-li deck was interesting. It's equally punishing to the slow decks that usually only draw on upkeep as the quick Rogue/Seeker decks that draw a lot of cards. I ended up sleeving them in the color sleeves of one of my investigators, and only had to resleeve into the other color a few times. Snow tokens made even easy tests risky. Being +2 on a test wasn't as reliable. I'm thinking about playing EotE will bless and curse tokens and spending five whole minutes drawing a cascade of tokens.
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Dec 3, 2021 22:12
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Got all the way through The Miskatonic Museum tonight. We got by by the skin of our proverbial teeth, but Yorick getting brain sucked in the back of the Clover bar left him with some issues going forward. Next time we get to catch the train try not to get got.
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Dec 4, 2021 04:54
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Back in July I was eagerly anticipating the delivery of my Return to the Circle Undone box as it was beginning to show up in various places around the world at that time. Little did I know, however, I was in for a much longer wait because Australia seems to be the last place in the world nowadays to get FFG stock. I eventually resigned myself to the possibility that it wasn't going to turn up on time and decided to do a refresher of the original campaign instead, with Preston Fairmont and Akachi Onyele. The report from that run is here. Flash forward to a few weeks ago and my Return box has finally arrived, and now that I've completed a two-handed Ironman run on Hard (my preferred mode of play) it's time for another report! Like last time I'll go over the decks I built, then the campaign, and then I'll share some final thoughts on the whole thing. I won't be using any spoiler tags but I will be using a lot of card images, including the new encounter cards, so if you don't want to be spoiled I recommend rapidly scrolling down past this post and the two following it. Return to the Circle Undone Part One : The Decks Arkham Horror LCG campaigns are generally designed with their accompanying investigators in mind, so a safe option would have been to pick two from the TCU box to run with. Instead, I picked two I've been interested in trying for a while, and while it was fine for the most part there were times (actually quite a lot of times) when I wished they'd both been a bit more... nimble. My base decks are usually optimized for the first couple of scenarios but this time I had my sights set on the fourth scenario, Return to The Wages of Sin. This new version inexplicably did not make one of the hardest scenarios in the entire game any easier, and in fact they added another very challenging objective where you need to banish three Heretics. I spent a huge amount of time replaying not just that scenario but the first three as well in order to refine a pair of decks that could consistently beat it. Without saying too much about it here I will say that I tried a number of different strategies but didn't start making real progress until I discovered One Weird Trick that blew the whole scenario wide open (Heretics hate it!) But more on that in the campaign report. For now, let's meet our lead investigator, Jacqueline Fine.  Jacqueline's ability is very strong. Drawing three tokens and cancelling two provides a solid boost to your chance of passing any test (around 10-30% in the bag for The Witching Hour) and if you can cover the two largest negative modifiers you're guaranteed to succeed. More often, though, you'll be using the ability to either find or avoid a particular token for one of the many Mystic cards which interact with them. There are definitely different ways to build Jacqueline but I can't imagine any of them involve not taking Sixth Sense. In this campaign she was going to fulfill the main cluever role so I decided early on I'd base the deck around the Sixth Sense (4)/Sign Magick (3) combo where having two copies of each in play lets you take five investigate actions per turn.  Unlike most other Mystics who make do with whatever tools show up in their hand, Jacqueline needed to get those specific pieces into play each game in order to realize her clue-gathering potential. Sixth Sense (4) is a fine spell by itself but with the other pieces in play it becomes one of the most efficient methods in the game for grabbing clues. And there are really only a few ways to get those pieces into play in any kind of consistent manner and only so much space in the deck for support cards, so building with that combo in mind proved an interesting challenge. And since I wanted to build a combo deck I didn't want to increase its size by adding the two cards from the introduction where you choose to accept your fate, so we called bullshit. This means we get two Elder Thing tokens added to the deck for the entire campaign, and for the first scenario that meant we wanted to be +4 on each test, for an 87% chance of success. A +2 attempt would only be successful 60% of the time, but if Jacqueline had her ability available that +2 attempt would actually be successful 83% of the time. Messing with the forces of fate pays off! Jacqueline Fine in Return to the Circle Undone (Hard) Assets 1 x Arbiter of Fates (Jacqueline Fine) 2 x Clairvoyance (Jacqueline Fine) 2 x Crystal Pendulum (Jacqueline Fine) 2 x Arcane Initiate (Core Set) 2 x Mists of R'lyeh (The Forgotten Age) 2 x Arcane Research (Threads of Fate) 2 x Sixth Sense (The Wages of Sin) 2 x Sword Cane (The Innsmouth Conspiracy) Events 2 x Voice of Ra (Jacqueline Fine) 2 x Drawn to the Flame (Core Set) 2 x Ward of Protection (Core Set) 1 x Delve Too Deep (The Miskatonic Museum) 2 x Uncage the Soul (The Path to Carcosa) 2 x Storm of Spirits (The Unspeakable Oath) 1 x Read the Signs (The Search for Kadath) 2 x Spectral Razor (Dark Side of the Moon) Skills 2 x Prescient (Jacqueline Fine) 2 x Guts (Core Set) Treacheries 1 x Dark Future (Jacqueline Fine) 1 x Haunted (Revised Core Set) Sixth Sense x 2, Clairvoyance x 2, Read the Signs x 1 : This is our starting Investigate package. The base version of Sixth Sense doesn't provide enough efficiency by itself so I went with Clairvoyance for backup as it's a bit more flexible than Rite of Seeking. Read the Signs is useful for the Witch-Haunted Woods in the first scenario which have nasty effects, and I was running two copies for a long time before swapping one out for a second Mists of R'lyeh. Drawn to the Flame x 2 : This one is a staple in my Mystic decks (all three of them). Testless clue gathering with considerable but generally manageable risk attached. Strangely, due to the quirks of Sixth Sense (4) I actually found myself reaching for this far less often than in my Akachi game so I ended up replacing both of them before the end of the campaign. Spectral Razor x 2, Storm of Spirits x 2 : The killing half of our enemy management package. Storm of Spirits is particularly good in At Death's Doorstep, The Wages of Sin, and Union and Disillusion (funnily enough, the three scenarios where The Spectral Watcher shows up to boost the potential enemy count) and of course it's good for getting a free hit on Aloof enemies as long as someone is engaged with something at the same location. Note that if you fail when another investigator is engaged with your target you don't damage them. Mists of R'lyeh x 2, Sword Cane x 2 : The evade half of the enemy management package. I went heavier on evade here because of the new objective for The Witching Hour where you can only advance the act if there are three exhausted witches at the Witches' Circle. Voice of Ra x 2, Uncage the Soul x 2 : Our starting economy cards. Jacqueline obviously has an advantage for Voice of Ra and if her weakness is out she can get an incredible eleven resources from it! That never happened during the campaign, but I did hit only one resource a disturbing number of times. Generally, though, the results reflected the expected odds (mostly three or five resources). Arcane Initiate x 2 : Card draw, deck thinning, and soak. Later in the campaign our spell load will get a bit lighter, leading to more dead uses, but there's simply no replacing this card when Sixth Sense is such a crucial part of our gameplan. Crystal Pendulum x 2 : I was really skeptical about this card. Not about the lack of horror soak from forgoing the Holy Rosary (I was pretty confident it wouldn't be missed even while running Arcane Research x 2) but because I didn't think it would draw many cards. Then I tested it and in practice it was really solid, and while I didn't keep track of exactly how many cards I drew I'd guess it would have to be at least 4-5 per game if it came down early. I remember having a full hand quite often but using it anyway because I needed to dig for my combo pieces, so it actually became one of the deck's key enablers. It's quite simple to use, too. Just pick the most common negative modifier in the token bag for each scenario and if you pull one of those you win. But keep in mind that if your choice would have led to a successful test but you fail instead, you can still win because of the 'fail by' clause, so unfortunately it does sometimes become a mathematical endeavour after all. Such brain strain! Arcane Research x 2 : I'm no Mystic expert but I'm pretty sure most Mystics want two of these most of the time. It's worse in The Innsmouth Conspiracy because you can't upgrade cards between half the scenarios, and it's better if you do a side scenario because you get an extra use out of it, but for regular play it's just a huge amount of extra XP in a class that wants as much as it can get. And with nine starting sanity the two trauma is rarely a relevant downside. Not never, ho boy, not never. But rarely. Prescient x 2 : Apart from Crystal Pendulum this is the only 'Jacqueline' utility card I went with, and it was mostly used to recur Ward of Protection and Spectral Razor. Note that you don't actually have to succeed at the test to get the card back. And similarly to the Pendulum, you generally just want to name the most common of the available choices : symbol. Guts x 2 : I wouldn't normally bother doing a justification for this one but Promise of Power is a strong contender for this slot so I feel like I should mention why I didn't choose it. Firstly, I don't really like taking curse or bless token stuff when I'm not playing decks focused on those mechanics, and secondly and more importantly, I really wanted the card draw. Also, I didn't test it but I'm pretty sure non-standard tokens screw with what Jacqueline is trying to do, at least if you're not actually focusing on the bless/curse stuff. Delve Too Deep x 1 : I took this in my Preston/Akachi campaign because I had essentially solved The Witching Hour and it was easy to accommodate it, and even with this new objective that still holds true. And it turns out At Death's Doorstep is a lot easier when you don't care about saving the Lodge guys, so it was pretty easy to fit it in there, too. And then after a heap of runs up to The Wages of Sin I really wanted to push it further and take it in The Secret Name, partly because that scenario has a more variable XP profile than before, and partly because every single last bit of XP counts for getting through The Wages of Sin. So after a bunch of playthroughs I felt comfortable enough taking it in TSN (mostly because of how well Sixth Sense (4) makes short work of the VP locations) but there was no way in hell I'd ever take it into Wages. Haunted x 1 : This is the basic weakness I drew for this run and it's definitely closer to the nuisance end of the scale, with the hilarious game-killer Overzealous at the opposite end. My runs tend to go a bit better when I get these double action taxing ones, though some of them are definitely worse than others. Dark Future x 1 : Jacqueline's weakness is pretty mild. It shuts down her ability but with the base TCU bag it has a 47% chance of disappearing at the end of each turn. There were a few times it persisted for three turns but most of the time it was only one or two. And as I mentioned before there is a bit of a silver lining in that you can potentially get more money from Voice of Ra. Not very compelling, I know, but it's kind of cool! Arbiter of Fates x 1 : This is a tough one to evaluate. I was really torn on whether to mulligan it every time it showed up without a Sixth Sense alongside it. Yes, it's strong because her base ability is strong and it makes all of your tests better, but if you don't have a Sixth Sense you can't perform your primary function to begin with. And three resources is a lot for this deck even with all of its economy cards. If it showed up during the early turns of a game it would often sit in my hand for a while, but it was still always a welcome draw. And that's it for our first deck. I'm going to save the alternative card choices commentary for my retrospective after the campaign report. Which means it's now time to introduce our second investigator! Meet Roland Banks :  I know, I know, that's clearly Mark Harrigan in the picture, but it still bears a striking resemblance to Roland when we took on The Wages of Sin...  Roland Banks is the game's original Guardian and I hadn't played him since the core set was new, so this was going to be a good opportunity to see how his card pool had developed over the years and to see how he'd fare in a full length campaign. Admittedly, Return to the Circle Undone isn't a great fit for him and it's probably a bit worse than the base version, but that just adds to the deckbuilding challenge. And a challenge it was, as I revamped his deck completely more than once before finally settling on something which felt like it could go the distance. In every version I relied on passive stat boost allies for both horror soak and to bring up his Combat skill, the two areas where he's particularly lacking (a base four in Combat is good but not really good enough for a Hard token bag). The other thing I kept in all versions of the deck was something I'd already decided on before I even opened the card box; it's one of his best tricks and something only he and Zoey Samaras can do. Well, Carolyn Fern, too, but she doesn't count. It's this combo :  Since Stick to the Plan activates before you draw your opening hand and it searches your entire deck it will always trigger the Astounding Revelation, which means you begin every game on seven resources and with only 24 cards in your deck after you draw your opening hand. Those are some significant advantages, plus, you know, you also get the three curated plays under SttP. For these reasons, SttP is the first card we purchase between games. The first cards we purchase before the game are these two :  In the same way that Jacqueline doesn't care about two mental trauma Roland doesn't care about two physical trauma, and Charisma has an almost 100% pick rate in Guardian decks so we might as well get it out of the way before we start. The last thing to cover before we get to the rest of the deck is his replacement card set from The Dirge of Reason novella :  I chose not to take these over his base signature cards for two reasons : 1) Mysteries Remain has a unique and powerful effect, but the gun is simply better in this deck. 2) The Dirge of Reason is a huge liability, particularly with such a small deck size. You have no control over when it appears so if you're not ready for it (or even if you are) it can be a pretty big tempo hit. And if it gets shuffled back and comes out again the second tempo hit and lost draw can be devastating. In contrast, Cover Up does nothing when it hits the table and will never get shuffled back into your deck. It's not at all difficult to deal with if you're prepared, and you can always choose to simply not clear it. Yes, having Roland Banks take mental trauma can be a valid choice (though probably not more than once). And the very last thing I'll say before getting to the decklist, and again at risk of pre-empting some of my post-campaign commentary, is that this deck was really fun to play! Roland can pull off a lot of neat tricks and Handcuffs is fast becoming one of my favourite cards in the game. Roland Banks in Return to the Circle Undone (Hard) Assets 2 x Grete Wagner (Nathaniel Cho) 1 x Roland's .38 Special (Core Set) 2 x .45 Automatic (Core Set) 2 x Handcuffs (The Depths of Yoth) 2 x Enchanted Blade (The Secret Name) 2 x Tetsuo Mori (A Thousand Shapes of Horror) 1 x In the Thick of It (Edge of the Earth Investigator Expansion) 1 x Charisma (The Essex County Express) Events 2 x Shortcut (The Dunwich Legacy) 1 x Prepared for the Worst (Blood on the Altar) 2 x Logical Reasoning (A Phantom of Truth) 2 x On the Hunt (Black Stars Rise) 2 x Scene of the Crime (Threads of Fate) 2 x Crack the Case (The Secret Name) 1 x Astounding Revelation (The Dream-Eaters) Skills 2 x Vicious Blow (Core Set) 2 x Overpower (Core Set) 2 x Take the Initiative (The Boundary Beyond) 2 x Daring (The Search for Kadath) Treacheries 1 x Obsessive (Harvey Walters) 1 x Cover Up (Core Set) .45 Automatic x 2, Enchanted Blade x 2 : The .45 Auto is the very definition of an acceptable weapon. It's not bad, not great, and it gets the job done, but you'll want to upgrade out of it as soon as possible. The Enchanted Blade has more staying power and provides some nice utility for a few of the enemy types that prefer being killed by a relic, and it can also be used when it runs out of ammo (sorry, charges) unlike any of the guns. Roland's .38 Special x 1 : I think Roland's gun is actually a good weapon. That +3 Combat bonus feels like safety in the early stages of a campaign and it's big enough to still be relevant in the later stages. My mid-to-late campaign weapon strategy saw it fall out of use fairly quickly but I was always glad to have it in hand as a backup weapon and it did still get some facetime. You might think its clue requirement is a serious issue, but consider that with the other cards in this deck (Prepared for the Worst, On the Hunt, Shortcut) you have a lot of control over when and where you use it, and you'll generally only fire it four times per game. Having said that, it does gain value with more players in the game since not only are there more clues to gather there are also more enemies to shoot, both of which serve to shorten the window during which it would lose the bonus. Prepared for the Worst x 1 : With a small deck size (after the first scenario) and five weapons in the deck you'll pretty much always hit something with this, and that's all it really needs to do. Two copies felt like one too many for The Witching Hour, anyway, because we didn't always want to kill our target... Handcuffs x 2 : Instead, we arrested them! This is obviously sweet for clearing that first objective where we need to have three exhausted witches at the Circle but it has so many great uses throughout the rest of the campaign, right up until the last couple of scenarios. It also synergizes with Roland's kit such that after you handcuff an enemy you can engage them and then drag them to another location to interrogate them (Scene of the Crime) or execute them (Grete Wagner/Roland's ability). Scene of the Crime x 2, Grete Wagner x 2 : Speaking of which, these are our supplemental clue-gathering tools. Grete would typically grab a couple of clues and soak one point of horror, then sit around providing her passive Combat boost until either the second copy showed up or the situation was dire enough to warrant sacrificing her. She's expensive, but she becomes more affordable very quickly after the first scenario. Tetsuo Mori x 2 : Good soak and good utility for tutoring the Handcuffs but he's really just a placeholder until we can upgrade into Beat Cop (2). In the Thick of It x 1 : A great new card from the Edge of the Earth box which will be hard to resist putting into every one of my decks in future. An early Charisma is the best use for its XP. Crack the Case x 2 : I didn't mention Roland's ability in the intro but this card really highlights how uniquely powerful it is and how testless actions in particular can feel exciting to use because they almost feel like cheating. Crack the Case is well balanced because to get a big payoff on a high shroud location you need to invest heavily into passing an investigate test. But not if you're Roland! You can bypass the cost and go straight to the benefit, claiming a huge bounty by doing something you'd do anyway : kill an enemy. Of course, you don't always have to hold it until you hit the jackpot; sometimes claiming only two resources is the right move if it maintains your tempo, and as a bonus you can also share the resources with your partner, which is something I actually did quite often. On the Hunt x 2 : This one has Roland's name written all over it and it complements just about everything the deck is trying to do. My favourite use for it is to dig for a VP enemy to ensure you get the maximum amount of XP in the scenario, but it's also great for giving yourself a free pass in the Mythos phase, or at least as near to as you'd be likely to get otherwise. Shortcut x 2 : Fantastic utility for Roland. Apart from its standard action compression usage it allows him to relocate at the start of a turn to make use of Scene of the Crime, or to drag an engaged enemy from a clueless to a clueful location to make use of his ability and/or Grete's, or to simply ensure you get the bonus from his gun. Logical Reasoning x 2 : This is some tech for The Witching Hour, specifically for Frozen in Fear, which is something Roland struggles to deal with. It's also good for committing to or recovering from Rotting Remains, which again only shows up in the first scenario. Vicious Blow x 2, Overpower x 2, Daring x 2, Take the Initiative x 2 : A pretty standard set of skill boosters. Take the Initiative is there mostly to soften the impact from some of the Mythos phase tests rather than actually pass them, because Roland rarely passed any of them. Two of them in particular became recurring nightmares for both him and Jacqueline, but more on that in the campaign report. Obsessive x 1 : As far as weaknesses go this is honestly a pretty nasty one because it has a knack for grabbing the one card from your hand you really didn't want it to take, no matter your handsize. For that reason getting rid of it was often a high priority, which meant that Jacqueline basically lost a whole turn to it every other game. Cover Up x 1 : So... I just read the ArkhamDB entry for this card, and while I learned a long time ago that other players can interact with most treacheries in your play area, including weaknesses, it didn't occur to me during this campaign that that would apply to this one. That, uh, that would've made a pretty big difference every time it came up. As it was, Roland dealt with it himself in each scenario by generally observing two distinct modes of play : Before Cover Up, and After Cover Up. Before Cover Up you want to try to hold back on using Scene of the Crime, Grete Wagner and sometimes support cards like On the Hunt or Shortcut. And After Cover Up, well, you get the idea. And that's it for the decks! But that's not it for this post. It turns out the next one hit the character limit so I've moved the encounter card replacement set comparison forward a bit. Here they are, side by side with the originals :   I've already hinted at my choice of investigators being a bit lacking in the Agility department, and you can start to see why here. Supernatural Tempest wasn't too bad to deal with because it doesn't show up in many scenarios and both Jacqueline and Roland have quite a lot of expensive cards to pitch for it, but it definitely took the wind out of my sails more than once over the course of the campaign. Mists From Beyond is a nice freebie much like the one it replaced as I don't think any dedicated cluever cares about +1 Shroud, and Roland sure as poo poo doesn't.   Unstable Energies and Bloodthirsty Spirits are both great replacements because the player has some agency in managing them. If they have to keep printing sticky treacheries I much prefer the Bloodthirsty Spirits model to the Frozen in Fear one.   Vice and Villainy is a vastly better design than Evil Past because it encourages you to put some thought into your decision of where to place it, and while it was often possible to play around it effectively it was by no means an inconsequential threat. Unhallowed Land and Unavoidable Demise were huge pain points for Jacqueline and Roland throughout the entire campaign. Unhallowed Land is obviously bad for Roland's allies, but for both of them it meant the encounter deck would deplete at pretty much its maximum rate in every scenario it appeared, and Unavoidable Demise was kind of insidious in that if you can't pass it reliably you probably shouldn't bother trying at all. That's the approach I eventually took because while Jacqueline could keep up with the hits if they were spread out, the few times I built it up to 4HP it was deadly. And the other thing to consider is that if you pass them the encounter deck gets smaller, which has a bunch of flow-on effects that might end up being worse than a 2HP hit that doesn't cost you any actions to deal with. I think just about every scenario had one or both of their sets in it, too, so that was great.  This is the best Ancient Evils replacement yet. I pretty much took the chip damage every time because it was often a lot better than the worst case surge draw and not hugely worse than the best, and eating it meant that the effects that trigger off the encounter deck emptying were slightly delayed as well. And now it's time for the campaign! Kalko fucked around with this message at 06:37 on Dec 10, 2021 |
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Dec 6, 2021 14:03
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Return to the Circle Undone Part Two : The Campaign For each scenario I'll do a brief overview of what's new or changed, then I'll describe the strategy I came up with to tackle it. Some of the strategy points from my previous campaign report are still relevant, but with new objectives and a different pair of investigators there are more than a few significant differences. Prologue : Return to Disappearance at the Twilight Estate There is a new location here but otherwise the prologue scenario is identical to the original except that you're using the new encounter sets. The setup instructions don't actually tell you to do this, though, and unfortunately this won't be the last time we come across something that needs errata or clarification. I suppose there is one other change, and it's the following new rule which appears in every scenario that features The Spectral Watcher : "While resolving the Watcher's Grasp treachery, The Spectral Watcher does not exhaust after it attacks."  In my earlier report I noted that The Spectral Watcher does actually exhaust when you resolve that treachery, but, well, now it doesn't. This should make it a bit harder to deal with but in practice it didn't really have much of an impact over the course of the campaign. Strategy : I took Gavriella Mizrah and Penny White again and tried to replicate my previous strategy whereby I spent all of Gavriella's resources to save Penny, and it initially seemed like an impossible task. One notable change is that the new Fate of All Fools doesn't help you with the doom clock anymore, but as I got more familiar with the new cards I realized the encounter deck is overall a bit easier to deal with, though the replacement enemies are a bit harder. In the end I concluded that it was functionally impossible to ever save both of them (in the original I could save both around half the time) but it was still almost always possible to save one. The main change in strategy was to have one of them drag the 2-3 enemies you'd get as far away as they could during the final turn or two while the other retreated to the Billiards Room, the goal being to put enough locations between them so that their hunter moves wouldn't let them catch up to the survivor before the doom clock ticked over. I chose to save Gavriella this time because she would be a great fit for Roland's deck.  Scenario One : Return to The Witching Hour Along with the new objective there are a couple of new Witch-Haunted Woods locations, a couple of new Arkham Woods locations, and there's also a note saying you can use the Return to Night of the Zealot Woods locations as well if you want to, which I did.  If you weren't aware, the original scenario has a FAQ entry where you're required to put five Witch-Haunted Woods into play instead of four, as it turned out that in rare situations there wouldn't be enough clues to advance to the final act. I remember playing it that way a long time ago but for some reason I must've memory-holed it on my earlier campaign judging from how much XP I recorded at the end. Strategy : Collect six clues and advance the first two acts one after the other so we don't have to waste any actions getting clues from the Arkham Woods locations. Jacqueline usually took care of that task while Roland kind of sat around digging for the Handcuffs or waiting for enemies to appear to use them on. If I got a witch or two within the first few turns I'd usually kill them for clues because the deck would be guaranteed to cycle and return them to play, but if they showed up any later than turn four or so I'd cuff at least one of them and keep them around. The doom clock was very safe here on every attempt, and Jacqueline would cycle her deck with several turns to spare so she was always able to play the one Delve Too Deep she took. I'd always wait for it to appear before advancing the act to reveal the Witches' Circle, which I'd then let 1-2 regular witches move into, and on the following turn Jacqueline would move in and evade two of them then Roland would move in with his prisoner and we'd advance the act and win. In one of my test runs the Piper of Azathoth actually spawned (a very, very rare occurrence across both playthroughs) which was awkward to say the least. I briefly wondered if it would be possible to build a pair of decks that could deliberately spawn him and have enough firepower to take him down in order to extract the maximum amount of XP from the scenario. I'm not sure what would be harder : managing all the mill effects well enough to trigger each Daemonic Piping in a timely fashion, or actually taking him down with level zero decks and a Hard token bag. Something to consider for a future run. Resolution 3. 6VP (five locations, one Delve Too Deep) + 3XP from the resolution = 9XP. The witches' spell was cast. Erynn wants to meet. Mementos Discovered : Mesmerizing Flute, Strange Incantation. Upgrades Jacqueline : 10XP spent, 1XP left. Sixth Sense x 2 -> Sixth Sense (4) x 2 : This is an insanely powerful and efficient card for Jacqueline and this upgrade puts us ahead of the power curve until at least the sixth scenario. For the remainder of the game Roland now has a side job : open up all the places Jacqueline wants to visit in her astral form, or however else you imagine the mechanics translate into a narrative effect. Mists of R'lyeh x 1 -> Robes of Endless Night (2) x 1 : More economy and some actually-quite-valuable soak seeing as how Jacqueline is about as agile as her flat-footed partner. Roland : 9XP spent, 0XP left. Stick to the Plan x 1 : I covered this one in Roland's intro, but buying it this early is absolutely the right decision and it basically lays the groundwork for the rest of the deck from this point on. For the rest of the campaign two of its slots would be taken by Ever Vigilant and Prepared for the Worst, leaving one flex slot filled most often by On the Hunt. Logical Reasoning x 2 -> Ever Vigilant x 1, Extra Ammunition x 1 : Ever Vigilant has a permanent spot under SttP and it provides excellent action compression and economy. Extra Ammunition will be handy for all the shooting we'll end up doing in the next scenario, and it has a particularly good interaction with our big gun of choice later on. Daring x 1 -> Well Maintained x 1 : It didn't feel great to replace the Darings since Roland appreciates the boost, but they were kind of the only flex slots the deck really had, at least at this stage. Well Maintained isn't doing much for us now but after we get our two-handed weapon it will allow us to get another use out of it after we bump it off with a one-handed weapon (or if Vice and Villainy hits it). Scenario Two : Return to At Death's Doorstep There are a few new things here. The first is the addition of the Wine Cellar location, which has errata stating that it's connected to the Victorian Halls (and vice versa) at all times. We had no reason to visit it but it proved useful for juking The Spectral Watcher because this time around we weren't trying to save the Lodge guys; they were on their own.  And speaking of lodge guys, these two are the other new things :  The Senator begins the scenario in the Entry Hall and presumably he's there to provide an immediate target for Mysteries of the Lodge, along with some extra clues I guess, but for us all he provided was The Spectral Watcher's first meal of the day. Dmitri was a more problematic addition but only if he happened to spawn in the late game. There were quite a few times where he kept the Watcher busy for a few turns when the doom clock wasn't a concern, which worked out well. I think I even pulled him out once or twice with On the Hunt just to get him out of the way early, so it's not like we were short on ways to handle him. Strategy : Due to our choice to save Gavriella in the prologue there were six clues on the Entry Hall, which was better than the Balcony because we didn't have to waste actions on movement. It did have a higher shroud but that barely mattered to Jacqueline since she was now testing at base seven with Sixth Sense (4). Clairvoyance was more efficient here since there was no other location with clues on it, but either way it didn't take long to grab them all. And in those turns before we grabbed them there was literally no chance of encountering any enemies that we could fight, and also no point in getting more clues for the next act because the number we needed to advance to the final act was exactly the same amount provided by the VP locations. This meant that Roland often had a few free turns to dig into his deck or gain resources, and I went back and forth on starting with Extra Ammunition and On the Hunt in the SttP flex slot. Extra Ammunition was good because of the variance in the number of monster enemies you could get when the first act advanced, but in the end I went with On the Hunt to ensure I'd be able to pull the Nether Mist out of the encounter deck for its VP (by the time we want to use it, if it hasn't already appeared he almost always had the other copy of OtH in hand so between the two of them we pretty much always nailed him). After clearing the Entry Hall we move to the Master Bedroom to speed up the doom clock so that we don't risk putting any more monster enemies on standby. In the unlikely event that we had zero monsters waiting (it only happened once in all of my test runs) Jacqueline would go to the Office right away, but otherwise we want to be together to deal with them more efficiently. If we pulled any Lodge guys before the act advanced the first one would be placed in the Wine Cellar and the second in the Master Bedroom. Since they count as investigators when The Spectral Watcher hunts this allows you to pull him away from the Victorian Halls (after he eats the Senator) so you can travel freely between the Master Bedroom and the Office or the other side when we're ready to move to the Billiards Room to confront Josef Meiger. Roland would typically grab both clues on the Master Bedroom by killing the monsters and Jacqueline would move up to the Office while The Spectral Watcher was still in the Entry Hall, but if she got delayed for some reason we would defeat the Watcher rather than wait an extra turn for it to kill the Senator. Unstable Energies on the Bedroom was kind of annoying but not a huge deal because as soon as Jacqueline gets to the Office she can grab clues from it with Sixth Sense (4) anyway. And after clearing the Office Roland would visit the Billiards Room, grabbing its clues and gunning down Josef (often on the same turn) then we played Delve Too Deep while standing in the Entry Hall and got the hell out of there.  Resolution 1. 8VP (three locations, two enemies, and 1 x Delve Too Deep) -> 8XP. "Did you see Josef in there?" "Uh, yeah. The ghosts got him. Nothing we could do." "'ey, boss, we found 'im! Wait, these look like bullet holes!" The investigators are enemies of the lodge. We're on Gavriella's trail. Upgrades Jacqueline : 11XP spent, 0XP left. Sword Cane x 2 -> Sign Magick (3) x 2 : Our combo enabler. After activating and fully resolving the action on a spell asset we can activate Sign Magick (3) to immediately take an action on another spell asset. The assets don't have to have different names, and in fact the ideal situation is to have two copies of this and two of Sixth Sense (4) for a total of five investigates per turn. If we had a spell asset with a fight action we could even use it to do an investigate action without taking an Attack of Opportunity since Sign Magick (3) activates with a reaction trigger. Drawn to the Flame x 1 -> Robes of Endless Night (2) x 1 : As before, economy and soak. Mists of R'lyeh x 1 -> Blur (1) x 1 : The new spell assets from Edge of the Earth are all good but I think Blur is the best of them. They all have the same clause where you don't actually spend charges unless you succeed.  Ward of Protection (2) x 1 : Kind of a staple for multiplayer games. Now Jaqueline can save Roland from Unhallowed Land at least some of the time. Roland : 7XP spent, 1XP left. Tetsuo Mori x 2 -> Beat Cop (2) x 2 : Passive Combat boost and testless damage. Still one of the best Guardian allies. .45 Auto x 1 -> .45 Thompson x 1 : This is our big two-handed weapon for this campaign. It's expensive and it only does two damage per shot, but Roland starts every game on seven resources so he can always play it on the first turn (even if he has to find it with Prepared for the Worst) and TCU doesn't really have much in the way of bosses or high-HP/high-fight enemies except in the final scenario. As soon as you start firing this thing your resource pool begins building up again, and Roland has tools like On the Hunt (and its amazing upgrade) to speed that process along. With two Combat boosting allies this gun tests at 8, which is pretty respectable even for the Hard token bag. I've always wanted to take it but I could never find the right campaign/investigator match for it. Until now.  Scenario Three : Return to The Secret Name The Return version of this one adds several new Unknown Places locations to the pool so that you can now end up with significantly more VP, or significantly less, but on average you're looking at 3-5 if you clear everything. The new locations offer some help for dealing with Nahab but I didn't need to make use of them at all.  Strategy : I went through more or less the same steps as in my earlier run, except this time I could use Joe Mazurewicz's Room to pull out Roland's new gun :  Regarding SttP, On the Hunt wasn't particularly useful here so I swapped it for Extra Ammunition. We made sure we had enough clues to advance the act without touching the two in Walter Gilman's Room, because this meant they would swap to Keziah's Room and Roland would have a convenient way to clear Cover Up since the enemy spawning is so predictable. As before, Jacqueline would place the first three Unknown Places locations without moving to them because none of them could be the Witch House Ruins, then I had her place a couple more and start moving to them, keeping one in the deck in case we revealed The City of Elder Things. While this was going on, Roland would move to the earlier ones to identify them, and naturally he would always be the one to reveal the Court of the Great Old Ones. And Jacqueline would always end up revealing the Twilight Abyss.  Clearing all the VP locations was simply a matter of Jacqueline moving to one of them and grabbing two at a time with Sixth Sense since they were all two locations away from each other. Once we'd accomplished that we would advance the act to reveal the Site of the Sacrifice and then move in and put our stockpile of clues to work removing all of the doom from Nahab within two turns. I had to play Delve Too Deep on the turn we revealed Nahab otherwise Brown Jenkin would nuke it so I would try to defeat Nahab the turn we engaged her to prevent more doom building up, but if we had to tank her instead it wasn't a huge deal. On most of my runs we advanced to the final act while on the final agenda, so Nahab did get a fair bit of doom on her, but again it didn't really matter. We also didn't bother defeating Brown Jenkin at this point because we didn't need our hands when all of our actions would be spent removing doom.  I played this one a huge number of times while refining the decks for The Wages of Sin and one thing I noticed is that occasionally you can get really bogged down with the hex treacheries. They can be really taxing to remove so I eventually tried ignoring them whenever possible and just making do, but the problem with that is that if you get Unstable Energies on Keziah's Room there are so few hexes left in the deck that it can completely cycle more times than it otherwise would, which is sometimes good but usually not. Still, for the most part this scenario is very predictable and saving Ward of Protection for the right targets (usually Ghostly Presence but sometimes, as always, Unhallowed Land) smooths out the rough edges.  Resolution 2. 4VP (three locations and 1 x Delve Too Deep) + 2XP from the resolution -> 6XP. The Black Book was added to Jacqueline's deck (one Skull token is added to the token bag for the rest of the campaign). Mementos Discovered : Gilman's Journal, Keziah's Formulae. Upgrades Jacqueline : 7XP spent, 1XP left. Clairvoyance x 2 -> Word of Command x 2 : This is kind of like turning Clairvoyance into a third and fourth copy of Sixth Sense (4), and since Word of Command is itself a spell it can be tutored by Arcane Initiate. Delve Too Deep x 1 -> Blur (1) x 1 : DTD has served its purpose and now it's time for it to go. Ward of Protection (2) x 1 : Now both copies are upgraded. The Black Book x 1 : We took this because Jacqueline appreciates both the Willpower boost and the extra Skull token, and Skull tokens are the 'easy' symbol token so it shouldn't cause too many problems.  Roland : 6XP spent, 1XP left. .45 Auto x 1 -> .45 Thompson x 1 : Surely no explanation is needed. Daring x 1 -> Custom Ammunition x 1 : This is some tech for the next scenario. One neat interaction with the Thompson is that if you only have two resources when you initiate a fight action you will immediately gain a third from its ammo being spent and you can then play this card as a fast action to gain its benefit for that fight.  Scenario Four : Return to The Wages of Sin It's all been leading up to this. One of the hardest scenarios in the game didn't get any easier but instead got itself a new objective which requires you to banish three Heretics. This was a feat I'd only ever accomplished across both versions perhaps 1-2 times over dozens of attempts, so if there was a way to do it with any kind of consistency I was determined to find it. And in the end, I did. Strategy : So the basic problem here is that you just don't have enough actions to accomplish everything unless you luck out on Unfinished Business targets. And luck is not something you want to rely on in this game, so after doing a lot of test runs with the same basic opening strategy, and I mean really a lot of runs, my first breakthrough came when I simply said to myself, "Hey, instead of peeking at all of the Heretics before choosing which ones to kill every time, why don't I just have Roland go in blind, guns blazing?" So I put Custom Ammunition onto SttP and Roland could now two-shot a Heretic starting on turn two or three after Jacqueline grabbed enough clues to advance the act. This felt really promising, but the second and more important breakthrough (and the One Weird Trick I mentioned in the intro) came when I realized there was one particular location I could  Here's a typical opener from our new playbook, in point form :
Sometimes we lost a few actions to various things but as long as we stuck to the plan (heh) things went pretty smoothly. As with the original, it's always better to pull from the spectral deck than the non-spectral because you don't get any of the action-taxing hex treacheries, and in fact the only card you can draw which will cost you any actions to deal with is the Screeching Banshee (the other enemy spawns at one of the crypt locations and can be safely ignored until the agenda advances because it won't have hunter). In addition, none of the spectral encounter cards deal horror unless you happen to get one that triggers an Unfinished Business card which does, which was important for Roland's survivability since he'll be taking a few hits. And there are several good reasons for staying together on the Haunted Fields whenever we can afford to :
And if you happen to get Unstable Energies on the Fields and it would cause a problem you can flip it back to its non-spectral side before leaving. In general it's surprisingly easy to deal with Unfinished Business tasks before the agenda advances, but once The Spectral Watcher appears you need to really plan your moves well because you're now racing against the clock, and you likely also have two Malevolent Spirits about to start chasing you. That part wasn't much of a concern though since by this point Jacqueline always had a huge stockpile of clues built up to use with Spectral Web, because now when the act advances you place two clues per investigator on every location. Unfortunately, though, you can't use that spell on the Watcher itself. In our proper run we killed the Heretic from The Gallows first and it wanted to go to the Chapel Crypt, so Roland took it over there while Jacqueline stayed at the Fields (Sixth Sense could grab clues from it as soon as Roland flipped it). Roland killed the Crypt Heretic then banished the earlier one and headed over to the new Unfinished Business location, Hangman's Brook. Jacqueline finished clearing its clues and met him there in case he wasn't able to pull off the new "test any skill at 5" task, then Roland headed up to The Gallows to recover because we were one turn away from the Watcher spawning and he only had one point of sanity left. Staying two locations away from where the Watcher spawns meant Watcher's Grasp wouldn't finish him off, and no other encounter card could defeat him on the next turn. A couple of turns later Roland had two fresh allies to soak horror and he moved into the Heretic's Graves and killed its occupant, and it turned out its banishment location was... Heretic's Graves! We caught a break, but experience told me we had enough time and resources left to clear a location on the other side if we really had to. We actually had to deal with a lot of enemies this time around, but with Roland doing his best Mark Harrigan impersonation holding down the trigger and Jacqueline's hot hands slinging webs everywhere we had it handled pretty well.  And that is how we overcame one of the most difficult challenges in the game. From now on the rest of the campaign would be all downhill. (the rest of the campaign was not all downhill) Resolution 3. So it turns out you don't actually get any XP for banishing the three Heretics, which I really do think is unintentional, but hey I'll play it the way it's written this time. 2VP locations cleared -> 2XP. One Heretic was unleashed into Arkham. Erynn joined the investigators. Mementos Discovered : Bloody Tree Carvings. Upgrades Jacqueline : 5XP spent, 0XP left. Storm of Spirits (3) x 1 : I kind of had to do this one to avoid losing the Arcane Research bonus but it's a good upgrade that I'd make at some point anyway. Read the Signs x 1 -> Lucid Dreaming x 1 : We are a combo deck and this card provides one of the few ways to directly tutor for combo parts. As with Word of Command it's also a spell so it can be tutored by the Arcane Initiate.  Erynn MacAoidh x 1 : So, Erynn's ability isn't great but the Willpower boost and 2/2 soak for two resources makes her worth it. If I'm being perfectly honest, though, increasing the size of this particular deck is probably not worth the cost of adding her so I shouldn't have done it, but she was also a brand new part of the campaign so in the end did I really have a choice? Roland : 3XP spent, 1XP left. On the Hunt (3) x 1 : This is an excellent upgrade. You can now search the entire encounter deck and if it wiffs you don't have to draw a card at all, and of course you now also get a three resource bounty for killing your target. This card will be particularly useful in the next scenario.  Scenario Five : Return to The Greater Good This is still my favourite scenario and this time it was even better because I'd never experienced the Members Only version where you're an enemy of the Lodge. The layout and the design here really captures the feeling of sneaking into a place you're not supposed to be, and dispatching any passers-by without leaving an evidence trail is an amusing side objective. And coming off the back of the previous scenario it was nice to be able to unwind a bit with one that wasn't nearly as demanding. There are a few new things here, including a second Lounge location which leads to the new Hidden Passageway that links both sides of the board. The most notable change though is that the objective where you were forced to advance the act if investigators with all the keys were at the same location has been changed so that advancing is optional, and if you've already discovered all of the keys then any effects which would have put another one into play now grant you bonus VP.  Strategy : With the new On the Hunt (3) under SttP, Roland grabbed the Cell Keeper right away and Handcuffed him to remove the doom, then put a bullet in the back of his head and claimed his key. We cleared out the left hand side first and it turned out we were able to put the Hidden Passageway into play, but moving to it presented a bit of an issue because it was pretty much guaranteed to add doom. I had Jacqueline circle back around to start working on the Sanctum locations to find the one with the 2VP reward, meanwhile Roland stayed back to deal with a couple of enemies. On the turn before the agenda would have advanced I had him reveal the Passageway (triggering the extra doom) and he met up with Jacqueline and they cleared the Ceremony Room together, then we advanced the act to spawn Nathan Wick nearby and took him out.  By this stage we had all the keys and the encounter deck had cycled once, so we were able to grab the Cell Keeper again and claim bonus VP for his key, but unfortunately that was the only extra VP we had time for and we wanted to get the Puzzle Box resolution to be able to use it in the next scenario. Resolution 2. 6VP (four locations, one enemy, and one bonus key) -> 6XP. The Puzzle Box was added to Roland's deck. Upgrades Jacqueline : 8XP spent, 0XP left. Blur (4) x 1 : Now that we can spend more than one charge it's tempting to always take that option but it does mean you get fewer uses out of it overall. Still, that's pretty much how I played it every time. More actions now is usually better than more actions later, and we may not even need to evade anything else afterwards. After all, who knows what the future will hold? Hmm, Jacqueline, I guess. Storm of Spirits x 1 -> The Black Cat x 1 : It's time to break out the 5XP cards! They're so much fun, and this one is a good fit for Jacqueline because of course she has a higher chance of finding the Elder Thing token and also the Elder Sign token, and Jacqueline's Elder Sign ability is something you can't always make use of so having an alternative works pretty well. There are no Tablet tokens in the bag so it's not optimal, but that doesn't matter too much as she can always use that HP for soak.  Roland : 6XP spent, 1XP left. On the Hunt (3) x 1 : It's one of Roland's core cards. Handcuffs x 1 -> Dynamite Blast (3) x 1 : Sadly, Handcuffs has just about reached the limits of its usefulness. There are some humanoid enemies in the last two scenarios but we generally want to kill them outright now, and Dynamite Blast (3) is an excellent way to augment Roland's damage dealing potential, plus it works very well when enemies don't spawn on our location (something the final two scenarios have in common).  Scenario Six : Return to Illusion and Disillusion Like last time, our goal here is to unlight all of the braziers, thus making the Circle... Undone! This time around there are two new things : a new act card to match a set of conditions we weren't pursuing, and an annoying new treachery :  Strategy : There's some variance here with the Unvisited Isle locations because between us we're only good at two skills, but there's only one location which doesn't use either one of them and in the proper run... it turned up. We spent the early rounds collecting enough clues to be able to advance the act twice in a row so that if we got unlucky with the Penny Monster spawn we had some room to maneuver, and I made sure Jacqueline had a Blur down before we advanced. She did end up getting Penny, who, it turns out, deals damage when you evade her (geez) but Roland dispatched her pretty easily and we proceeded to scoop up the remaining clues before tackling any of the Circle actions. Delaying a few turns allowed us to grow our hand sizes a bit because we'd still need to commit cards to the tests we were good at, but for the one we were bad at (Agility + Intellect) I briefly agonized over spending most of Jacqueline's clues to drop it to zero, then I did exactly that because I wanted to dodge the auto-fail token with her ability and doing that often meant taking two other big negative modifiers. And I did draw the auto-fail! She ain't the only psychic around here. After we'd unlit all of the other braziers it was time to advance to the final act. I had a few turns to spare this time (unlike last time with the Ancient Evils debacle) and it was a fairly simple matter to defeat The Spectral Watcher at The Geist-Trap after Roland used the Puzzle Box to unlight its brazier.  Resolution 4. This resolution replaces the original R4 and if you meet certain requirements you can win the game right here by letting the Coven take over the world. It's a nice bit of symmetry that was missing in the original version which only offered that choice to Lodge supporters, but of course ending early wouldn't be any fun so we ran away instead. 6VP (five locations and one enemy) -> 6XP. Anette Mason is possessed by evil. Gavriella Mizrah was added to Roland's deck. Upgrades Jacqueline : 8XP spent, 0XP left. Drawn to the Flame x 1 -> Lucid Dreaming x 1 : The other copy. Blur (4) x 1 : As above. Charisma x 1 : We now have three different allies in the deck and while we generally want to sacrifice one of them, that task is very easy to accomplish without having to use the ally discard mechanic. Roland : 6XP spent, 1XP left. Handcuffs x 1 -> Enchant Weapon x 1 : We now have two upgrades that Well-Maintained can return to our hand, but more importantly Roland can now do One Good Attack per turn, which is all he really needs, though the final scenario did put that statement to the test. Charisma x 1 : We can now have two Beat Cops or Gavriella and one each of the others in play, which is a decent upgrade. Gavriella Mizrah x 1 : So, all the way back in the prologue when I decided to choose Gavriella over Penny, one of the reasons was because I looked ahead and saw that In the Clutches of Chaos would not have Unhallowed Land if the Lodge guys were our enemies, so Gavriella's one point of sanity wouldn't be a liability. But it turns out that being enemies of the Lodge doesn't necessarily mean you fight them in that scenario, and due to our story choices we ended up fighting the witches. Whoops.  Scenario Seven : Return to In the Clutches of Chaos Alright, I just have to begin this one by quoting myself from last time : quote:This scenario has a great theme with the portals opening all over the place and the central mechanic here for determining random locations is clever, but it sure does become tiresome after a while. If someone wrote an app for it this scenario would rise at least a dozen places on my all-time rankings of Arkham Horror scenarios. I've been using a chaos bag phone app for years called Arkham Chaos Bag and this time when I switched it to this scenario I noticed there was a new icon at the bottom of the screen.  Look at that! Incredible! This scenario just rose at least a dozen places on my all-time rankings. There are six new locations here, one each for those in between Hangman's Hill and the Silver Twilight Lodge. I need to make special mention of the new Southside because it is one hell of a show-stopper for my deck :  If it were any other location it wouldn't have mattered, but Southside is connected to five other locations so when you resolve an incursion there it dumps breaches everywhere and will quickly start causing chain reactions. In my two test runs I drew it both times and wasn't able to successfully perform its action even once, so my strategy for the proper run was, um, don't draw it during setup? And hey, it worked! This scenario is a good test of your deck's ability to perform a range of different tests, and my two were found kind of wanting in that regard. It wasn't a huge deal, though, because we got a few favourable ones, including the Southside which lets you discard three cards from the encounter deck and then resolve a Power treachery if one appears (which, annoyingly, Erynn can't cancel). I was pretty cavalier about performing that action because most of the Power treacheries have Willpower tests and Jacqueline rarely ever fails those, but then when we were getting ready to advance the act she discarded the third Daemonic Piping. Oh, right, that one's a Power treachery, too. Hmm.  We expended a lot of resources dealing with the Piper and Roland ended up with one remaining sanity. According to my notes I held Ward of Protection for the last four turns of the game because Unhallowed Land would have finished him off, but I ended up not having to use it. We were pretty lucky because late in the game we placed three clues on the Silver Twilight Lodge so there were a few left there when we spawned Mega Anette Mason. There was also one on French Hill, so there was a lot of distance between us and her and we could gather them all safely. This dropped her HP low enough for her to be finished off by dynamite and an angry copper.  Resolution 1. 7VP (one location, four enemies) -> 7XP. The investigators arrested Anette. By arresting her we avoid the option which adds a -5 token to the bag in the Twist of Fate interlude, but you now also remove one Skull token from the bag and erase one tally mark. There is a cool new addition to the option where you ask her for power, though. You get to add a Pact, Curse, Omen or Silver Twilight weakness to your deck in exchange for 4XP which you can only spend on Spell, Ritual, Sorcerer, or Witch cards. I would've taken this option but Jacqueline didn't meet the requirements. You can kind of cheese it by taking Dark Pact (since there's only one more scenario you won't have to suffer The Price of Failure). Upgrades I love the upgrade round before the final scenario of a campaign. You don't need to worry about the utility of your choices for future scenarios because there are none, so you can afford to take more situational cards to counter specific threats. That's not really what I did in this instance, but it's what I like to do. Jacqueline : 9XP spent, 0XP left. Prescient x 2 -> The Black Cat x 1, Brand of Cthugha (4) x 1 : Prescient was kind of the only flex slot the deck had left and during an earlier test game I went with Guts (2) instead because the additional card draw was useful. But my testing changed my mind about that and I wanted an extra cat for the soak and for its abilities. Also, I don't know a huge amount of Lovecraftian lore but I do know that Ulthar is one of the few powers that can stand against the Ancient Ones, and we were about to face what has got to be the biggest one of them all. I took the Brand because it was the best option to use up all of the Arcane Research XP (I bought the base version for 1XP and upgraded it right away) and some more firepower might come in handy, not to mention it's an additional spell asset to interact with Sign Magick (3).  Roland : 7XP spent, 1XP left. Crack the Case x 1 -> I've Had Worse (2) x 1 : I actually didn't realize I had one extra XP here or I probably would've gone with something that cost 3XP instead, but it occurred to me after playing with this that it would've been a pretty nice thing to have throughout the entire campaign because there are now a lot of treacheries that deal two points of damage and/or horror.  Enchanted Blade x 1 -> Agency Backup x 1 : Is this the smartest upgrade I could've taken? No, but it is sweetest! They're from the Agency! Roland is from the Agency! Who else is he gonna call? Seriously, though, Roland can afford it and it would give him some staying power if we had to fend off the Mindless Dancers for a turn or two. It's also more fast testless damage, which is a very valuable thing with all the high-priority 1HP cultist targets that could appear.  If I hadn't taken this I probably would've taken I've Had Worse (4) x 2 because it counters Whispered Bargain fairly well, and funnily enough the level zero Dodge has pretty good value here, too. If I had Tablet tokens in the bag (if you fail, Azathoth attacks you) that might've pushed me over the edge, but then if that were the case I simply wouldn't do any test below +3. Though when you're in a tight spot perhaps that's easier said than done.  Scenario Eight : Return to Before the Black Throne There are a few new things here, including a replacement act and a few new Cosmos cards, but the coolest addition is the Nightgaunt Steed :  You have to cross off two tally marks during setup to take it, and since that's exactly how many we had I of course chose to do it. The Cosmos/Empty Space mechanics in this scenario invite a lot of rules questions, so I'll do a few quick clarifications :
Strategy : This time I did a couple of test runs in an earlier game and I've gotta say, this one is actually pretty difficult. The Nightgaunts are very useful but I refrained from spending them right away to check the first potential objective location, preferring instead to save them for emergencies like when a Cultist with doom on it needed killing before the agenda advanced. The lead investigator really takes a beating here with all the Daemonic Piping surge draws but in general most of the encounter deck will cycle through and you'll see all of the cards, so any silver bullet upgrades you took are quite likely to pay off. The main piece of advice I would give here is that those Cultists are your #1 priority because they're the primary means for doom building up on Azathoth, and that's the thing you want to avoid at all cost. For this reason, during the first Mythos phase Roland ripped the Wizard of the Order out of the deck with On the Hunt (3) so that we wouldn't have to deal with that potential game-ender.  I always tried to draw two Cosmos cards at a time (never three) because one of the new ones is pretty bad, and I almost always ended up pulling a location I could use without having to pay an extra cost. The Mindless Dancers were best avoided if at all possible, but Roland could take them down if it was really necessary. In the proper run he had to take down two of them and then deal with the Piper (Agency Backup came in really handy for that job). We weren't nearly as lucky at finding the objective locations as on my previous run. This time the first one was our second pick (out of two), the second was also our second pick (out of three) and the last one was our fourth pick (out of four). That last dash to the final objective location was pretty hectic, with two Mindless Dancers and the respawned Piper chasing us (Blur was MVP here) and Roland was four locations behind Jacqueline when she made it to The Black Throne. I thought we had to be there together to advance it but it turns out it didn't matter, but I still had Roland catch up to her because he wasn't able to slow the monsters down any more so if we didn't win within the next two turns it wouldn't matter.  Unusually for us, we had 'accidentally' passed two Unavoidable Demises earlier in the scenario, so for those last few turns Jacqueline was one last Unavoidable Demise away from fulfilling that card's title, with no Ward of Protection in sight. In the end she was able to clear the clues pretty easily (I triple-checked the math anyway) and we won with no agenda in play and Azathoth on six doom. Resolution 6. Azathoth slumbers... for now. This was the new final resolution which required the new objective from The Wages of Sin. It doesn't give the most bonus XP but I think it's the best one for the investigators : only one mental and one physical trauma each! For reference, here are the final versions of the decks : Jacqueline Fine (58XP) Roland Banks (44XP) Kalko fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Dec 21, 2021 |
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Dec 6, 2021 14:04
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Return to The Circle Undone Part Three : Final Thoughts Jacqueline Fine At the beginning of this campaign Jacqueline chose to reject her fate because, after all, the future can be rewritten. The world didn't get consumed by some ineffable force from without, but it was kind of a near thing. Playing her with cards like Crystal Pendulum and Prescient, I was initially struck by how much more thought I had to give the token bag, even compared to other Mystics. But then most other Mystics don't take those cards, and when I was browsing ArkhamDB decks to help me evaluate some of the others that aren't often picked I made a shortlist of potential candidates for the few utility slots I had left. Here are a few, along with the reasons I rejected them :  Wither was easy to dismiss because this was a two-handed game and Jacqueline wouldn't need a lot of fighting support, plus it was an asset and I wanted to fill those extra slots with evade options instead. Also, I don't think Wither is very good anyway. Astral Travel is a card I did initially playtest (taking a single copy) but it proved to be too situational and expensive and would sit in my hand a lot. In a campaign with larger maps it could still be a good choice, though. Eldritch Inspiration would only really be giving me an extra clue from Sixth Sense, as cancelling any of the negative effects in this deck would not be worth the slot. Dark Prophecy is also basically only giving me an extra clue, with the added bonus of sometimes forcing an auto-fail (it also boosts her chances of discarding her weakness to 73%, which is honestly not a point in its favour) but is playing a card which essentially reads 'discover one clue' really not worth a slot? Probably not, but something I keep thinking about is how often I wished I had Arbiter of Fates in play when I needed to grab clues, because generally speaking you only get one 'guaranteed' double-clue action per turn. In the grand scheme of things it didn't really matter too much as Sixth Sense (4) is insanely efficient anyway and enabled a lot of plays in this campaign that other cluevers simply can't make, but it does bear thinking about. Premonition is the only other one on that list I wish I'd actually tried out. On paper I've always thought it seemed like a bad deal; ok, you get to know what the next token is, but that's good for only one test, right? But if you think about it as 'auto-succeed on the next test' it starts to get a lot better. Sure, you might have to invest some resources to make that happen, but unlike Dark Prophecy and Eldritch Inspiration it can help with any test, not just an investigate, and in Jacqueline's case it also allows you to 'save' her ability for a future action, increasing the overall action quality of that turn. There were also a few upgrades I considered :  Hypnotic Gaze (2) was really just a consideration for the final scenario to prevent doom being placed on Azathoth, though there's certainly no shortage of other targets for it. Recharge (2) or Recharge (4) are great in Jacqueline's hands, but for this run the only asset I really had with charges was Blur, and while gaining extra actions is pretty sweet I never felt like I needed more than what it came with to get through a scenario. Recall the Future, though, the more I think about it the more I realize I've probably been thinking about it wrong all this time. I kept thinking you would factor the +2 into your test result such that you would need to trigger it to succeed, but since it only exhausts if the number you pick comes up the way you really should be using it is to 'cover' a number greater than the one you're aiming at, so for example if you're +2 on a test you can name a token which gives -3 or -4 and now you'll succeed on any pull which shows -2 or that token, and with Jacqueline's ability to filter her pick this could actually be very strong. I also want to quickly mention a couple of token-related 5XP upgrades I looked at and wanted to take but couldn't justify :  Both of these are really sweet, but Seal of the Elder Sign just isn't doing much for Jacqueline (or Roland) unless she has the cat out, and there really isn't enough XP to go around for both. Seal of the Seventh Sign is a lot more interesting. Jacqueline has a higher than base chance of revealing the auto-fail with her ability and she can dodge the tokens that remove charges, but, and this is a big but, her most commonly-performed action is Sixth Sense (4), which wants those tokens to appear! But then you're still getting up to seven pulls of the Sixth Sense lever without the possibility of an auto-fail, not to mention its use in regular tests, and if we take this then Recharge (4) starts to look more promising as well. And as long as we're going down this road, Roland has some options for token manipulation to preserve the life of the Seal, too, namely Eat Lead (2) and Snipe, both of which work on his most commonly-performed action :  But now we're well on our way to janktown. The last comment I'll make about the deck is that it definitely had some shortcomings. Unlike with my Akachi deck, this one doesn't really qualify as a toolbox because there are fewer different spells and fewer spell assets. This meant that Word of Command and Lucid Dreaming would quite often sit in my hand with nothing to tutor, and neither of them have skill icons so they were next to useless. But it wasn't always the case that I had both copies of Sixth Sense (4) or Sign Magick (3) in play, or that I couldn't have possibly made use of a Spectral Razor in the near future, it was usually that up to a certain point, making do with what I did have in play was a better use of actions than further preparing for the future. I don't think it was wrong to include those cards because they were often critical, it's just that they have some very definite downsides. Which I guess means they're well balanced. And one final comment about Jacqueline's ability : since Mystic cards interact with symbol tokens you want to have a certain amount of them in the bag to be able to find or avoid them, but not too many or too few. For this campaign I was working with 4-5 non-auto fail tokens and it felt pretty good, but there's probably a sweet spot depending upon which cards you're running in your deck. Maybe I can find it with a sim one day. Roland Banks If Roland "War Crimes" Banks proved nothing else it's that you can't save the universe without executing a prisoner or six. This deck was fun to play not just for its narrative hijinks but also because it felt lean and efficient. It was quick to get going, and once the bullets started flying it could throw out a steady stream of bodies to soak the hits Roland didn't want to take. It took a while to get to that place, though, with several earlier versions going much heavier on the allies with things like Venturer and Calling in Favors. After laying all the cards out on the table during its construction, it struck me that this is a very 'blue' Roland deck. I wondered what a 'yellow' Roland deck might look like, and I concluded that it would probably look very bad for a Hard campaign. Seeker (2) is the best off-class pool and it does incredible things for Trish Scarborough (who also has a clue-related ability) but unlike her, Roland starts with an Intellect of three, and that's a hard disadvantage to build out of. Let's put aside for the moment the viability of leveraging value from his ability with a deck that only has a minor focus on fighting and say that we're going to devote most of the deck to supporting him taking investigate actions. I think in this case you'd still have to go down the ally path, only this time you're looking at passively boosting his Intellect.  Dr Milan Christopher is a great ally but without reliably passing investigate actions you aren't going to get much benefit from him. Alice Luxley is a card that always falls just short of being playable, but if any deck is going to take her it would probably be this one since she does have some synergy with Roland's ability. Whitton Greene is probably pretty bad because I don't think Roland wants to take much in the way of tomes or relics. There are a couple of relevant XP allies :  Grete Wagner (3) is still mostly looking for enemies to kill, and the new Michael Leigh is great but he requires you to actually perform those investigate actions. And even if Roland can do that he's only gaining one clue per action, which might be alright in solo play but definitely not for multiplayer. I guess you could take Fingerprint Kit and other Intellect-boosting items :  The new Icepick (1) might be more Roland's style, and On the Trail also has potential. Would it be possible to set up an engine with the Fingerprint Kit and Emergency Cache (3)?  While I was doing my trial runs I spent a lot of time scanning the Seeker (2) pool of cards for possible upgrades and one of the more interesting ones was Mind Over Matter (2), which could help him in the Mythos phase and then persist for a good combat boost, provided he was planning on doing a few fight actions in that turn. Forewarned is another one which I've played in different decks and found to be good, and if anyone can make use of Quick Study surely Roland can. Both of them synergize well with his ability such that you can avoid the opportunity cost of dropping a clue, and some of his cards gain value if there are clues at his location.  I might've made room for Forewarned in this run but the problem I kept running into is that the deck was so finely tuned there just weren't any slots to flex. This is the eternal dilemma of the deckbuilder in any card game, though. There are many good cards you could fit into your deck, but what do you take out? The last card I'll mention is something I came across in an earlier version when I was still running Calling in Favors. One thing I don't like about that card is that your hand can fill up with the allies you want to draw and there's no way to get them back into your deck, but actually, it turns out there is :  Of course, you run the risk of simply drawing them again, but the option is there. Return to the Circle Undone The Circle Undone is a very gamey campaign. There are a lot of moving parts and things to keep track of, with several treacheries that trigger when the encounter deck runs out of cards and a heap of persistent effects with all of the cards that stay in play in various zones, and I'm not sure all of it really serves the experience very well. Out of all the scenarios, I found myself having to pay closest attention to what was going on in The Secret Name; I think I made more mistakes in that one than in all of the others combined, and I'm not really sure why (I do remember being pretty tired at the time, maybe that was it). I don't think I'd call any of the changes from this Return box bad and I appreciate the shift away from so many Willpower tests and onto Agility, but I was hoping for more from the narrative. To be honest, the issues I had with the original in that regard were probably beyond the scope of this product to address, but overall I just wasn't particularly engaged with any of it. For me, the highlights were The Greater Good and also Before the Black Throne. I'd only ever played that final one a few times before but this time around I gave it a few test runs and became more familiar with it, and I don't know if it was just the relative novelty of it for me or whether it really is good, but I really appreciated how challenging it could be and especially how much freedom you have to pursue different strategies. I had fun with Return to The Circle Undone, but I am so, so ready for a brand new campaign. Bring on Edge of the Earth! Kalko fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Dec 7, 2021 |
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Dec 6, 2021 14:04
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Mind over matter can’t help you during the mythos phase. It starts with “play during your turn.” But we’ e had a lot of luck with it in Norman in edge of the earth though, which has dex treacheries that you test at the end of your turn.
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Dec 6, 2021 19:41
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Good catch! When I did a proofreading pass after posting I realized I left another XP on the table in The Greater Good with the new location that spawns a key. Feels bad.
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Dec 6, 2021 20:27
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Jaqueline and Banks are a great combo, I ran them through Carcosa.
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Dec 6, 2021 22:36
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I love your write-ups and if I may be so presumptuous to ask for one addition it would be to always note which card you removed from your decks when purchasing a new card. Also just a question, why do you do things like: quote:Daring x 1 -> Well Maintained x 1 : It didn't feel great to replace the Darings since Roland appreciates the boost, but they were kind of the only flex slots the deck really had, at least at this stage. Well Maintained isn't doing much for us now but after we get our two-handed weapon it will allow us to get another use out of it after we bump it off with a one-handed weapon (or if Vice and Villainy hits it). rather than just save the XP and making the purchase later when it is actually relevant? Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Dec 7, 2021 |
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Dec 7, 2021 13:57
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I forgot to list the swapped card for the first Robes upgrade (fixed now) or did you mean you'd like to see the swaps for the direct upgrades too, like Ward of Protection -> Ward of Protection (2)? I should be able to edit those in, though the character limit was kind of fiddly (it kept telling me I'd hit it when the count was at least 500 short). As for the Well-Maintained, I eventually started trying different XP configurations for Wages of Sin without playing through the earlier scenarios and then worked backwards to fit everything into place. You make a good point and I just didn't question the decision at the time. I should've purchased it after the second scenario.
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Dec 8, 2021 00:55
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Edge of the earth has some really intriguing scenarios. Entering part three, they seem to reward completely different things, but speed and doing a ton of damage are both vital. Not much of a spoiler, but the first scenario has a lot of ancient evils, so we ran Lily Diana and Ursula. loving annoying.
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Dec 9, 2021 05:33
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Yeah my box arrived yesterday and I had to resist the impulse to read every card while I sleeved it because I'm hopefully going to play it with a couple of friends at Xmas. I did read the new rules section of the campaign guide and the scenario design sounds really interesting with the whole checkpoint thing. The overall impression I got was that this new distribution model has allowed them to do some creative things with the actual design of it all and it seems pretty fresh. Can't wait.
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Dec 9, 2021 05:45
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Yeah, now is a great time to just start the game. A lot of the old campaigns feel like trash compared to this new stuff (ahem Circle Undone) and half of the old player cards are never going to be used.
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Dec 9, 2021 05:56
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New characters make old cards good again. Flesh ward is hard to run outside of Daniela but with her it’s amazing.
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Dec 9, 2021 05:58
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Golden Bee posted:Edge of the earth has some really intriguing scenarios. Entering part three, they seem to reward completely different things, but speed and doing a ton of damage are both vital. I lost a scenario to drawing Ancient Evils, reshuffling the encounter deck, and drawing another one. After cancelling two earlier in the game. Got me considering one of the Return To replacement encounter sets that are punishing but fun.
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Dec 9, 2021 07:06
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LifeLynx posted:I lost a scenario to drawing Ancient Evils, reshuffling the encounter deck, and drawing another one. After cancelling two earlier in the game. Got me considering one of the Return To replacement encounter sets that are punishing but fun. I'd back you 100%. Too random.
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Dec 9, 2021 07:18
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Ancient Evils denies an entire turn to everyone, in a really loving boring way. It's truly the lamest Encounter card in the entire game. 100% agree you should replace it with a Resurgent Evils in every play that calls for the former.
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Dec 9, 2021 07:37
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The other suggestion that goes round is treat Ancient Evils as Victory 0
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Dec 9, 2021 09:58
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I'm seriously wondering if Ward of Protection would still be an auto-include in every deck which is allowed to take it if a campaign had no Ancient Evils (or equivalent) in it at all. I'm leaning towards it being investigator dependent. Maybe even investigator + actual-treacheries-that-are-included-in-that-campaign dependent?
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Dec 9, 2021 10:16
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Anyone have ideas for fun Seeker/Survivor builds for Innsmouth? I’ll be going in blind, and I haven’t been paying attention to the new cards. I’d like to do a Calvin deck, is he strong enough now?
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Dec 9, 2021 20:06
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Prairie Bus posted:Anyone have ideas for fun Seeker/Survivor builds for Innsmouth? I’ll be going in blind, and I haven’t been paying attention to the new cards. I’d like to do a Calvin deck, is he strong enough now? With In the Thick of It from EotE maybe? He's not my style, but Survivors have lots of tricks even when their stats aren't great. Someone described them as "can do anything well, just once a turn" or something like that. I'm not sure how blind you want to be going in, but all the investigators from the pack are outstanding in their campaign. Trish and Amanda are incredibly powerful even with the taboo list. He's not from the box, but I picked Luke as my clue getter and I wasn't disappointed.
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Dec 9, 2021 20:38
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