Feast of Hemlock Vail launches with one of the most restricted and the least restricted investigators in the game’s history. Kate Winthrop gains, outside her class, access to first aid(0 and 3), emergency aid, and survival technique from her science keyword. If it wasn’t for her access to insight(0-1) she’d be Mono-Yellow.

But this isn’t a Kate review. I say all this because Narukami gains access to more than 110 Blessed/Cursed cards, with a spread across all five classes. And his ability means you can’t ignore the good tokens and let them be a passive benefit (The way Sister Mary could theoretically.)

All previous bless/curse Investigators had an issue: making sure they got their tokens out to power their effects. Favors of the Sun and Moon only went so far to guarantee results, the same with Olive or Jaqueline’s ability to look at more tokens. Narukami’s sig ends that. Do you want to use Fey once a turn for the rest of the game? Sure. Need to trigger Beloved to pass an agility(6) check? It's on tap.

The perils of his deck building are more subtle. First, he only gets Mystic 0-3, so his high-level spells need to be blessed or cursed. Second, you’re not >forced< to make everything blursed. The temptation is to try and cram every single traited card in the deck, without a thought of economy or flow. There’s an opportunity cost to making the chaos bag even more chaotic. If you’re playing in a group, make sure everyone else is capable and eager to ride the tides of fortune.

-This is an excerpt from my 'All for One' series of decks. If you'd like to see similar descriptions for other investigators, just search them up under my username.-

Kohaku puts the chaos in chaos bag! He's an oddball mystic with rather high intellect, meaning he doesn't necessarily need to rely on spells to solve his problems, and can even be a pretty good cluever with a few boosts. At its best, his ability can potentially net you a bless token and an extra action every turn. While the bonus action takes some extra doing to maintain consistency, the effects are very potent and beg to be played around by loading the bag up with as many "blurse" tokens as possible - and you should have no problems doing so, since Kohaku has access to basically any card with either effect (particularly if you also own the Innsmouth campaign).

As one might expect, loading up the chaos bag comes with the consequence of making draws very swingy. An investigator like Kohaku should have strategies to mitigate this, but any friends at the table might find this less than desirable if their deck hasn't been tailored around bless and/or curse. He also has abysmal agility, and a few badly timed treacheries like Grasping Hands could shred through your limited health if you don't have an answer ready.

Some archetypes that work well for this template:

• The Folklorist - As should be clear by now, Kohaku wants to generate a lot of bless and curse tokens to get as many bonus actions as possible. What's not obvious is that you want your cards to generate more curses so you can use your ability exclusively on generating bless. This is because generating curses with cards is normally a trade that gives you other benefits, but using your ability to generate curses is purely negative. It's much more efficient to use it on a positive effect like bless when you can control for it. That said, priority is going to be putting tokens in the bag, which is very easy with curse. The secondary goal will be using cards that make the most of those extra tokens.

• "Lean Bag" Narukami - Maybe your other players let out an audible groan when you mention you'd like to play with curse tokens. Maybe you just want to play something more "traditional". You still want to take as many bonus actions as possible, but you want to keep the chaos bag light, especially when it comes to curses. Finding the right balance will take more finesse, but instead of cards that play off of drawing specific tokens, you can now focus on cards that make your extra actions more potent, such as with the following archetypes. It's also a great way to de-fang your weakness, Weeping Yurei.

• Spell Slinger - While Kohaku won't be able to access most high level spells, there are more than enough resources available to give him some potency. He'll need some willpower boosts, and spell tech cards like Arcane Initiate are important to make it all efficient. If you have Innsmouth you can really go all in on some of the curse-based spells found there.

• Cursed Cluever - Not many mystics start with 4 intellect, and there are actually a decent number of purple assets available to bump that number up even further. Conveniently, seekers have received some really solid curse support in Hemlock Vale, and this is very good news if you'd like Kohaku to do your snooping. All those cursed yellow cards provide Kohaku a very interesting niche as a primary cluever.

• Uniquely effective and/or staple level 0 cards for Kohaku: Rod of Carnamagos, Ritual Candles, Wicked Athame, Ofuda, Alyssa Graham, Scrimshaw Charm, St. Hubert's Key, Absolution, Antediluvian Hymn, Control Variable, Guided by Faith, Hypnotic Gaze, Accursed, Diabolical Luck, Purified, Arcane Initiate, mystic permanents, basic mystic spell assets, Cat Mask, David Renfield, Flashlight, Olive McBride, Speak to the Dead, Drain Essence, Delve Too Deep, Emergency Cache, Ethereal Slip, Uncage the Soul, Voice of Ra, Ward of Protection, basic neutral skills, Ancestral Token

Quick question about the "whichever there are fewer of" of his capacity, does it count all the or tokens which are in play, like the ones sealed on Favor of the Moon or Favor of the Sun ? I have this doubt since the wording of The Key of Solomon is not exactly the same, saying "if there are more [...] in the chaos bag" which doesn't count the sealed ones. The same question applies to his Book of Living Myths.