
So, can I choose 0 assets and combine with Shed a Light to ignore whatever shroud and discover 3 clues? (or maybe use other cards that can decrease difficulty to make it 0) I think Darrell Simmons will be happy to find this
So, can I choose 0 assets and combine with Shed a Light to ignore whatever shroud and discover 3 clues? (or maybe use other cards that can decrease difficulty to make it 0) I think Darrell Simmons will be happy to find this
Personally, I think that, regardless of its power level, Blade of Yoth is a very good card for Arkham because of the thematic point it makes, that the Mythos is not inherently evil. The point of Lovecraft's creations wasn't that they were hostile to humanity, it was that they were largely indifferent to them, and the cycle that gave us this card's name is one of the best examples of that: in the Forgotten Age, neither the Valusians nor the Yithians were, strictly speaking, evil, they were only trying to save their homes. Yig, the Father of Serpents, only fights you if you threaten his children, and in one resolution is willing to give you gifts for helping his children.
The Mythos is not a monolith of evil; it's a collection of non-human individuals, oftentimes possessing as much capacity for good and evil as the investigators. We can't sing Kumbaya with them, our needs are too diametrically opposed (again, the Forgotten Age shows it really well with Ichtaca's point about Earth belonging to humanity now, not the Valusians), but that doesn't mean that we're inveterate foes, utterly incapable of benevolent interaction. We're people, with all the messiness and conflict that brings with it.
So, this is a card that Alessandra may find useful, since she is the one who will spend Parley actions to feed this.
The thing is... this is underwhelming. Alessandra will always prefer to use her Parley actions in other powerful Parley cards as long as there are enemies in the map, and this is not hard to force in the vast majority of scenarios. You can even look for them with Kicking the Hornet's Nest or ask your Guardian to play On the Hunt.
Let's say you waste your precious Parley extra action and you add three charges. Then you activate the effect and play Blade of Yoth. You can attack 3 times for 6 damage, 2 times for 3 and 2 damage or 1 time for 4 damage. You have to basically wasted 3 extra Parley actions (probably along 3 rounds) that could have been used to win the scenario with cards like Vamp, Fake Credentials's , Grift, Power Word or Beguile's to feed this in order to get this numbers.
This is just so much trouble when you can simply play British Bull Dog and shoot 3 times for 6 damage ignoring Aloof or even not paying because of its . Do you need bigger numbers? Use Dirty Fighting since it also synergizes with Parley tests or the new Fox Mask.
Is this a boss killer? Not by any stretch, you will just perform worse during the whole scenario with Alessandra just for get this thing fed.
Marie Lambeau suffers from the same. Her extra for activating Spell assets' is way better spent in assets like Shrivelling, Rite of Seeking or any spell you want to play.
So, Alessandra and Marie Lambeau have way better options and ways to spend their extra actions, but, this card has another cool effect. When you load this thing using the Parley action, every investigator gets +1 to deal with the parleyed enemy during this round. I find this such a cool support tool for non other than Carson Sinclair. He can use this to ease hard Parley actions (There are some of this in The Forgotten Age if I remember correctly), or to buff any investigator while dealing with an enemy. He can get next to a big boss (or big enemy), use this card's three times and suddenly all investigators will consistently trigger cool effects with card like Switchblade, Mauser C96, Beretta M1918, .41 Derringer, Cheap Shot, Opportunist, Lucky Cigarette Case, etc. Kymani would love to get their numbers bigger by this in order to have an easier time discarding enemies. You can even join the fun if you've added enough charges and swing with a +6 bonus for 4 damage! Not live changing, but good enough for a exclusively support character, allowing Carson to have autonomy against enemies he draws from the Mythos deck as a consequence of perfoming good at his role
Sure, not all the campaigns have such dangerous enemies to get this rolling, but there are some other campaigns with a lot of bosses and beefy enemies (specially in bigger player counts) where other players will gladly take the bonuses and the help.
Is Eyes of Valusia the best option for Carson? I don't know, but it looks fun enough for me. Maybe this card needs to get mutated to be playable. Realisticaly, no Guardian (or Marie Lambeau) will pay 4 exp when you can get Brand of Cthugha for the same slots and bigger damage for less actions and ghost killing if they are a thing in the campaign you are playing. Maybe there is something I'm not seeing. I don't know.
Surely this will get taboo'd pretty quickly. It is not hard to use cards like Breach the Door or Skeleton Key to reduce a location's shroud to zero. Add in Seeker movement tricks to allow investigators to end their turn there and on small maps it means no mythos phase, ever, for anyone.
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.