The fourth set of "will replacement" assets, Armageddon, Eye of Chaos and Shroud of Shadows.

The other sets are:

Shrivelling, Rite of Seeking and Mists of R'lyeh.

Wither and Sixth Sense.

Azure Flame, Clairvoyance and Ineffable Truth.

The similarities between the spells above and this new "cursed" spell set should be plain to see. however, ironically, the "cursed" spells dont have penalties for finding tokens, they are in fact a little bit more expensive, but in-turn they're safer and have bonuses on there!

Well. Safer is perhaps a wrong way to describe it, because playing with is plenty risky in of itself.

In order not to overcomplicate these reviews, I'm assuming you already know how good it is for characters to replace their into tests, pretty much every deck packs in several of these cards, sometimes doubling up for the sake of consistency (a clue focused taking both Rite of Seeking and Clairvoyance for example). This is the way to go for most mystics, with some rare and specific exceptions.

So why would you go for the cursed set?

The cards come hardwired with a higher cost, and a risk -> gains mechanic for tokens, so obviously you'll be plying the risky waters of in a bid for more power. Try to pack in some of the obvious combos to get running on that archetype, Favor of the Moon, generators wherever you can get them (a bit of a rarity in the card lineup, so look to your off-class cards or friends to do that with you).

The unique bit for Armageddon to deal 3 damage in a hit will definitely come in handy and save you charges in the long run. The starting point of 3 charges (compared to Shrivelling's 4, is why you really cannot play Armageddon outside of a curse build.

Dont forget, you need to actually beat the penalties so an even higher baseline of than usual, with Relic Hunter and multiple copies of Holy Rosary and/or Crystal Pendulum to launch your starting point into the stratosphere.

Lastly, remember to pack a bit more resources than usual, you dont want to be too impoverished to play or run your assets!

Is this way ot playing better than the older variants? I dont think so, especially on hard where penalties can be straight up untenable, but if you're able to consistently flex tokens and overcome the penalties you'll certainly be a bit more powerful, but those are big IF's.

So after finally doing a campaign with these in a team that was dedicated around bless/curse tokens, as well as seeing the new doom sidegrades like Ceremonial Sickle, I felt like it was worth evaluating this cycle of cards again as I think that merely saying "it's good with curses" doesn't really go far enough to describe. The Doom Charms are cards that also require some concessions in deckbuilding and playstyle, but even when you manage to really mitigate the downsides of putting doom in play, you end up with mediocre weapons that just don't really stack up vs the regular Spell assets like Shrivellingand Azure Flame. Their raw power just isn't very high to the point where even if you can manage the cost of having to figure out where all the doom is going to go, you still are left with cards that don't really pull their weight.

Armageddon (and Eye of Chaos) both have 3 big costs to them compared to the standard spell assets. Firstly, they're just less efficient than their base versions. Eye costs 1 more resource than Rite of Seeking, and Armageddon costs 1 more resource while also giving you one less charge than Shrivelling. Secondly, they require you to hit curse tokens to get any substantial benefits over the base versions. And lastly, the fact that you're hitting curses (and thus getting reductions in your skill value) has to be overcome in some way in order for you to still actually pass your test. Using these assets as an expensive way to hedge against unfortunate Curse pulls IMO just isn't really the best use of these cards, and if drawing curses are that big an issue for you and you're not going to invest in finding them consistently you should just have your party run less curses.

However, I think that of the 3 downsides, all of them can be reasonably mitigated with the right build. Firstly, the lowered base efficiency can be reasonably made up for if you consistently hit curses. If you hit a curse on even 2 tests I think you break even vs Shriveling as you can give yourself 5 total uses or potentially get a clutch extra damage that you can distribute among any enemies at your location, allowing you to either kill a 3 health enemy clean or deal 2 to one and finish off another. If you consistently hit curses, you can pull well ahead of the vanilla versions. Shriveling and Rite of Seeking will eventually run out of charges and force you to find and play another copy to get uses back, (or some other card that restocks the charges) but Armageddon and Eye of Chaos can easily last the whole scenario with no support outside of making sure you find curses, saving you resources in the end.

As for actually hitting curses, you have 2 fairly effective options. Favor of the Moon can give you a curse on demand, although only one a turn so it's somewhat limited but still extremely potent as it alone gives you 3 guaranteed hits. And secondly there's Olive McBride. Digging 3 deep for tokens gives you a pretty good chance of finding at least one curse if the bag is stuffed with them.

For actually passing tests that you reveal a bunch of curses, there's a couple massive bonuses. Firstly, there's the Blasphemous Covenant and False Covenant which both mitigate the negatives of them. But the really big bonus is the newly buffed Ritual Candles. This card is absolutely nuts with Curses and Blesses as it gives you the boost for each one you resolve. Even one of them can go a long way in more or less mitigating the fear of drawing curses, but if you can get 2 in play it completely cancels out the curse penalty making them all upside as you remove them from the bag. Unfortunately, Mystic as a whole isn't the best at finding non-spells consistently so if you don't find your candles early it can be a struggle to pass tests especially if you don't have any other sources of Willpower boosts, but if you can find them it's extremely strong.

So the sort of TL:DR is that if you can support Armageddon and the other Curse spells, they're not just fairly decent. They're absolutely fantastic and greatly reward you for building around them. This is sort of a thing that you unfortunately kind of have to build your entire team towards supporting, but it is fairly effective and fun to play with, and since you'll be pulling curses with Favor of the Moon and Olive, the curses will be in large part mitigated by you so it's not even that bad for your teammates.

The Fight version of Eye of Chaos, it has the same set of considerations as that card. If you are in a Curse-heavy environment, this might work out well. On the other hand, it's essentially a Shrivelling, where you pay an extra resource for one fewer charge and a slightly janky reloading mechanic. You also get to skip the horror ping for an unfortunate token draw.

It's worth noting that you don't cancel the Curse token, so your best case scenario is attacking at -2 hoping for 3 damage, which will get tricky with even 4 fight enemies unless you have some serious boosting or are throwing icons at the test (which is another cost). Maybe there will be a Level-3 version with a +2 bonus?

On reflection, Dexter could go heavy in this card suite with False Covenant and erase the negatives on the Curses. That's not a bad synergy.

This one is a whiff. Contrast to Eye of Chaos, which is basically an upgraded version of Rite of Seeking, this spell fails in nearly every way to supplant the gold standard Shriveling.

Let's compare...

Eye of Chaos vs Rite of Seeking/Sixth Sense

-Similar resource cost. -Eye of Chaos is at default a "double success" like Rite of Seeking with 1 less charge and no downsides. -Unless you're playing TCU no downsides for failing a check (i.e. drawing six curse tokens on an investigate only benefits the spell, often hugely).

Armageddon vs Shriveling -Armageddon is more expensive. -Armageddon is at default a "single success" with a weapon, dealing 2 damage base. Shriveling however, deals 3. -Shriveling has a larger modifier for attack (+3 vs +2). -Unlike Investigation actions, many fight checks do have penalties for failing (i.e. Retaliate). So even pulling one curse token is going to start making you nervous with even the most hearty spell casters. You'll need to pull at least 2 for the effect to even matter on game state, default putting you at -4 starting out. -Steals curses from Eye of Chaos.

Overall, I find this spell is severely underpowered. Its almost useless on bosses because most of them have retaliate and if you power up the spell at all you're basically guaranteeing you'll get crunched, which mystics have minimal ability to survive. You could pair it with some evasion tool (i.e. sword cane) but then you're using two actions to attack, and of you don't pull at least four curse tokens you're still behind what you would have been with shrivelling.

As such, I tend to skip this spell and just run Shriveling with Eye of Chaos for curse based builds.