Card Reviews · ArkhamDB

Obscure

This seems like a niche card that’s better for solo players and lower difficulties. That is my review.

What’s left are rules questions, because I find this card ambiguous. Does “Immediately Fight or Evade that enemy” allow the investigator using this card to activate an asset such as Blur or play an event such as Spectral Razor? Or does it presume a basic action of the relevant type? If it allows assets and events, I assume it saves exactly one action cost? Like from the Sledgehammer? And if you’re Frozen in Fear or otherwise can’t afford additional action costs of your desired swing, you presumably couldn’t do it?

6/15/25

Eudaimonea · 6

Holy moly, you made me realized they use a different wording here, compared to e.g. Eon Chart. The design team never ceased to amaze me, ambiguous indeed. Although it is just because we are used to the words in lower case letters and non-bold ("fight", "evade") - I actually think the way it's written here is the better/clearer one IF they mean any card/ability/basic action with the bold action designator. But then again, what about additional costs? I wish the used the power of reminder text more often... — AlderSign · 423 6/15/25

It's a reaction, it had to use a different wording. The bold denominator indicates it is a basic fight or evade, you can't activate assets and stuff, if you could it'd say immediately take a fight or evade action, just check how Ursula Downs is worded for reference. — DakonBlackblade · 13 6/23/25

Doppelgänger is a reaction printed in the same set that does the same thing with a different wording. It says <reaction> “ After an enemy enters or leaves attached location, return Doppelgänger to your hand: Either perform an evasion attempt against that enemy, or immediately move to attached location.” If they just now decided just now decided that the bold “Evade” was their reaction shorthand for “perform a basic evasion attempt,” it’s weird they printed two assets with that identical reaction in the set and worded them so differently. — Eudaimonea · 6 7/1/25

In other words, Doppelgänger proves that this card didn’t have to use different wording due to its reaction status, and in fact if this card is supposed to do the same thing as Doppelgänger, those two would be expected to use the same wording. Doppelgänger could save several words and be uniform if it said “Either *Evade* that enemy or *Move* to its location.” I guess one way to interpret the different wording is that they decided on this new phrasing late in The Drowned City’s design and didn’t go back to standardize Doppelgänger. Another would be that different people designed the two cards and didn’t consult one another. A third could be that they failed to send Doppelgänger through the proofing process. But it seems to me that a pretty good explanation for them being worded so differently is that they are intended to function differently. So again, what is this card supposed to do? Whoever’s confident it is a basic fight or evade action, I’d like to know your reasoning on why the wording is so different from Doppelgänger. — Eudaimonea · 6 7/3/25

Obscure

One of the best arts in the game, sadly the card in very underwhelming, having your base stat be equal to the shroud of the place is not at all a good thing, it can help you if you are a 1-2 foot investigator or a 1-2 fist investigator but it is still not good, and you need to seal a good token to keep it "armed". There are many way better ways to deal with enemies in the rogue class even for gators with low foot or fist.

6/14/25

DakonBlackblade · 13

Preston? Charlie? — AlderSign · 423 6/14/25

Many ways to deal with enemies in better ways even with gators with low foot and fist, it says so in the review itself. For Charlie specifically, you are actually like a 6/6/6/6 investigator, you do not need this at all, I woudl never waste my XP and deck slot here. Also you can never relly on the card, low shroud locations exist in droves, getting Preston up from 1 foot to 2 foot will sure help a lot. — DakonBlackblade · 13 6/14/25

Yes, I read it, but I disagree. Raising the base skill is effectively the same as getting a modifier, so it does help those two I mentioned. What you omitted from your review as well is the fact that this card saves you actions, which is quite important IMO. — AlderSign · 423 6/14/25

Charlie doesn't need to raise his stats, Preston has much better things to do to raise his skills if you even want to do that cause he mostly can just pay for test less success anyway. This maybe has a fringe use in true solo since it saves you an action but even in that situation you have no real control when it triggers, you might just be in a 0-2 shroud location. — DakonBlackblade · 13 6/14/25

i don't follow most of your train of thoughts (guess we just have to disagree), but I also think this is a solo card because of the re-sealing condition. — AlderSign · 423 6/14/25

Inquisitive

Even if this card worked the way that the designers clearly wanted it to, it seems overly specific. There's only one archetype that cares about succeeding by specific numbers - Exact Number Seeker. Oversuccess Rogues might have this competing acting as three boosts, and they'll usually have Savant filling that role if they aren't already pumping the number in other ways. For everybody else, good old Unexpected Courage exists and works better for their cases.

So, this is only useful in a specific archetype (and lucky for that archetype, most of the time the deck building restriction is going to match). Is it going to get a lot of mileage? That's somewhat limited. Innate isn't a particularly useful keyword - it combos with True Survivor, which could be helpful for Darrell Simmons, but that's pretty much it. (Darrel and Alton O'Connell could make for an amusing duo, though.) It also only boosts a single use, meaning it's not going to go as far or be as flexible as tools like Artistic Inspiration, which can act as mini-Lucky! on demand, or Steady-Handed, which can incidentally heal horror as well. And out of the cards that care about exact numbers, the more impactful ones (Chemistry Set or Antikythera) already have successful results within a range of two numbers - which means you really don't need to tune that much. Sure, this could help enable Alton O'Connell or Dr. Charles West III - but spending XP just to enable them once seems like a stretch to me.

This isn't bad, but it's fairly low down the list of exact skill enablers - there are better options before then. And once you have those in play, I don't think you need this. Unless you're really eager to see Carson Sinclair use a Katana, this falls a step behind for its XP cost.

6/14/25

Ruduen · 1025

I can imagine Amanda enjoying this for multiple uses. — AlderSign · 423 6/14/25

Good Money

If you lose resources, do they also get removed off this card? It seems so easy to complete this each time, as you gain a resource each round during refresh. I just pulled my weakness Paranoia and lost all my resources.

6/14/25

Yadayada · 1

Its pretty easy to complete, but I suspect you might be misunderstanding it. If you trigger the reaction when you gain resources, you place the resource on good money, that resource is then not in your resource pool. It's not like the damage and horror ones, which have different wording. This card is more like embezzled treasure, put resources away in early scenarios but get access to them in later scenarios — NarkasisBroon · 13 6/14/25

So yeah it's effectively "give up 5 rounds of upkeep" which is easy to do, but still a meaningful sacrifice. — NarkasisBroon · 13 6/14/25

You're right. I missed that part. Thanks and that makes it a bit more demanding. (Not a fan of these tasks!) — Yadayada · 1 6/14/25

Wait, it's not "give up 5 rounds of upkeep", right? Doesn't this reaction ability keep triggering each time you gain 1 or more resources, even after you already have 5 resources on Good Money? In other words, throughout the entire scenario, the only way to gain ANY resources at all is from playing cards such as Emergency Cache (which then gives you 2 instead of 3 resources). Or have I been punishing myself way too badly with this card, and could I have stopped after 5 missed resources? — TheKeeper · 1 6/18/25

Reaction triggered abilities (with the curved arrow symbol) are always optional, so you can just stop triggering it when you have 5 resources on good money. You would only be forced to perform the ability if it was "Forced:" at the start — NarkasisBroon · 13 6/19/25

Mortar and Pestle

Like a lot of cards from this set, it feels very underpowered, and not even in a way that can inspire creativity to make it work. The main character I can think that would want to use this is Mystic Agatha (Seeker Agatha presumably would not be using enough spell events to justify this card and also has the seeker pool for more cracked income generation), and Mystic Agatha can easily get by the entire scenario with Voice of Ra cast twice (once normally, once in discard). Resources are most valuable early on in the scenario when you need to get setup and get some momentum. This card maybe promises to generate enough income as a completely wiffed Voice of Ra/get a resource basic action after three turns. Weird.

6/14/25

NastyParsley · 3

5 turns of finding clues to be almost as good as supply cache... this is garbage.there are some combos like raven quil — BakaWisdom · 5 6/20/25

unfortunate day of trying to newline and posting half a thought instead -_- — BakaWisdom · 5 6/20/25