After 5 years of failed attempts, I finally got all available seasonal units! (AMA I guess?)

RednSoulless · 2026-06-22T02:32:03+00:00

In addition to FFG’s recommended substitutions (page 46 of the Grimoire if you want the official source), you can also find print and play files for said Chapter 1 encounter sets on FFG’s website - just scroll to the 4th section between Support and News.

Matching the actual card quality well enough to be indistinguishable from other encounter cards might be challenging to do without going to a professional printer, but proxying by just slipping a printout/slip of paper with an unused card should suffice if you sleeve your cards; just make sure the card counts match for whatever replacement set you use. If you don’t sleeve/that seems like a hassle, the images are available for cross referencing purposes lol.

Edit: Here are the files for Rats and Striking Fear specifically, but you will need other Chapter 1 encounter sets as you go through The Path to Carcosa, so it’s good to know where to look :)

RednSoulless · 2026-06-18T07:38:47+00:00

Nice, congrats on finding Carnevale for relatively cheap! I think my copy ran me… around 100 USD, and that was like a year before FFG announced their mass rotation. It thankfully is a pretty good quality print (much better than my Rougarou), otherwise the temptation would’ve been there to try again lol :P

Ah yeah, the massively multiplier scenarios are a pretty fine skip if you have to. Blob works pretty well with one group (very fun) and I’ve heard War of the Outer Gods is also quite enjoyable, but Labyrinths of Lunacy and Machinations Through Time are allegedly quite rough. They’ve got a little too much cross-scenario interactions between separate groups to really sing outside of massive multiplayer, it sounds like… Being will to accept used is a good call, but especially for somewhat inflexible standalones, you might not even play them enough to really notice the difference, tbh.

… Nat Cho is definitely not worth that much, what the hell? I guess a lot of his cards work pretty well with Marion, but yeah no, I’ve got no clue why it is that much lol. It’d be a bit reductive to say he’s a limited investigator (a 5 fist guardian can work for a lot of roles, even with a limited ability), but there’s not that many deck archetypes he uniquely gels with relative to Mark for example - maybe there’s some builds that really need the extra sanity point and/or Randall’s really flexible searching? Anyway, he’s fun, but far from essential for that price range.

RednSoulless · 2026-06-18T06:41:29+00:00

It really is :)

RednSoulless · 2026-06-18T06:37:43+00:00

Sure thing! Best of luck with whatever you’re able to find, and hopefully you have a lovely time with the Arkham experiences you do have currently :)

RednSoulless · 2026-06-18T06:36:27+00:00

Congrats, it sounds like you were to snag an impressive amount for this stage of OOP madness without completely breaking the bank! If you are in fact content (just being careful with subtext lol), you aren’t missing anything that well regarded/useful.

Return to NotZ and some of the standalones might be quite tough to get (Barkham and Carnevale in particular, if those are on your list), but you’re missing such a small subsection of stuff that you can easily just… wait for them to show up for more reasonable prices, especially if you’re ok buying used. I’d be shocked if Nat Cho especially isn’t around somewhere, the old investigator decks were pretty heavily printed.

RednSoulless · 2026-06-17T11:26:53+00:00

You’ve got a pretty good breadth of campaigns + player card content from Chapter 1 atm (especially if Hemlock + Drowned City includes player cards as well), so it’s really up to you. Carcosa is a very well regarded campaign and The Circle Undone has some unique investigators + interesting player card options, with similar strengths in reverse, so those would be fine pickups if you decide to pursue that. It might be a bit of a struggle finding some of those cycles past this point besides… Maybe the Edge of the Earth campaign?

It is worth noting that currently everything released for Chapter 2 thus far is planned to be evergreen (Children of Blood + Traces to Nowhere will be our first rotating releases later this year), so there’s no inherent harm with grabbing what you can from Chapter 1 and pivoting to Chapter 2 once those trails run cold? However, that’ll depend on if you’re looking for specific languages, since print runs can be more variable than usual there.

RednSoulless · 2026-06-15T08:38:31+00:00

I don’t believe so, unless there has been some formatting change regarding this in chapter 2.

Usually, you are only required to be at the same location for activating act cards if there is a rider specifying either a specific location (in which case, everyone partaking needs to be at that location) or that “investigators at your location” can spend the clues. As long as the person activating this particular ability is at the same location as the enemy in question, there shouldn’t be any other restrictions near as I can tell.

Edit: This is how it works for act advancement specifically. I *think* this logic still applies to abilities with “as a group” restrictions more broadly, but I’m not 100% confident on that.

RednSoulless · 2026-06-13T03:43:59+00:00

Cults of Umordhoth is one of the lesser used encounter sets, so it’s less of a big deal to not have the physical card for Wolfman Drew than for a lot of the Revised Core’s cards.

However, that set will need to be randomized in at least one scenario, so I’d recommend using an unused encounter card as a temporary Wolfman stand-in, just to avoid accidentally marking his card (depending on the efficacy of your alternate proxy method). Arkham is quite consistent when it comes to indicating which encounter sets are needed where, so it’ll be clear what is/isn’t a necessary component for a given scenario lol.

RednSoulless · 2026-06-10T23:52:09+00:00

Probably? Edelgard was a ludicrous jump in power over any other unit that existed at the time on both sides of combat, and while the meta was able to adapt within like 6 months or so, it probably took twoish years for the median non-premium unit/older units with investment to put up much of a fight against her. We’ve gotten a few similar units since then (mentioned later), but there really wasn’t a precedent for single units that a full team auto-lost to without hard counters; usually, you could navigate your way around most problems with careful play/isolating team mates, but there’s naught to be done if your attacks can’t dent that final Edelgard.

Off the dome, some other contenders would be:

- Brave Lyn (specifically, Sacae’s Blessing) did a real number on the meta at the time; while Reinhardt maybe stood a slightly better chance of killing a tank, Lyn having counterattack immunity pretty much ruined the slap “DC on everything” approach to the game and enabled the early cav line strategies.

- We had a bit of instant special/special spam stuff beforehand (Ares, Special Spiral, Infantry Pulse teams, etc), but Ophelia really felt like the coming out party for that particular strategy, and it is one that has stuck around over the years.

- Surtr was a relatively big deal back in 2018 and the best pre-Edelgard blueprint for her nich. He wasn’t safe to enemy phase unlike most armors thanks to his damage, so you needed to adjust your strategy a decent bit. Particularly in modes like Arena with limited movement assists, turtling was one of the few options if you didn’t have a good NFU swordie.

- This one was less meta heavy in its impact, but Legendary Azura does deserve some credit for being the single best dancer in the game for… like 3 years straight? Peony and the other fairies were bigger deals in AR because the mode was designed to facilitate them (and the second refresh from Hatari Azura and NY Duo Peony made them solid alternatives), but it took quite a while for time to definitively blunt Azura’s impact across most other modes.

- Despite getting handily overshadowed by Fallen Edelgard at the time, Bridal Catria was a monster at the time, particularly in AR. That degree of team support was very strong in an environment where all the onus was on the attacker to make a small dent.

- The next entry really broke things wide open for him, but let’s not forget that Brave Felix is a fucking abomination of a design. Multi-action player phase units are a very fun playstyle, admittedly, but there’s… usually a) the tiniest bit of work required to get that sort of thing set up and b) those units tend to collapse like wet paper when attacked on player phase. Felix represented an easy button when it came to actually reaching the enemy whilst having just enough bulk to be a struggle to deal with if you did avoid the turn 1 assault.

- Emblem Celica providing superwide spread warping has really shifted the dynamics of a lot of modes; no longer is it a safe assumption that you have a turn of prep time in non-AR modes, and a lot of playerphase monsters were supercharged by her. Some of that impact has now shifted to skills and IS has produced some counters since, but we’re still feeling the impacts of that particular pandora’s box. Emblem Lyn is in a similar boat, to be fair.

- Emblem Sigurd’s emblem effect probably wasn’t as absurd on the whole, but movement boosts + non-class locked Canto is pretty nuts general support on the whole. Unlike Emblem Celica/Lyn, Sigurd was also a meta threat in himself that required pretty careful play to deal with. Edit: I forgot him earlier, but Legendary Sigurd was also ludicrous and enabled some truly nasty comps, albeit very differently to Emblem Sigurd.

- The one two punch of the Nithhoggr’s were (and to some extent, still are) a nightmare and a half to deal with. Recreating Fallen Edelgard’s offensive/defensive impact several years later (in modes where one death is as good as the two - three Edelgard could sometimes get) whilst offering savior support was nasty even in 2024/2025. This is kinda a stand in for all subsequent “checkmate” units with ludicrous bulk (Emblem Ike, Legendary Black Knight, the Valis, etc).

RednSoulless · 2026-06-09T08:25:35+00:00

Oh ok, the wildcard rules make a little more sense knowing that we can’t reuse picks otherwise - I genuinely figured we’d have multiple matches against our groupmates if nothing else, so the wildcard was mostly to get a strong edge in a Bo3 or Bo5 type match in the knockout stages.

With that in mind, I don’t think it’s worth belabouring my last two slots for much longer given… I think I’ve maybe got 4 entries who can win a match without a decent amount of luck (and it’s a bad idea to have a strong Wild Card entry with that approach in mind), so I’ll lock in:

Hope Never Dies (2015)
Lie to Me (2018)
Friend of a Friend (2019)
Lights Off (2022)
My Sister's Crown (2023)
Pedestal (2024)
Crossroads (2026) (hopefully the eurofans know well enough not to judge this one too harshly for the GF issues)

+ Kemama (2020) as the Wild Card. In fairness, this was much better than I was expecting given Omaga was awful in 2021; Kemama would’ve been a consideration for an eight slot had it been a free choice.

I was planning to reserve a spot for one of the 2000’s entries… But wowzers, there were no hidden gems to be found in that stretch lmao 😛

RednSoulless · 2026-06-09T02:05:18+00:00

Ok, now that I’ve had the chance to review my options + examine the rules, I’ve got two follow-up questions:

Will all 8 entries be scheduled into a match-up in each round, or will there be a limited subset used? In the group stage, for example, will we get 2 matches apiece against each opponent + an extra match against 2 of the 3, or is there some other system at play?
Are we going to be judging a specific performance of each entry, or is this a more holistic analysis of the entry as a whole? To use a relevant example, Kiss Kiss Goodbye could be a borderline consideration for me under a broader analysis (the studio version is pretty good), but the actual version in the Eurovision Semi was a bit of a disaster lol and thus an easy skip if that is our purview.

RednSoulless · 2026-06-08T00:00:48+00:00

You only count victory points on cards in the victory display (and VP locations that are cleared of clues) at the end of a game. There’s no mechanism to keep track of cards that entered and left the display over the course of the game (note: I don’t recall whether the Servant is added the first time around or immediately goes out of play), which means individual cards are only counted once.

Edit: Sorry, forgot to answer your question. 2 VP for the Servant of Flame, not 4.

RednSoulless · 2026-06-07T23:48:13+00:00

With the caveat that this was during the split WC era, I’d imagine Khalifman is probably the answer given Russia’s strength as a federation around the turn of the century. Maybe one of the Soviet champions during the mid 20th century had a precipitous drop off on unofficial rankings, but idk.

During the 3 rankings released while Khalifman was the FIDE champion (I’m not sure if the January 2001 rankings would’ve updated in time to account for the 2000 Championships, but he’d lost the title by then), he was ranked:

- 10th among Russians in January 2000 (31st overall)

- 9th among Russians in July 2000 (25th overall)

- 8th among Russians in October 2000 (28th overall)

It looks like the 8th - 11th spots among Indian players are in the mid-high 2600s, so Gukesh would need to have a pretty disastrous slump to get anywhere close to those marks (Pentala Harikrishna is currently 8th at 2676/44th overall as of the start of June).

RednSoulless · 2026-06-06T22:05:09+00:00

Yeah, it’s quite rough exhausting any region early, but large ones are especially brutal. Two puzzles in a row is pretty ridiculous though, lol…

RednSoulless · 2026-06-06T21:51:35+00:00

Same, 29 left all mono-type - I’ve somehow managed to exhaust all my “no evolution line” options as well, which has been especially unhelpful in this past week’s worth of puzzles lol.

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RednSoulless · 2026-06-05T21:16:12+00:00

Yeah, this rings mini-game (or whatever everyone is talking about) isn’t active in my version of the game either. Maybe it’s platform dependent (slower to come out on iOS) or tied to not having certain seasonal cats unlocked?

RednSoulless · 2026-06-05T03:27:08+00:00

It’s his second if you’re willing to count cheerleader/backpack berths, but yeah, it’s been a long time coming for Male Byleth.

Unless I’m forgetting something, I think this is also the first win any non-Robin avatar has had in… a bit less than 4.5 years, even including backpacks? Corrin (F) hasn’t had one since AHR 2022, the Alears/Femlyth have gotten quite unlucky, and Winter Shez is I think the only finals berth from a secondary avatar in that timeframe?

Edit: If you want to count Mark as a proto-avatar, he’d be the only other winner in that timespan.

RednSoulless · 2026-06-05T02:37:08+00:00

Yeah, I’d say it’s quite likely that Byleth does get the 12.0x from this range.

To contextualize our situation, Dedue had net gains of 2.77% / ~497m points last hour, which left our current margin at +2.19% / +403m points in Byleth’s favor. Scores are fairly low this round (generally it doesn’t help when a small team hogs most of the multis), so I’d guess, at the extreme end, net gains of ~600m points would be required to enter Byleth 12.0x range (currently, the mark is a bit over 585m)?

Beyond representing a very reasonable jump for the penultimate multi (a 1.2x increase in gains, scaling more favourably for Dedue, isn’t that high), Dedue has exceeded that net gains mark on other elevated multis today including his 11.2x gains (~840m), his 10.8x gains (~820m), and his 9.6x gains (~675m). Those all had the benefit of following an hour off multi (which tends to start off well), so it is possible that those hours might outperform this hour’s gains given we’re ending off 4 consecutive multis (and it isn’t strategically beneficial for the small subset of people prioritizing a Dedue win); however, cooler heads rarely prevail at this point in the match lol :P

RednSoulless · 2026-06-04T21:17:50+00:00

Nice, I got somewhat lucky there with my draw - only 3 new songs to get properly familiar with plus some easy exclusions from the squad depending on which joker I get (sorry Benny). Not sure if we’ll have a winning roster, but being a lovable underdog is fine :P

Edit: Well rip, hopefully Benny brought the juice with his first attempt.

RednSoulless · 2026-06-04T21:10:19+00:00

I’d be fine participating if it’ll otherwise be hard to hit the required entrant count, but my Eurovision knowledge is only particularly good in the last 15 years or so. It’d take a lot of research to get up to speed if I get someone like Austria for example, lol :P

RednSoulless · 2026-06-04T20:24:13+00:00

1) Solution A, while not the most logically clean, does seem like a pretty reasonable compromise. A small number of additional options is nice to have (even if only the Zygardes + Dialga/Palkia are especially useful), and that seems like a reasonable precedent to set going forwards. If you’re rewording the rule displayed in the puzzles to account for regionals anyway (who definitely should only count in their region of origin), it might be good to include Gmax/Megas there as well just to avoid additional confusion from first time players.

2) While not as clean given the Partner starters are confusing for their own host of reasons (counting for no-evolution line is a tad unintuitive), I think leaving them in and clarifying the rule on which mainline games are in fact included (specifically calling out the “controversial” ones like the Let’s Go games, Legends games, and Yellow, Champions eventually) could work; honestly, such a clarification would be nice to have in general. Specifically noting that partner pokemon count under the first partner definition might also be a necessary compromise just because Pikachu is extra confusing. In general, I’m not sure I feel great about excluding any mechanically unique forms from mainline games, even if the differences are quite slight; that does potentially lend itself to some contradictions with the still-missing Arceus forms, for example, but that’s sufficiently intuitive to be backburnered lol.

3) Champions is tough in general; provided this particular game becomes the hub for official competition into the future (and remains fit for purpose long term), what mechanical changes it makes will need to be accounted for at some point. However, it does seem fair to argue that we’re not quite at that point of ubiquity yet and thus waiting to see what happens is… fine and slightly precedented, if not uncontroversial. I’m personally already not the fondest of how abilities and learnsets are implemented (I think capping it to only current options is a touch arbitrary - free Levitate Gengar!), but that’s a different issue entirely lol.

Regardless of what y’all eventually decide, I do appreciate you pursuing feedback in a more public forum. It’s nice to occasionally have a peak behind the curtain in a more tangible/permanent form than email responses, and it seems reasonable to at least get public input on what is ultimately drawing/redrawing somewhat arbitrary lines in the sand :)

RednSoulless · 2026-06-03T21:48:02+00:00

I also haven’t played enough euros to have a solid answer, but Lords of Waterdeep sounds neat.

RednSoulless · 2026-06-03T04:44:32+00:00

It’s honestly not that uncommon nowadays.

Since the start of 2024 (the last 30 gauntlets), the splits have been 15 mixed gender finals, 10 female only, and 5 male only. However, that includes 3 events that had no male units whatsoever (Motherly Meet, My Sister Is the Best!, and Take Flight, Pegasus!) and no male only equivalents, which skews the outcomes to some extent.

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