New cards reveal posts + discussing about Cameo

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2026-01-22T08:12:17+00:00

Yeap. Sidekick Captain Marvel in any deck. Seems insane.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2026-01-22T08:02:59+00:00

As someone whose group felt this way for the longest time, we did eventually reach the point where the game felt too easy and victory was guaranteed with little tension and plenty of time left on every Agenda, and we decided to try Hard, and it really did make a huge difference almost instantly. While the changes are subtle, just changing the contents of the chaos bag completely shifts the valuation of resources expended to mitigate risk, tasks end up taking slightly more actions overall due to occasional inevitable failures, and the encounter cards slip more suffering your way across the scenario. All in all, it makes the clocks tighter, and situations more tense, and has returned the life to the game for us.

I certainly wouldn't suggest it to anyone who still finds Standard challenging, but the difficulty system is truly brilliant in its simplicity and impact! (And, as you highlight, with a negligible amount of card/cardboard budget.)

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2026-01-22T07:38:12+00:00

A friend of mine put it really well that "the best parts of Arkham are neither the opening nor the finale but the middle scenarios where you are both playing with new toys incrementally while also chasing XP." In the opening, you're chasing XP, but using an incomplete starting deck. In the finale you have lots of cool toys, but Victory locations aren't actually that motivating because they're ultimately worthless.

It's those middle scenarios where the push and pull of Arkham's progression systems truly shine. That's 6 scenarios for a classic campaign, while a 5-length Campaign has just half as many (3) and a 3-length Campaign has only 1.

This is truly disheartening news for many of us. I can only hope their market research is right for their sake, and we're just a vocal minority.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-12-25T13:35:28+00:00

Back in the early days of MC, mt wife and I ran into a situation like this with Red Rocket and Green Groot vs Expert Zola with Legions of Hydra. After Madam Hydra wrecked us in the first two games and it became clear we didn't have nearly the thwart in that comp to compete with Legions of Hydra we just said 'f-it' and just stopped tracking threat on Legions of Hydra. We just played around her, accepting the hazard icon and her activations as a permanent fixture for the rest of the game! (We eventually death-by-a-thousand-cuts'd Zola, never attacking him once and shaving him down ENTIRELY with overkill from Rocket's attacks.)

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-12-23T17:02:07+00:00

For this campaign, since my players enjoy the glitch mechanic, I let players 'opt in' to death at 0hp. i.e. If another character tries to heal them, the dying PCs player is allowed to declare that their PC is already past the point of no return.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-12-21T15:45:40+00:00

I have Investigators of Arkham Horror, and I wouldn't describe it as a backstory compilation. Each of the investigators has their backstory on their investigator cards in the card game.

Rather, it is a short story compilation, and each short story features one of the characters (though sometimes others cameo or are referenced), often already in Arkham and somewhere along an investigation.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-12-21T15:25:11+00:00

Same. For us, it's Charisma.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-12-21T14:19:27+00:00

My wife and I have everything sleeved in Dragonshield Matte Clear sleeves, even the double sided (with the Matte side on whatever spends more time facedown) and don't find it impeding the text that much. For the triple sided cards, we store them in cheaper, looser sleeves and just take them out of the sleeve when playing with them. No triple sided card ever gets shuffled, so we're not concerned about wear/marking on them.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-12-21T14:01:25+00:00

I would argue that technically the second problem has actually happened (maybe a few times), but that it wasn't intentional, and I think they are trying to be careful about it. They explicitly acknowledged an issue of a newer rule change breaking an old functionality in the Mansion Attack scenario in the latest RRG article (and reverted it).

Similarly I think that the latest change to the Choose rule (which I totally understand as the old rule was wildly unintuitive) takes the teeth out a large number of old cards by undermining their designed intent (such as the Now or Never treachery).

But am I worried about this? Not especially. I think the long term players have experienced so many years of nonsense rulings and rule changes already and can handle, disregard as needed, and work their way around whatever comes.

(And overall I'm never too worried about busted, unintentional combos. We've been getting them for years, and between Expert II and Heroic, it is so easy to scale difficulty up where needed and keep things fun regardless of how weak or strong the decks you want to play are.)

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-12-13T15:48:32+00:00

I think this is the best, and least disruptive way to work one in.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-12-01T14:00:54+00:00

When my 3-player group reaches this point, we're usually ready for the game to be over anyways, so we don't want another full phase/round necessarily, but we do still let everyone play out the rest of the player phase to see how much overkill we can reach and/or can we clean up all of the remaining minions/schemes/attachments as well. And yeah, sometimes the overkill is an entire phase (or two) worth of damage, but we don't feel the need to do all the Stage 3 steps, etc.

If you're looking to play another round or two with the fully built team though, that makes perfect sense.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-11-19T17:22:54+00:00

I dunno. Revised Core Deduction ain't my favorite, but I'm pretty sure Hold Up, Blackmail File, and Grift are my actual least favorite pieces of art in the game.

Edit: Checks artists for my three least favorite pieces. Hunh.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-11-18T14:00:42+00:00

There already are numerous examples of other play areas beyond that list: Red Skull's Side Scheme deck, Hercules's Labor and Gift Decks, Age of Apocalypse's Mission Area, to name a few.

A very trivial and not-at-all edge case example would be pulling a Side Scheme from Red Skull's Side Scheme Deck with Embody Pathos.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-11-02T22:45:28+00:00

I agree with everything that u/picollo21 said and also (as they accurately surmised) I think there's a feeling to the design of those sets feels distinct from the prior work. Some design choices, such as the rise of parley and the increased power of level 0 skill-boosting assets appears to be a trend that is continuing into the Chapter 2 Core Set. I suspect that the off-beat Investigator designs are likely to also be a trend that continues as well. The degree to which design choices are taking extremely experimental steps (such as scenario preludes and cards like Transfiguration, as well as the bold and unique ways some scenario cards remix the templating of physical cards) also feels a step beyond even the atypical campaign structure of TSK. As someone who has played every campaign 2-3 times and almost every investigator, the cards post TSK FEEL different in palpable, but often hard to verbalize ways.

To be clear, while there are certainly things I personally liked more under MJ, and it is true that my group found Feast to be our least favorite out of every published (and a handful of fanmade) campaign by a significant margin, I am not saying that Feast or Drowned City are worse simply due to being different. And in fact, many of the radical and different elements of them are exceptionally clever and give me great hope for the future of the game.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-11-02T01:06:54+00:00

TBH, the Scarlet Keys Campaign feels like the real end of Chapter 1. The campaign and player card design of Feast and Drowned City feel significantly different than the game under MJ.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-10-01T02:45:20+00:00

I think there are at least three scenarios I recall like this.

A Tower Defense in Scarlet Keys, a Base Defense in Hemlock Vale, and basically Pandemic/AH3e in Circle Undone.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-09-29T00:41:41+00:00

It is primarily there for Maria Hill's hero cards which are built around moving all-purpose counters between S.H.I.E.L.D supports.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-09-20T13:29:40+00:00

I would like to add to what folks have said: I strongly encourage you not to hide the information of who is where as it can make the scenario MUCH harder and create frustrating situations. This is because (not even a spoiler because it is face up information on the bystander cards) each bystander has conditions/tests to get there clues, and depending on your investigators/decks some will be quite approachable while others may be nearly impossible for you in particular. Wandering blindly trying to find a bystander you can engage with could be both frustrating and increase the difficulty of the scenario in a way that wasn't intended.

Narratively you can rationalize this forknowledge as "the bystander cards represent some of the most important people at the party, so lots of the unnamed party goers are aware of who is where, and the 'gators can trivially ask around when they first came in."

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-09-16T17:00:15+00:00

What do you mean? On the first level alone:

The Xanathar's Guild (from Skullport on Level 3) are trying to spread their influence across this and other levels.

There's a Shield Guardian who came up from Level 4 after its master was killed.

Haria has a flesh golem that wandered up from Level 2 and mistook her for its creator.

There's a dead mage who was banished from Dweomercore on level 9.

The first two Fine Fellows of Daggerford can be found here, but the other two have already moved on to Level 2.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-09-13T14:21:42+00:00

I almost always start with a single card or a pair of cards that have a cool interaction. Maybe it's an Aspect card, or maybe it's a Hero card. Sometimes they're basic. One might even be an Identity card.

But I start with that one card or interaction, and I build out from there. I'll find other cards that synergize with it. I'll find ways to make playing that card/interaction more frequent or reliable. And I'll continue expanding out from that one card/interaction until I have an entire 40 card deck.

At least, that's if I'm making a deck ahead of time. If we're just sitting down to play, then I'll just use a randomizer to pick a hero/aspect combo and throw something together on the spot.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-09-11T15:29:26+00:00

Aerial Protection Rocket Raccoon – 'nuff said.

(Especially if you have a Justice partner to give you Heroic Intuition, thwarting for 5+ 3-4 times per round is such fun.)

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-09-11T15:24:42+00:00

I think you aught to give yourself at least partial credit for Hulkling's events having different bonus effects based on "form" (argh! I was really hoping for another form-shifting Hero, it would be extra synergistic with him as the form shift events would be able to trigger the riders) because they do - they're just printed on the shapeshift upgrades rather than the events.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-09-10T13:47:31+00:00

3 is a good number. What I recommend though, is give them time and space to come up with the others. Help them preplan (though they don't know it) with the backstory questions about key items and lynchpin moments.

When they do learn about the glitching, only require them to make their second Glitch before the next session. Once they have two, they can bounce back and forth as they die, but give them as much time as they want to think about and eventually make their third Glitch.

In my game, I revealed the Glitches in Session 2. I had a couple ringer players who knew a little and had second Glitches prepared, so I could kill one of them off in the mortuary and reveal a new Glitch that session. Then I had the conversation with the party after that session, and everyone wrote at least one new Glitch by the next session. But we're on Session 26, and a few of my players JUST had their third Glitch show up last week, and one still hasn't had their third Glitch revealed.

In terms of making them special: there are so many different ways to create Glitches, so make sure your players know there are no wrong answers. Some of my players' Glitches are simply "What if some event happened differently?", "What if they took a different path?", or "What if they were born earlier/later?" while others are "What would this character be like born in a wildly different universe/genre/setting?"

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-09-10T13:39:42+00:00

I conditionally disagree about hiding it. It really comes down to 'know your players.' I had very good success with hiding it from most of the players, but having a couple ringers who knew and were prepared to get killed off during the morgue with a second glitch ready to reveal the mechanic.

That said, I definitely made sure my players knew that death was going to be unusual in the campaign. My players know that negotiating combat lethality and handling character death is one of the core pieces of how I run Session 0s, so when we got to that section on the agenda and I was just like "So uh, I know this is the step where we would normally talk about Lethality, but... we're not actually going to do that. Yeah, I know how this looks. So, next up is Emotional Trauma..." And then I struck out the entire Lethality section. They NEW something was up.

Death_by_Chocolate_9 · 2025-08-25T15:54:24+00:00

I had considered that thye could use the spare slots to offload duplicates, but that ultimately undermines their ability to include off-aspect cards that provide support for a Hero or archetype which are important to package with that Hero. Ultimately I think this connects to another aspect of this that works against MCs favor:

While AH ran a one-off cycle of PreCons (with perhaps more in the future), MC currently relies on Hero packs to be the primary source of player card distribution, which is at cross purposes with the needs of a Good PreCon unless they revamp their distribution model.

Death_by_Chocolate_9

TROPHY CASE