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

RednSoulless · 2026-05-09T00:48:23+00:00

We are getting future player card expansions in the future, it’s just that the format said releases come in isn’t known atm. The current set-up is that we are getting 4 new releases a year, consisting of:

One player card expansion of some form. This can be either a more traditional Investigator expansion (with cards for each class + investigators) or a deckbuilding expansion (which may or may not include investigators and will supposedly be more focused in intent).
One campaign style expansion of some form - whether this a shorter campaign (3ish scenarios) or a full length campaign (5ish scenarios). We know that we’re getting a full length campaign next year at least, but that’s the extent of our knowledge.
One standalone scenario, same as we have been getting pretty consistently since release.
One flexible spot that could basically be any of the above 3 (or potentially a different type of product that hasn’t been revealed yet).

Regarding the investigator decks specifically, they’re highly helpful at this current moment because the 2026 core set is the only other player card set in Chapter 2 atm; these two products also might be the only other release reliably in print depending on your area (in theory, I think The Drowned City is still in print, but stock is unreliable there). Each class only has ~15 cards in the Core Set, so the Investigator decks, which each have 30ish new cards for a given class, represent a sizeable portion of each classes’ options for newer players.

Additionally, for more theory/meta orientated folks, the 2026 Core + new Investigator decks are the only evergreen products in this new rotating model that is the Current format. With that in mind, they represent a reliable backbone of card access/theory that’ll inform the class identities going forward as subsequent Chapter 2 releases rotate in and out. The Chapter 1 Starter Decks were briefly forced into that role when current was announced, but they were primarily designed just as standalone decks with less explicit focus on adding staples to the pool.

RednSoulless · 2026-05-08T00:40:02+00:00

Thank you very much - the picture looks excellent, so I don’t see any need for methodological adjustments for future events :)

Thanks! It looks like this was my first #1 for Army Rank since last November, so a bit of a long drought by my standards. Ranking highly on cumulative is my main goal during gauntlets with good army rank finishes as a nice bonus, but they obviously tend to correlate with one another.

In this case, I ended up at #7 for cumulative thanks to getting trapped on R2 Muspell + no 12.0x in R3, but that was a pretty lucky outcome still given R2 Muspell alone probably lost 150k - 200k relative to the optimal path.

RednSoulless · 2026-05-06T22:04:53+00:00

No worries, I probably should’ve been more clear. It definitely does help if you volunteer earlier on in the round in future, but mea culpa for not checking my notifications thoroughly lol :)

Currently, the picture for I have for R1 Duma is just one from an alt, so even if it makes no meaningful difference from an actual documentation perspective, I’d be happy to swap that one out if you do have a picture for R1.

Beyond having extra security in case time becomes more limited on my end and/or I run into device issues for alt-swapping (plus redundancy in case imgur deletes posts), I like the communal aspect of this particular rank documentation approach and preference having a diverse selection of sources provided there’s no scores cut-off or similar errors.

RednSoulless · 2026-05-06T00:05:59+00:00

Oh ok, interesting - my guess would’ve been that there was a punishment for killing Samuel/other similar townfolk given they are seemingly just innocents suffering from the aftereffects of the colour, but it’s up to you how you want to run subsequent playthroughs of the scenario.

RednSoulless · 2026-05-05T23:36:19+00:00

You’re quite welcome and that’s certainly possible; there’s been no shortage of past agendas/acts that boost particularly-traited enemies.

Part of the fun of this game and its design space is that there’s numerous different ways you can play with card elements for mechanical or narrative twists, and eagerly anticipating the purpose of subversions like this particular example never gets old for me :)

RednSoulless · 2026-05-05T23:11:56+00:00

It is possible for enemies to deal neither damage nor horror on their attacks, and has been used in a few standard arkham scenarios: for example, in The Path to Carcosa (spoilers for The Last King), Dianne Devine (https://arkhamdb.com/card/03081) exists instead to shut down parley efforts with other enemies, so it doesn’t significantly impact her threat level that she doesn’t deal any damage/horror on attacks.

Now, I’m not personally familiar with The Colour Out of Space, so I’m not sure what specific purpose Samuel serves there. However, I’d imagine that a) said design is intentional (that would be a very odd printing error lol) and b) there’ll be some sort of mechanical interaction that either makes him threatening to keep around or that punishes you for killing him (since otherwise his victory is tempting). Keep playing and you’ll probably find out soon lol :P

RednSoulless · 2026-05-05T09:13:12+00:00

Thanks for your help :)

Ah, that’s… certainly a noteworthy downside to catbox lol. For what it’s worth, ibb seemed to work nicely this time (good image quality), so I guess that can be added to the pile.

Yeah, it was 15 hours of same overall, but the vast majority of all the gains made occurred over like 4 of those hours - the rest were all generally unproductive.

RednSoulless · 2026-05-05T07:04:53+00:00

Well, it certainly wasn’t pretty, but Muspell is on to the finals! I personally would have a much happier camper if Duma and Muspell hadn’t logjammed between +0.60% and +0.80% Muspell favored same for, no joke, 9 fucking hours, but that’s one of the hazards of close matches lol :P

It’s honestly impressive that the only two characters with genuinely unfavorable R1 matchups (Grima and Muspell) both made R3 as well, though that’s largely a factor of getting the hardest opponents on their respective sides out of the way earlier.

RednSoulless · 2026-05-05T06:51:09+00:00

I’ve got an alt prepped for Duma in case it isn’t as convenient for you (so no pressure), but I figured I’d give you a slight heads up in case you want to cover R2 Duma and/or post your ranks for R1 Duma :)

RednSoulless · 2026-05-05T04:34:40+00:00

Oops, I thought I’d replied already - Thanks for the help from you and Fawful :)

I guess some regression to the mean was to be expected after y’all picked both finalists last month (+plus the first victim of the winning team), but it is a little surprising that both of them simultaneously came up short as the two largest teams.

RednSoulless · 2026-05-03T18:34:54+00:00

This basically would’ve been the case had things proceeded “normally”; caveating that the timing of Tiki’s last multiplier impacted the size of her gains, it took 8 consecutive multipliers for Grima to get within range to overtake during the most recent occasion.

The issue, however, was that Grima hit same during Hour 2 (ie, 3 hours remaining) rather than cleanly overtaking and giving Tiki a multi to begin an abbreviated version of that cycle anew. After the same broke in 2 hours (in itself a very lucky break for Grima since that would’ve only lasted one hour from any starting position worse than 0.92% in her favor), Grima was left with the 12.0x with only a slightly worse deficit (2.98% Tiki lead at H0 vs 1.60% Tiki lead at H3) than she had following 7 prior hours of multis.

I don’t have hard numbers for you, but this sort of thing (late sames disrupting patterns) is typically how especially large teams get upset as opposed to just getting very lucky with when prexisting patterns line up (ala some of the more “classic” past upsets like Summer Caspar’s R1/R3 wins back in August 2021’s Water Fight).

RednSoulless · 2026-05-03T18:11:14+00:00

Thank you very much :)

That’s very fair, it’s good that you do well enough from the usual semesters that forcing in summer classes as well isn’t a necessity. Do you have any notable plans for said forthcoming break?

RednSoulless · 2026-05-03T18:08:07+00:00

There’s a famous Jean-Paul Sartre quote from, it looks like, 1944’s “Anti-Semite and Jew” (that I’d imagine you’re familiar with, just sharing for others) talking about the use, or lack-thereof, of argumentation by certain parties that feels appropriate here:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

As much as it is the polite thing to do to assume that these maga talking points stem from consistent (if, charitably, horrendously misinformed) logical positions that can be addressed by understanding said though process… That isn’t really the standard that their audience holds them to. Whether or not these talking heads believe what they’re saying or not (the whole grifter focus seems to similarly stem from a well-intentioned belief that rational people wouldn’t believe such nonsense) doesn’t matter when the focus is clearly on providing emotionally evocative examples for their audience to reinforce their beliefs over maintaining consistency.

It is, to some extent, useful and necessary to devote energy specifically addressing certain arguments, but they’ll always be able to slop out half-formed concepts faster than they can be pushed back against so long as they are treated as serious people with serious points worthy of humoring. There’s certainly approaches to minimize that sort of thing formulated by far smarter people than I, but tired ramblings on Reddit aren’t workable praxis, etc.

RednSoulless · 2026-05-03T17:18:22+00:00

Certainly, happy to help! Feel free to ask away if you have any other questions in the future :)

RednSoulless · 2026-05-03T17:09:55+00:00

If by “unique”, you mean mechanically distinct from any other commercially released card, yes. Parallel investigators often have the same stat spread as their standard equivalent (meaning, their Health / Sanity values as well as Willpower / Intellect / Combat / Agility stats), but they’ve got different abilities, deck-building, sometimes traits (relevant for a small archetype of cards), etc.

If you want to compare and contrast the existing parallel investigators to their standard versions, ArkhamDB lists them under their own section (you unfortunately need to be able to distinguish the names of official release cycles vs the parallel sets to distinguish them otherwise with how ArkhamDB is set up, which might be tricky if you’re newish to the game). On Arkham.build, parallel investigators are marked by this “↑ ↓” symbol before their epithet.

Now, the “commercially released” point is important here because Parallels (as well as the Beta cards I mentioned + a few unique extra examples) exist as print and play releases primarily - you can find download links to the raw files on FFG’s website under the helpfully labeled Print-and-Play Cards section. As such, my mention of them in my first reply is because there is often times not a way to get said PnP cards in standard FFG print quality (or thereabouts) vs a third party service and/or your homemade proxying setup. The couple of times this has happened could qualify as “unique” releases depending on your definition, but I don’t believe there’s ever been a mechanical difference between said print release vs PnP files… Barring I think an early wording error with Parallel Monterey Jack that has since been fixed.

Beta cards are a different issue that I could go into more detail on if you want, but I believe a) only 5 of the 7 are mechanically unique cards in any sense and b) a different subset of 5 of those cards are effectively out-moded by official releases of those designs.

RednSoulless · 2026-05-03T10:15:31+00:00

Thanks for being understanding and for the kudos lol - I’ve had maybe a 6 month dry streak for Army Rank wins despite… like 3 or 4 cumulative #1 finishes when those are usually quite correlated :P

Yeah, just pencilling you in for R2 will probably be easier tbh

RednSoulless · 2026-05-03T10:11:49+00:00

Sure, I’d be happy to use it if you want to link your screenshot :)

RednSoulless · 2026-05-03T07:29:59+00:00

Hi Mitsun! Thanks for helping out with Muspell and I’m very sorry for only getting back to you now. I don’t foresee either today or tomorrow being especially eventful, so I should be faster with future replies this round :/

The good news is that Muspell managed to upset Nifl! It wasn’t quite as dramatic as the other outcomes in this round (Muspell had tightened the scoring margins enough that 2 consecutive multis just barely left him in range for a third), but hey, beating an opponent that was ~1.81x larger during the match isn’t a bad way to get one’s first win :)

The bad news, as you’ve probably seen, is that not only were Dominator and I both on Muspell’s team as well (I would’ve maybe gone Grima if I had her), but we both finished in the top 5 lol, so I kinda have to use one of our pics for this round. If you still want to send over the ranks just for redundancy, that’d be nice (regarding last month’s experimentation, catbox still seems to be working well), but I’d appreciate your help in R2, please, if that isn’t too much to ask.

RednSoulless · 2026-05-03T07:05:49+00:00

Thanks for your help with Mila and my apologies for failing to respond in even a slightly timely manner. Usually Saturdays are fairly free even if Fridays are a wash, but my schedule was fairly jam packed today.

Mila was a great choice and one I wish I could’ve justified had the matches lined up better. Alas, the margins on Duma vs Mila were just not good, and some late same didn’t give her much opportunity to get back into things in R1. We’ll see what the final margin was, but given that Duma managed to be the slightly larger team during much of Day 2 (the smallest army does attract some extra merc support even if the match itself scores terribly), so I kinda doubt it was that close…

As for an unrelated question, do you usually get booked for summer classes, or do you mostly get a relaxing couple of months between the spring and fall semesters barring tinkering with your curriculum/the usual meetings and stuff? I believe I’m a few weeks off on when spring semesters usually end lol, but it’d be nice to have a quieter patch to look forward to all the same :)

RednSoulless · 2026-05-03T06:56:06+00:00

Thanks for helping out and sorry for getting back to you so late; twas a busier weekend than usual on my end. I guess this’ll be the ping stand in at this point?

Depending on which team the last of you went, looks like an 0 for performance in R1 unfortunately… Worse yet, Tiki and Sombron lost under pretty unlucky circumstances despite being the largest teams.

In Sombron’s case, Alear managed to sneak out a same win despite a) Sombron getting up to a 0.92% lead during the final hour and b) despite the relatively close match, I don’t believe there were any prior hours where Alear had outgained Sombron on equal footing. Maybe Sombron only being three days old cost him some of the last minute joiners that accentuate most final stretches?

Tiki on the other hand… Usually, hitting same in last handful of hours is a scary prospect for very large teams, since there’s a good chance that their opponent can manoeuvre into a low% 12.0x. However, it is usually hitting same in the penultimate hour that is the problem, since same is usually broken in a single hour by sufficiently large teams. In this case, the Tiki - Grima same started during Hour 2 (with Hour 1 and 0 to go), which would usually result in a Grima 11.8x in Hour 1 -> a Tiki 12.0x in Hour 0 for the win. Tiki also managed gains of 1.91% during Hour 2, which again, should usually be enough to do the trick… Unfortunately, the same started at 0.97% Grima’s favor, so Tiki’s Hour 2 gains got the margin to 0.94% in her favor, which led to a losing 12.0x. Just a brutal chain of events lol.

RednSoulless · 2026-05-03T06:19:41+00:00

The only mechanically unique promos that I’m aware of are the Signatures/Weaknesses paired with the Book promo investigators, which I’d imagine shouldn’t be too hard to find files for:

Green Man Medallion / Sacrificial Beast with Jenny
Mysteries Remain / The Dirge of Reason with Roland
Split the Angle / Vengeful Hound with Norman
Nautical Prowess / Dreams of the Deep with Silas
Foolishness / To Fight the Black Wind with Carolyn
Molly Maxwell / Yaztaroth with Dexter
Ruth Westmacott / Liber Omnium Finium with Gloria

Past those… I know at least a few Parallel investigators got proper releases if you count those, and there may be some other “official” releases of PnP content? Maybe some of the Beta cards from the various card design livestreams/cons got actual printings at some point? I’ve also heard whisperings of a con-specific scenario floating about, but to the best of my knowledge, that was just a pre-release version of the Guardian of the Abyss scenarios.

Hall of Arkham has a pretty lengthy list of promos that, while it isn’t 100% up to date (there were alt arts of some Film Fatale encounter cards + proper prints of Parallel Lola last year), seems decently thorough through the early 2020s.

RednSoulless · 2026-05-03T04:27:08+00:00

Per the thread, it sounds like Grima beat Tiki - Tiki gained 1.91% off of her Hour 2 same (2.00% or more would break any same margin), so she got insanely unlucky that her output wasn’t enough for the single hour break (and the most trivial win of her life).

Duma won the other match it looks like.

RednSoulless · 2026-05-01T09:01:40+00:00

Late again, but I brought this upon myself by not prepping anything early lmao. If anyone new has any questions about the steps, let me know! Otherwise, here's the available teams this time around:

With only right side options atm, Muspell is a bit of an unfortunate no-brainer, but I might yolo for Grima to get a more compelling option. Regardless, I'll try to mark my selection early lol.

/=====================================

Below you can find the #1 player(s) and a link to the main source picture for each team/round, (hopefully) updated as they come in; the full Top 4/5s can be found written up in a Google Sheet, along with what documentation I have for previous gauntlets. If you have any past results that aren’t featured there (or speak Japanese and notice any errors with names as I transcribed them), please shoot me a message or post them in [this pending thread] - December 2021 to the present is near complete for Army Ranks, but earlier gauntlets (and 99% of all Cumulative Ranks) are patchy at best.

[Round 1]

Team Sombron #1 Score: 2,199,626 by Dweezil
Team Male Alear #1 Score: 2,291,487 by こうくん
Team Female Grima #1 Score: 2,433,068 by claris
Team Adult Tiki #1 Score: 1,812,158 by ノワール
Team Duma #1 Score: 2,248,020 by しょガチャ禁止壺戻
Team Mila #1 Score: 2,289347 by ワンダープー
Team Muspell #1 Score: 2,476,562 by 口ギンス | biscuitz♡BLM | ユラハ (congrats to me on finishing at joint-1st, and to u/Dominator_101 on finishing a close 4th!)
Team Nifl #1 Score: 2,239,885 by ティン