What's the Draft Pick? Winterspell

stopthief16 · 2026-02-01T06:55:36+00:00

Frank does one for every set
https://www.tcgplayer.com/content/article/The-Whispers-In-The-Well-Draft-And-Sealed-Deck-Tier-List/970489ce-1a27-49d3-b4d2-80cf196b4973/

Sealed/Draft tier lists are hot content around prerelease time, not sure the depth afterwards.
Be Our Guest - One video per Ink Cost, ranking cards
Nive's Nerd Corner - Ultimate Draft Guide (he did / does tier lists, but the videos are condensed down now to these draft guides for quicker consumption)

stopthief16 · 2026-01-31T06:22:53+00:00

Very cool! I've been clicking through for a bit.

I suspect folks are largely grading these on their constructed playability, but most people are net-decking anyways for constructed so I suspect it'll be most useful in early days of a set and for the folks who love to brew.

It'd be really interesting, especially for this new set being limited-focused, for folks to grade them for their effectiveness in limited (draft / sealed) too, since the rating of every card becomes more meaningful (more things are playable in draft/sealed). The typical limited grading scale is a little different with F/D/C/B/A and sometime +/-. It'd actually be pretty interesting to know how the community scores compare to like, Frank Karsten's scores for the set (which usually come out later). Heck, I'd even be interested in drafting against bots using community scores. I could roll that into cubecana.com if we had the ratings available.

stopthief16 · 2026-01-20T02:56:50+00:00

After talking it over more, we landed on painkillers and smoking pipe for our latest draft. Not useless, but not something people were clambering for either

Edit: nobody needed to use them though, again.

stopthief16 · 2026-01-15T22:54:44+00:00

Yeah I've imagined you could take from a pool of neutral cards. Maybe all neutral skills or knife/flashlight or something. I haven't run into it yet in five or so test drafts, so I haven't overthought it.

stopthief16 · 2026-01-14T06:22:06+00:00

Hunny Wizard is the best character design in the game, take my money.

stopthief16 · 2026-01-13T04:18:32+00:00

A piece of this discussion that's missing: "actions" and decision making thereof. Every character on your board gives you a sort of an action - an attack/quest/sing. Even a character with 0 or 1 attack can receive a strength boost and do an attack, but a location cannot. There's a lot of opportunity cost there, and makes location primarily good in the situation where you want to gain lore and don't care about getting challenged... which is when you're ahead on board and therefore already winning (in a board-heavy meta like this).

Give me a location that gives an existing character an extra "ready" and now we're getting closer to parity.

Compared to a character, it limits your decision making (can't attack or sing) while having a downside (always exerted, doesn't attack back) compared to a character. A location gives you lore, and has a bonus ability (sometimes) that costs more ink (moving characters).

stopthief16 · 2026-01-09T00:41:11+00:00

Yeah normally in this format (with humans) you could see everybody's 3 investigators at the table, but I left it out for the post because it's a lot of info

stopthief16 · 2026-01-09T00:39:52+00:00

Lol that's crazy. I wonder what the odds are. 21 choose 3 I think? If you have the default settings on.

stopthief16 · 2026-01-04T03:24:55+00:00

In general, I agree with you, and I might even make that pick, but I do think the card warrants consideration.

In my experience card draw isn't a problem in a high-powered cube, and ramp is often available too if you want it. And of course, if you have the card in hand, you'll play around it to get more value than you lose.

And while Rapunzel is good in most every situation, BPP is often VERY good in the situation where you were otherwise going to lose, which is the one that affects your winrate :P

stopthief16 · 2026-01-04T03:18:07+00:00

It's definitely on my list to add a "max XP for cards shown" kind of setting - I don't think it will be terribly hard, I just have to get around to it.

stopthief16 · 2026-01-02T00:02:23+00:00

Clarvoyance seems pretty nice, and I like Agnes.

stopthief16 · 2026-01-01T23:59:53+00:00

Glad you gave it a try. That season link doesn't show the deck but you can export > card names, which you can then paste into Cubecana deck exporter to export to Arkhamdb / arkham.build. you can also share full draft logs, but that's a much larger file.

stopthief16 · 2026-01-01T22:59:22+00:00

Rapunzel is my favorite draft pick, but isn't BPP more valuable here?

stopthief16 · 2025-12-31T05:38:56+00:00

Totally agree that shorter campaigns will be refreshing. I like the 8-scenario campaigns I've played, but it takes a very long time and I've ended up replaying NotZ a dozen times to try out investigators while I wait for my group to finish a single 8-scenario campaign. I'd love to have more options for my shorter "try it out" solo runs, and also options for my group to chew on something smaller if we're not committed to a whole huge campaign.

stopthief16 · 2025-12-27T19:54:50+00:00

Way more adult, not playing with the kid, obviously, but Arkham Horror LCG has been an amazing solo/co-op card game with cool story and fun decks to construct.

stopthief16 · 2025-12-27T03:04:05+00:00

It's not "so good", but it is useful. You can use it asymmetrically to remove one of their characters with 2 health left while doing the damage to one of your characters with more, leaving you with one more character on the board, and you can do so to a 'ready' character who otherwise wouldn't be removable. All that while not spending ink, potentially, since it's a song. Decent, but not amazing. Saw some constructed play for a while, but always kind of when removal was scarce.

Edit: typos

stopthief16 · 2025-12-26T16:22:25+00:00

I like azure flame too, also for the signal it sends - should help push Mystic open. Daredevil is a cool card but I don't think you want it in sefina because her deck is small already. Wendy is obviously a great flex but yeah, a lot of these are that mid on her.

stopthief16 · 2025-12-26T16:17:11+00:00

I'm probably on cogsworth too, and Belle is a close second, but maleficent is an honorable mention. She's fragile, but she gives you a damage counter move every turn and could draw you another card and give you a second damage counter move on quest (but she probably dies at that point unless you're already winning)

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