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Truand

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Juan Martinez Pinilla
Aux Confins de la Terre – Extension Investigateurs #46.
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Reviews

"Highlander" decks in most games are interesting, because you are ending up with far more variance in exchange for some benefit.

This is an especially interesting highlander card because it is paying you off for rolling highlander... with consistency?

Lets take an opening hand mulligain, assuming a 33 vs 28 card deck with 2 weaknesses and 1 signature, where we ignore the weaknesses and are just trying to hit one, super specific card at all costs.

In a standard deck, if you 'hard mulligain' for the card, you have about a 54% chance of finding at least one copy.

In an Underworld Support deck, you only have a 35% chance of getting that copy.

This means this card isn't great for increasing your odds of getting your one specific card 'by default.' Deck thinning turns out to be fake, yet again...

OR IS IT?

Lets look for situations where it works better! Because this is not an unsalvageable situation

Firstly, there is the case where you have alternatives that are viable. Weapons are a great example. If your deck is normally running two copies of a weapon (As some of you psychos are!) and running Prepare For the Worst, and you happen to get the tutor rather than the weapon early, you have an 50% chance to find one copy in your 9 card search right away, and a 70% chance if you wait 3 turns (and draw 3 cards) before searching to see it in draws and searches, normally. But if you run both Prepare and Prepare with Health, and two DIFFERENT weapons, you have an 65% chance to find it right away, and an 80% chance to draw it 3 turns later.

Some pretty meaningful improvements, if not drawing your weapon in that scenario screws you, you will be salvaging 1 in 10 games that way, roughly. But you will notice the effect is more pronounced if you do it earlier. So as long as you can do this for most of the tools in your deck and bypass the highlander rule, you can get noticeably more consistent both draw to draw and for searches or other bulk draw scenarios.

Deck thinning is only fake if the cost is not worth the consistency, or if you are doing something dramatic and silly to get rid of the cards. In reality, deck thinning is VERY real (every card drawn is deck thinning after all), the question is 'does only running singletons of my cards noticeably make my deck worse more than it helps? It is going to be up to how dramatic the cost of running highlander really is in your classes. Mystic and Guardian Rogues have a lot of redundancy in their best tools, while a rogue hybrid (or anyone with access to level 0 rogue cards!) who have more specialized cards, like Survivors, may struggle to find alternatives for everything. It also limits more niche strategies: Sure guardians have a lot of weapons, but if you are going something more narrow like bless synergy it is harder to find replacements.

And, oh hey... wait a minute... isn't there a Rogue Mystic who doesn't mind having a diverse set of abilities because she can recursively play them as long as she can consistently get them into their opening hand, and who would love to more consistently nab one of her 3 copies of her signature?

Sefina goes from an effectively 38 card deck, down to a 36 card for the purposes of her opening hand. This means, despite her upshot of drawing 13 cards in her opener, her chance of seeing any specific cards she took two of is only 60%. But a lot of her staple tools have viable alternatives. Sure, everyone loves Shrivelling but would it really be such a nightmare to run armageddon in a non-curse deck if it let you ensure you open with a 'weapon' almost 20% more often? And that is just the really bad replacement! Sixth Sense and Rite of Seeking are downright fairly competitive with each other, and there are plenty of fantastic rogue and mystic event cards to populate your deck with to ensure you can cast your bag of tricks.

Sefina is probably most likely candidate for this card for that reason, though it isn't impossible for others to find value from it if they have enough fantastic options, and at the same time I am not holding my breath for this to be a "Sefina Standard" either.

The most 'valuable' aspect of this card though, is to do what Highlander as a format in MTG was originally intended to do: Force you to use more creative decks and explore more of your collection. While it is possible to really math out the benefits and say "Oh wow, a 14% higher chance to get the card I want in X situation" it is always going to be questionable if the increase in getting A tool for the job is better than always getting THE tool for the job.

The real value in this card, and why I suspect it will be popular no matter how good or bad it is, is that it is almost a voluntary taboo that forces you to really evaluate every funky 'offbrand X' in your collection, with juuuust enough reward behind it to make it a pleasant experience... and, maybe, just maybe, if you are a really clever deck builder, a card that can actually give you an advantage.

dezzmont · 199
Rogues have the biggest share of exceptional cards. Might be a reason to take this card, if you plan on going full into them. — Susumu · 330
Yeah. One thing I didn't mention is that for singleton cards its pure upside, ignoring the damage it does to your deck overall, which may be major or minor depending on what you are using. Assuming you are hard mulliganing for an exceptional card in your opening hand, your chance of getting that specific card jumps by 4%, which is not amazing. Your odds of seeing it in your mulligain or in the first 5 draws of the game go from 56% to 60% as well, or only 1 in 20 games, unlikely to make an impact on a specific card as well. Overall deck thinning gets 'better' the more hits you have because your increasing the proportion of the cards you could draw that are 'hits' more with each card drawn or removed, so you would need to be building around multiple exceptional or singleton cards to make it a meaningful moving of the needle, and need to not be running critical support cards that only have a single 'variant.' Many of rogue's exceptionals are either fairly generically strong or encourage your deck to have things rogues have lots of options on anyway, like events, so the main obstacle here is XP. If you want any of Double Double, Golden Pocketwatch, or Ace in the Hole to kinda force an extra turn into the game, your odds on opening with at least one go from 70% to 78% on a hard mulligain, which is way more noticeable, and the chance of getting TWO jumps from around 23% to 33%. — dezzmont · 199
I'm thinking this thing can be handy in decks that aren't highly dependent on any singular card straight away. 2 Luparas are nice! Is 1 Lupara and 1 Colt Vest Pocket(L2) significantly worse? Additionally, this card makes tutors a bit more effective... Backpack(L2), Calling In Favors, and Lucky Cigarette Case(L3) are more likely to hit valuable targets in a smaller deck. — HanoverFist · 660
I don't think Lupara and a Colt Vest work, not because the Colt Vest Pocket is a significant downgrade, or they don't fill similar niches, but they depend on specific support cards that are niche. Additionally, it doesn't make tutors more effective in most cases unless the card is already exceptional. Ex: Backpack, a 12 tutor, will hit a two of card 75% of the time in a 25 card deck (so post-mulligan, turn 4 if you never actively draw, a fairly reasonable point to tutor). In a 20 card deck (Which is where you would be in an Underworld Support deck!) you would only have a 60% chance to hit an important card! This is an important thing to understand about deck construction in general: Having more copies of something is almost always better than drawing more cards! — dezzmont · 199
Err, and having fewer cards in deck. All 3 help consistency in a vacuum, but the priority is Copies>Draw>Removing Cards in terms of consistently seeing cards. This is why most decks that really need something will try to figure out a way to effectively run 4 copies of it, and why even with good tutors in Guardian you don't run a singleton of your weapon even though doubling up the weapon is a huge XP cost and you often don't play both in one game.. — dezzmont · 199
Of course you're right, sorry, I didn't mean it helps tutors in the sense that it's superior to 2 copies of a given target- which is false the majority of the time. Rather, that it simply helps in a vacuum as you say- and in a few not-too-rare cases, it can actually be superior. I don't have the same skill with math to express the formula, but it more or less amounts to... the closer your tutor-depth is to the size of your remaining deck, the less difference it makes whether you took 1 or 2. e.g. Backpack(L2) with 17 cards remaining in your deck & 2 targets technically risks whiffing, tho not by much. With Underworld Support, the deck in this scenario would be 12 cards, and thus a guaranteed hit. It's tricky to express, but like I said, I feel like this would go great in decks where there's no single card that you need "immediately", but rather a lot of cards that you want to see "soonish", while possibly adding strength by eliminating drawing dupes of cards you don't want/can't have 2 of in play due to slot, unique, etc. (PS I've appreciated the mathematical breakdowns in your posts, keep'em coming!) — HanoverFist · 660
I wanted to add this as a review, but I'm not allowed, so I'll just add it here as a comment:I just finished a TFA campaign with [Winifred Habbamock](/card/60301) and had a total blast with Underworld support. With her special ability and [Lucky Cigarette Case](/card/60326) plus [Pickpocketing](/card/01046) she can cycle her deck really fast, and even faster with underworld support. And the good thing is, that I don't need to upgrade 2 cigarette cased, and 2 lockpicks and so on, so I had enough XP to also buy [The Gold Pocket Watch](/card/02305) AND [The Red Clock](/card/08053) and with a little bit of better upgrade planning I could have gotten [Ace in the Hole](/card/02266) too. And the punch of those exceptional 6+ XP cards is just so much higher with 5 cards less in the deck. In the later scenarios I cycled my deck 2-3 times, (that would have been 9 extra actions from Ace!!) With Lockpicks and [Anything You Can Do, Better](/card/60302) [Lockpicks](/card/03031) and and Lucky Cigarette you often look at 5-10 cards, wich is quite often the whole rest of your draw pile. With the [Backpack](/card/53011) holding your [Lupara](/card/03309), and 3-4 cards in or out of play your deck goes down to ~20 cards in your second time cycling. And the best thing is, it's so much more fun to spend XP to buy all the new shiny toys instead of spending XP to upgrade second copies of cards that you already upgraded before. It might not be the statically most solid or consistent approach, but it's really fun to try! — elfstone · 1

I'm a horrible numbers cruncher, I'm just here to say that I have been having a TON more fun with this card than I thought I would. I originally paired it with Short Supply in a Bob deck, but once I corrected that error it's been a blast. It adds a fun wrinkle to deck building and maybe offers a mathematical advantage? Who can say, that would depend on a number of factors. But it's certainly a tincture if you're having deck-building humdrums, and since you can take it from the start in many a investigator, it can really shake up an entire campaign (or two). There are also some particularly horrible includes for this card (Sefina comes to mind, considering it makes one of the worst weaknesses in the game even more difficult to deal with), and I do intend to give some of them a try.

Either way, I think you will find an unexpected smile on your face if you give this card a try, at least once you've managed to rack up the 40 experience points or so you need to make it worth it!

endoviking · 20
Sef digs it: helps her find Double Double. Kill weakness with Scroll of Secrets. — MrGoldbee · 1391

I was incredibly skeptical of this card.

To me it seems to say "draw more weaknesses and lose deck consistency" I am someone who is struggling to keep the other permanents out of my decks but this one I felt would never win my heart....until...

Bob Jenkins

Playing bob you realize just how many good cards for him are either limit 1, unique, exceptional or just don't stack, reducing your deck to 25(or 28) doesn't seem like a lot but then you look at one other card he can take, short supply, after your opening hand you have 23 cards left in your deck, ten go straight to your discard pile, what are the odds you get items (for scavenging), improvised events or Weaknesses in there (a weakness you see in your discard pile is one you don't have to fear).

you lose 1 rogue slot, but you gain the ability to double the value of the other 4, so that feels like a win.

your deck consistency goes way up (scavenging, resourceful, scrounge, Lucky Cigarette case all benefit from this set up)

so anyone like me who couldn't see the value in this try it in bob with short supply, and don't think of the one game you end up seeing your signature in the discard pile, think of every game where you got to add 10 more clever tools to win the game with and not compromise your deck consistency to add them.

Zerogrim · 284
Yeah but you can never build out of survivor tech. — MrGoldbee · 1391
Preston would have loved it if it wasn't illicit. Ah well. — suika · 9254
I can't think of a bob build that wouldn't want scavenging and thus resourceful and scrounge, its just so good in him. three cards out of 25 for infinitely reusable items seems difficult to beat. — Zerogrim · 284

For beginners wanted to try this card without mathing out probabilities, see if your deck's starting cards are :

  • Missing a few or even a single big, expensive piece, that would instantly make everything shines. (As opposed to missing multiple smaller pieces, that gradually adds up over multiple scenarios.)
  • Depending on seeing your 1x signature card, which there may not be many search tools to get it.

If so, this card can be thought as early campaign upgrade booster just like Down the Rabbit Hole. That key card maybe so expensive (exceptional or not), probably right after the first scenario you can only purchase that one, it may not be enough to feel like you have changed the fate of your deck. It is until the 2nd or 3rd scenario that things started to finally click.

But with this card, you can really feel an impact of your big purchase early even if it is a single card added.

My solo Monterey Jack deck really needs Michael Leigh (high 5 XP cost) to make his whip deal a potent 3 damages, and there are other whip supporting tools available already. I am just waiting for this Michael Leigh guy.

After the 1st scenario I got 5 XP minimum and purchase Michael Leigh. I have been managed to consistently see this 1x copy of Michael Leigh before trouble comes and in turn it helps me get much more XP in the 2nd scenario onwards.

It may lose out an advantage compared to decks without it later on, like Down the Rabbit Hole. (Other decks gets better than you when they started purchasing 2x of leveled cards), but since you get good faster than others, you are already useful to the team to help them through early scenarios.

5argon · 7516

An interesting card in Edge that was completely decimated by the release of Scarlet Keys.

The initial choice is whether you want to lower deck consistency to increase deck consistency. I'm not going to pretend to have run the numbers to see whether it's worth it for that, but Rogues' specialisation in Exceptional cards adds some amount of efficiency for finding those.

But then, rather than supporting the 'highlander' archetype a little more, Scarlet Keys came very close to destroying any reason to run this card at all.

A consistency tool like the similarly-named Underworld Market comes close to blowing it out of the water. It isn't hard to stack 8-10 weapons in that deck and focus on economy or niche cards in a fighter. It's a little harder to do so with investigation tools or evasion tools, but not impossible. And you can mix and match any of the three. The problem is that this is very hard to reconcile with Underworld Support, which would make your Market deck far, far less consistent.

Then we have the other Rogue consistency tool, Friends in Low Places. As a customisable, running a single copy makes it considerably less cost-efficient, costing 10 to fully upgrade one copy rather than two. On top of that the card itself benefits from running multiples of the cards you want to catch with it. As it only digs six (or nine) cards, if you can run two copies of what you're searching for, you're much more likely to hit it. Even in the best case of using it to dig through a smaller, Underworld Support deck, for exceptional items, you've still made it much less efficient to upgrade.

There's also the other two inefficient upgrades, Damning Testimony and Honed Instinct. While Damning Testimony isn't especially bad with Support beyond the inefficiency, using Support completely locks you out of what's probably Honed Instinct's best upgrade, letting you run it as a pseudo-myriad card.

On top of that, there isn't a single card in Scarlet Keys that makes you look twice at Underworld Support positively, except, perhaps, the limit-one Dirty Fighting, or wanting to quickly cycle Clean Sneak and not waste a whole 8xp on two copies. The only exceptional in the set is the Market itself. Even the high-cost ally is non-unique, so there's little reason not to buy two of him if you want him. Something like Embezzled Treasure is much better if you can manage to stack two copies.

It's especially a shame because the other permanents from this cycle got at least a small boost. Down the Rabbit Hole is great with customisables. Salvage is a pretty considerable boost to Short Supply decks. Guardians at least got a handful of interesting items which you can consider with Geared Up, and Vincent is an excellent new user of it regardless. Though there's little for Forced Learning decks, you can at least make the case that an extra investigate tool or a way of searching for your key cards can add some consistency to such a large deck.

I really would like to see a card or two boosting the 'highlander' archetype, perhaps even explicitly, in the next set. So here's hoping.

SSW · 206
The issue with Underworld support is that, while in theory you could sidegrade a bunch of stuff, in reality one of Rogue's best qualities is digging really fast using some specific tools (ex: Lucky Cig Case), so even if you were running heavy on exceptional cards you probably lost deck consistency. However, if anything, the existence of multiple consistency tools in SK *increases* the value of Underworld Support. Underworld market, for example, lets you very consistently get cards like Pickpocketing out, as well as getting weapons and clue tools *without* having to run 'second best' copies. It still isn't GOOD but I would actually consider running underworld support MORE post SK, rather than less, because 'more consistency tools' actually stack together, rather than conflict. — dezzmont · 199
But they don't stack together. They actively conflict. — SSW · 206
How do they actively conflict? Your deck goes down to 25 with underworld support. You then use underworld market, add 10 cards to your deck, and take those 10 cards (which, yes, need to be singletons, but that is fine), and shove them into underworld market. You still have a 25 card deck, you now just also have a 10 card side deck that lets you solve a major consistency problem for certain specialized draw tools (which, again, is the main weakness of Underworld support). — dezzmont · 199
The odds of drawing the specific card you want in a singleton underworld market deck isn't even that much worse: you see each card you desire 1 turn later than you would if you could run 2. That is a cost certainly, but that is a cost underworld support is applying to underworld market, not a cost underworld market is applying to underworld support. Underworld support is not made worse by underworld market, its just undeworld support's effect is almost always harmful to your deck in *every context* already anyway. — dezzmont · 199
You spelled out how they actively conflict, then pretended that that isn't an active conflict. — SSW · 206
They actively conflict in the exact same sense every single card in the game actively conflicts with Underworld support... yes... You have not specified why underworld market makes underworld support worse however. — dezzmont · 199
If you were intent on running an underworld support deck, underworld market *makes it better.* Your review is framed as if SK cards hurt underworld support, when literally the opposite happened. Underworld support was not decimated by the release of scarlet keys, it was *greatly enhanced.* — dezzmont · 199
I'll bite: I think dezzmont's take is correct, and also that I don't think Underworld Support is even trying to be good; it's a cute little restriction and reward for the class with the most Exceptional cards, and will likely not be a harbinger of a singleton archetype. — Hylianpuffball · 25
No, my point was that it's a shame that they printed consistency tools that further disincentivise Underworld Support rather than reward it, which they do. You seemed to read this as the reverse, somehow, that Underworld Market makes decks it's in worse? This obviously isn't true, but nobody ever made that point. Underworld Market is bad in Underworld Support decks because most of its benefits are massively reduced, so you would be better off spending the exp on something else - the same way almost all 'bad' cards are bad. You seem to understand why Market is significantly less efficient in Support decks, so I'm not even sure what point it is you're trying to make. — SSW · 206
The mistake your making is imagining the 1 extra turn it takes to draw a specific card in underworld support decks as a more significant cost than the time you gain in drawing it. In an underworld support deck, underworld market is actually BETTER in the way you care about: how much faster it gets you your cards, and in underworld support that effect is LARGER than in a standard deck, even though you get the card on average on turn 3 instead of turn 2. It also is better because its reduces the total copies of a capability you need, for example if you need a weapon as an evader you can just take a mauser and .25 in a market, while to get weapons consistently in a main deck still requires 2 more cards. — dezzmont · 199
For example in a standard deck where you can run 2 copies of pickpocketing or dirty fighting, you will find one 55% of the time in your mulligain, and on turn 4 on average if you didn't. Underworld market only gets you it 1.5 turns earlier, assuming only upkeep draw.In underworld support you will find your copy in 9 turns (and your ability to tutor and on turn draw is weaker). This means underworld market, far from being worse, swings your rate of finding it by MORE than 4 turns. The take that underworld market isn't worth taking in underworld support is just wrong, its literally one of the most impactful cards you can take. They quite literally were made for each other. — dezzmont · 199
I think a better argument would be that in term of consistency, it is market > both > support > none. In other words, yes adding market to a support deck make it better, but replacing support by market is even better. — MoiMagnus · 62

Cons:

Pros:

Other:

vidinufi · 63
In the Thick of It + Versatile + Underworld Support also nets 1xp. Versatile only costs 2. Pros should also include the same benefit for signature cards as exceptional cards. Especially for very useful signatures such as Bob’s, Tony’s (who still gets two), or Monterey’s. — Death by Chocolate · 1359
I'm conflicted about Parallel Skids. I mean, yeah, 20 card deck! On the other hand, this literally blanks his unique deckbuilding advantage- the ability to have 3-6 copies of certain upgradeable cards. Is this better than that? (Also, if you can tolerate 1 additional card without Skids' drawback: Zoey + Stick To The Plan + Astounding Revelation + Underworld Support == 21 card deck) — HanoverFist · 660
>I'm conflicted about Parallel Skids. I mean, yeah, 20 card deck! On the other hand, this literally blanks his unique deckbuilding advantage- the ability to have 3-6 copies of certain upgradeable cards. — PrecariousSleuth · 18
I'm not so sure that it "blanks" them since they are not considered "part of his deck" — PrecariousSleuth · 18
I mean, Versatile also nets you the additional level 0 card for which you take it in the first place. This can be game changing. — AlderSign · 204

Might be a stupid question, but does this affect Myriad cards as well? I see no reason why it would not do so, just wanted to check if someone knows something I did not consider...

---Fill the stupid 200 characters limit ;)

Schwaig · 41
'Cannot' is absolute and overrides 'may'. — thinsilver · 14