Empower Selfina

Sefina is back in a big way.

Everyone's favorite painter extraordinaire (eat shit Twila) got a huge boon in the last pack in the form of a myriad arcane asset.

Empower Self is a wild card. I see a lot of theorycrafting about using a singular copy to boost your highest stat. That is not the purpose of this card. This card is intended to boost your mediocre and garbage stats to usable levels and open up your options.

Sefina Rousseau with a full Empower Self complement has, in essence, a 4 4 4 6 stat line and the ability to abuse it. 4 is enough to punch a rat or zoog. 4 plus a weapon is guardian-level fighting once per turn, which Sefina is fine with because she can guarantee an evade at 6 and deal with larger enemies over several turns if necessary. 4 is a pretty good chance at a clue on a 2 shroud location.

But crucially, all of these stats become very easy to boost up to nearly-guaranteed levels, especially using the icons off of Rogue event staples like Small Favor or Intel Report. Additionally cards like Spectral Razor and Read the Signs begin testing at 8 which is nearly guaranteed outside of Expert. Crystallizer of Dreams does a lot of work here if you can find it, allowing your basic actions to piggy back off of the expensive events you play and allowing you to deal with the occasional treachery or off- test with ease. Things she used to struggle with before.

Uncage the Soul and Lucid Dreaming help the issues of cost and inconsistency in Empower Self respectively. If you only found Stamina but want Alacrity then you can fish for it instead, or finish your complement once you have the first two firmly in play. Double, Double is a cheeky Sefina include for getting more out of your events, in a regular campaign I would probably have purchased this 3-4 scenarios in, but in Dream-Eaters I wanted to acquire it as soon as possible. Remaining assets are a 1-of in order to avoid clogging up Sefina's deck and first hand with chaff. These events are sufficiently powerful on their own that even if you don't get the particular asset you want right away it isn't an issue, they merely act as major supplemental boosts later into a scenario.

The one major downside to Empower Self is that it doesn't slot well into a deck which focuses on repeating a single test multiple times in one turn. Rogues in general want to avoid this anyway, with most of their assets like Lockpicks exhausting anyway. This can limit what your goals are in high-multiplayer, but Sefina's events should pick up the slack in that case.

It's a good deck for solo and multiplayer but most importantly it is very fun. Just expect your allies to be a bit confused about what you're up to when you tap three different cards and play a copied event from under your player card in order to do some baller play like wipe out a stack of ghouls.