Longbow

One point I've seen people make in favor of Longbow is that it's "good against Aloof enemies." Not true for most of them. In most cases, when you want to deal with an Aloof enemy, you spend one action to engage it, and one action to bop it with whatever random weapon you have (or even your bare hands, for birds or many random cultist-types). With the Longbow, you spend one action shooting the enemy and one action reloading. Still two actions spent. For most aloof enemies, the "ignores the aloof keyword" text isn't making this good against Aloof enemies, it's making it not a total disaster. Where Longbow is actually good is when it's an Aloof enemy with exactly 3 hp, AND your alternative weapon deals 2 damage - now you're talking about 2 actions for Longbow vs 3 actions otherwise. There are a couple campaigns with a decent number of 3 HP Aloof enemies, but generally Aloof enemies have only 1 or 2 HP, so Longbow isn't actually gaining you any significant value relative to other ways you could be dealing with that enemy.

CitizenFry01 · 50
Custom Grip

Easily one of the best card of Tommy's pack: Custom Grip fixes so many issue with firearms (mainly the risk of running out of ammo at the wrong moment) and actually makes guns worth building around at least and gives a serious blow against melee's supremacy in Guardians deck (alongside the Machete nerf)

For one resource, you get INSANE value: a play action of a weapon, the ability to return the weapon to your hand and play it again or another one. So essentially you get to refresh a gun or replace it while keeping in hand the original gun you played. That is incredibly good tech at level 0 and it scales so, so well when you start using higher level guns, like the Lightning Gun.

This is a staple in all of my firearms deck that can access it: it singlehandely removes any risk of running out of ammo in inopportune moments.

Tempt Fate

Tempt Fate is a weird event that really didn't quite find a home in any deck beside few odd ones using Paradoxical Covenant... Until Kōhaku Narukami joined the team, where this card is basically an auto-include in his deck. Why? Because of his ability to burn 2 curse and bless token to get an extra action. Basically this card on him reads:

"Fast. Play when your turn begins.

As an additional cost to play this card add 1 Bless token and 1 Curse token to the chaos bag.

Draw a card and take an additional action this turn."

It's incredibly good and effective at level 0 and gives a lot of flexibiliy to Kōhaku on how to act. The draw is basically a net gain of 2 actions, which is almost unheard at level 0 decks normally.

I love when niche cards find such an effective home in certain decks, like Opportunist on Winifred Habbamock!

Scrape By

The weird wording rose an eyebrow immediately after the card was spoiled. RAW, this can make you succeed on the , if another token was drawn before. Travis from PBG argued, this is not terrible relevant, because the cards are designed for current, and there are no , or tokens (yet). I would have said, that there is always the , which frequently draws additional tokens, and does so in the new core, too. But well, the chaining of into is rather nieche. It will happen occasionally, but not that often.

Now we have the spoiler announcement for "Children of Blood", and guess what: they come with their own set of 12 (!) blood tokens, that draw extra tokens. Have fun with that interaction, until CoB falls out of current. (Or FFG is going into errata this card.) It was just a matter of time, unless this was really intentional, which I would not totally rule out. (Who was playtesting this card otherwise?) I guess, we will get again token manipulation in sooner or later, and probably a return of and later in Chapter 2. But I was not expecting to happen it so soon.

Susumu · 390
It's strange because it would be so easy to fix ("[...] a non-auto-fail token [...]" -> "[...] no auto-fail token [...]"). — AlderSign · 469
Agree, it would actually have been much more straight forward and sounding wording. This makes it even more uncertain, if the weird wording was intentional to allow canceling an auto fail, which is revealed after another token. — Susumu · 390
A card to solve the bless bless autofail heartache! — MrGoldbee · 1569
Haha, my words. First time, I wrote about that on BGG, I also mentioned "the old classic Bless into Bless into Autofail combo": https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/3604950/article/46945065#46945065 — Susumu · 390
Even in Brethren of Ash, all three of the scenarios feature at least one "rolling" token, so this interaction can come up just in the Core 2026 box. — CitizenFry01 · 50
Old Shotgun

With Oops!/Oops! this card finds a place in a fail deck. Compared to other weapons Old Shotgun's damage scales with the amount you fail by, which makes it easy to get the 3 damage when built around it. Drawing Thin, being Preston Fairmont or Charlie Kane helps immensely with this (especially when cursing a lot), as well as packing some recursion via Salvage, Scavenging/Scavenging, Pushed to the Limit, Professor William Webb/Professor William Webb (and Sleight of Hand, which is a staple synergy with this card anyway). Sadly, both Resourceful and Scrounge for Supplies don't work on this one.

AlderSign · 469
"which makes it easy to get the 3 damage when built around it": The problem, I see is, that Oups (2) requires you to fail by 3 or less, while the old shutgun requires you to fail by three or more (for max. damage). So unless you fight against an enemy with exactly 3 combat, this does not seem so trivial. And Oops (0) will always ever do max. 2 damage anyway. — Susumu · 390
Yes, the +3 (and other limitations) are a "problem". I don't really think it's worth building a deck around this interaction, I just noticed that it could be leveraged if you are into fail synergies already. The good thing is Oops can be played in reaction. That this whole thing requires another investigator to work is a huge downside though. — AlderSign · 469
Actually, I now think, Oops (2) would not work at all with this card. OS states "if you fail and would damage another investigator", and Oops denies damage to the other investigator, so you would not deal damage at all, neither to the investigator, nor an enemy, imho. — Susumu · 390
Oops! — AlderSign · 469