Personally, I think that, regardless of its power level, Blade of Yoth is a very good card for Arkham because of the thematic point it makes, that the Mythos is not inherently evil. The point of Lovecraft's creations wasn't that they were hostile to humanity, it was that they were largely indifferent to them, and the cycle that gave us this card's name is one of the best examples of that: in the Forgotten Age, neither the Valusians nor the Yithians were, strictly speaking, evil, they were only trying to save their homes. Yig, the Father of Serpents, only fights you if you threaten his children, and in one resolution is willing to give you gifts for helping his children.

The Mythos is not a monolith of evil; it's a collection of non-human individuals, oftentimes possessing as much capacity for good and evil as the investigators. We can't sing Kumbaya with them, our needs are too diametrically opposed (again, the Forgotten Age shows it really well with Ichtaca's point about Earth belonging to humanity now, not the Valusians), but that doesn't mean that we're inveterate foes, utterly incapable of benevolent interaction. We're people, with all the messiness and conflict that brings with it.

So, this is a card that Alessandra may find useful, since she is the one who will spend Parley actions to feed this.

The thing is... this is underwhelming. Alessandra will always prefer to use her Parley actions in other powerful Parley cards as long as there are enemies in the map, and this is not hard to force in the vast majority of scenarios. You can even look for them with Kicking the Hornet's Nest or ask your Guardian to play On the Hunt.

Let's say you waste your precious Parley extra action and you add three charges. Then you activate the effect and play Blade of Yoth. You can attack 3 times for 6 damage, 2 times for 3 and 2 damage or 1 time for 4 damage. You have to basically wasted 3 extra Parley actions (probably along 3 rounds) that could have been used to win the scenario with cards like Vamp, Fake Credentials's , Grift, Power Word or Beguile's to feed this in order to get this numbers.

This is just so much trouble when you can simply play British Bull Dog and shoot 3 times for 6 damage ignoring Aloof or even not paying because of its . Do you need bigger numbers? Use Dirty Fighting since it also synergizes with Parley tests or the new Fox Mask.

Is this a boss killer? Not by any stretch, you will just perform worse during the whole scenario with Alessandra just for get this thing fed.

Marie Lambeau suffers from the same. Her extra for activating Spell assets' is way better spent in assets like Shrivelling, Rite of Seeking or any spell you want to play.

So, Alessandra and Marie Lambeau have way better options and ways to spend their extra actions, but, this card has another cool effect. When you load this thing using the Parley action, every investigator gets +1 to deal with the parleyed enemy during this round. I find this such a cool support tool for non other than Carson Sinclair. He can use this to ease hard Parley actions (There are some of this in The Forgotten Age if I remember correctly), or to buff any investigator while dealing with an enemy. He can get next to a big boss (or big enemy), use this card's three times and suddenly all investigators will consistently trigger cool effects with card like Switchblade, Mauser C96, Beretta M1918, .41 Derringer, Cheap Shot, Opportunist, Lucky Cigarette Case, etc. Kymani would love to get their numbers bigger by this in order to have an easier time discarding enemies. You can even join the fun if you've added enough charges and swing with a +6 bonus for 4 damage! Not live changing, but good enough for a exclusively support character, allowing Carson to have autonomy against enemies he draws from the Mythos deck as a consequence of perfoming good at his role

Sure, not all the campaigns have such dangerous enemies to get this rolling, but there are some other campaigns with a lot of bosses and beefy enemies (specially in bigger player counts) where other players will gladly take the bonuses and the help.

Is Eyes of Valusia the best option for Carson? I don't know, but it looks fun enough for me. Maybe this card needs to get mutated to be playable. Realisticaly, no Guardian (or Marie Lambeau) will pay 4 exp when you can get Brand of Cthugha for the same slots and bigger damage for less actions and ghost killing if they are a thing in the campaign you are playing. Maybe there is something I'm not seeing. I don't know.

Surely this will get taboo'd pretty quickly. It is not hard to use cards like Breach the Door or Skeleton Key to reduce a location's shroud to zero. Add in Seeker movement tricks to allow investigators to end their turn there and on small maps it means no mythos phase, ever, for anyone.

Quick question about the "whichever there are fewer of" of his capacity, does it count all the or tokens which are in play, like the ones sealed on Favor of the Moon or Favor of the Sun ? I have this doubt since the wording of The Key of Solomon is not exactly the same, saying "if there are more [...] in the chaos bag" which doesn't count the sealed ones. The same question applies to his Book of Living Myths.

When i first saw these Myconids (This one and the one for threacheries) i immediately voiced my concern, but was bashed a bit and told how limit 1 per deck is enough of a restriction to not make it too powerful. Well, having played 2 full campaigns now with them, i officially declare them BANNED at my table. Don't think it was banned by me alone, but my whole group unanimously agreed that we haven't seen anything so broken as these 2 motherfuc*ers ever since my friend abused the crap out of The Necronomicon, so we kiiinda semi-banned it. But that semi-ban of the book was simple, we all agreed not to abuse it like crazy and if we play it fair and square you are allowed to put it in your deck. It is a co-op game, so it is not a big issue as we are all friends and like to have fun, which is the most important thing in this game. Fun!

Now these 2...oh boy, where to start? I cannot even complain about them that much because we all just vented out in person, so i will just say a couple of things. They are so insanely broken that i cannot wrap my head around how the fck they got out of print like this, but the same brain thought that this for 4xp is fair but a card like Miracle Wish which is just a bit improved Lucky! in Guardians costs 5xp, and you have to wait to see some blesses before you play it LMAO, and don't get me started on Flurry of Blows! You see, when this bad boy hits the table, you just play the normal game as a seeker. You for free trigger get the event to investigate, and as you already have ATLEAST 4 or 5 int as a base stat, you will probably have something to commit or have other boosts like Dr. Milan Christopher or Magnifying Glass or some skills, so you will get this creature powered up almost every turn. So if you pick the one for threacheries, you just move with Shortcut or Pathfinder or any other move effect that you have in your deck, and make yourself safe. If you don't have them, you just spend 1 action to move, you know, the action which you have to use anyway if you wanna get to the next location and progress the game? Or if you are not so sure about the shroud, just move back once if you wanna feel secure, or stick at your location as you already know the shroud so you make sure you succeed for the right amount. And what does it give you? Well, not so strong effect if we ask the designers. You just get a free Ward of Protection or the insane enemy deleter that guardians can only dream of. The whole community is bitching about seekers not being fair and how their enemy removal is even stronger than what guardians have, and the designers answered our calls and made sure that now they don't even need to spend the ONLY thing they had to do, which is use an action for it!! You don't even spend an action to fight anymore, you just investigate and when an enemy shows you eat it. No test, nothing. What the actual fck?

Imagine if guardians had a card which takes up no slots, okay make it limit 1 per deck (which would nerf them because they are not even close to the drawing power of seekers) and make it cost 4xp. The card says = Whenever you defeat an enemy, place X growth on this card. Free trigger = spend X growth, discover that many clues". What idiot would not play that card? It would be the most broken shit in the game, but then you still have to wait for enemies to show up so you can use it so it means it is STILL WORSE than this card, because with this thing you progress the game as usual and then when an enemy shows up, then you react to it. What.The.Fck? This is just straight up ban, if you don't believe me, play an optimized seeker and see for yourself. Both versions are completely banned at my table, period. We will only use the third one which seems like an actually playable and strong card, without this all seeker bias.