Agatha Crane is one of the two latest seekers from the Drowned City, offering a gameplay centered around events and token manipulation, instead of Lucius Galloway's roguish ways. This review will mostly focus on her seeker iteration, Seeker Agatha or Sagatha for short, although obviously many points made will also apply to Magatha as well.

Stats

• 4 is a great defensive asset against may treacheries, and a decent enough base to start using Spells.

• 4 is good, but needs some work to help investigate 3-4 shroud locations. Perfectly serviceable.

• 1 : Great. Its your dump stat, one that many investigators like her have overcome before (Wendy Adams, Mandy Thompson, Marie Lambeau). And as a bonus, you get...

• 3 can help you evade some enemies in a pinch, and leaves you less vulnerable to treacheries, many of which often target your Health.

• 6 Health / 8 Sanity : Between your 4 and 8 sanity, you should not struggle too hard to stay sane. 6 health and 3 should be good enough for most scenarios, certainly less vulnerable than someone like Daisy Walker.

Deckbuilding, , Signature and Weakness

Sagatha's deckbuilding options are generally a worse version of Daisy's. In exchange for a more limited access for 0 and no access at all to 1-2, she gets to splash a selection of Insight events. Notable options include Tinker for an extra slot, Scout Ahead for speed, a handful of draw / clue acceleration from (Nature of the Beast, At a Crossroads, Unconventional Method, Fortuitous Discovery, ...), Emergency Aid for healing and Stargazing for support.

Agatha also has a slightly larger deck compared to other investigators with 35 cards instead of the standard 30. This makes it just a little harder to find any one card in your deck. As a result extra tutor / draw / redundancy is worth a consideration.

Agatha's should allow her to pass any test she could realistically attempt. It does offer Agatha to redraw the token for a card and to enable her , which is very fun. Are the rewards worth giving up on the successful test and trying your luck again ? Well, it will depend, but the choice is ultimately yours.

Agatha's Signature, the Ocula Obscura, is the best activator for her ability, with extremely easy requirements (just succeed at a skill test, with a non-symbol token), little to no downsides and the benefit of predicting exactly what you need to commit to pass the next one. It fits extremely well into the "Precision" archetype (Chemistry Set, Antikythera, ....) and more generally oversuccess strategies, allowing you to get the payoffs you want. See ElseWhere's Sagatha deck for an example of the idea.

Agatha's weakness, Glimpse the Void is quite annoying. Generally speaking, you will never want to take a skill test where you reveal and resolve 2 tokens instead of 1. It creates so much variance and dramatically reduces your odds of success without really high skill values that Sagatha cannot easily reach. This means you will want to spend an action to reshuffle it into your deck, where it may creep up again and slow you down some more. With the exception of a lucky Scroll of Secrets or an Ally's Foresight + Alyssa Graham, you don't really have a way to get rid of it. If relying mostly on events to accomplish things, this card can slow down how fast you can draw new ones to replace the ones you played.

The Puzzle

I think Sagatha's stats and ability combine for an interesting puzzle : Your base stats are too low to fully work on their own, meaning you need to invest cards/resources/commits/actions to boost them somehow. Except you also need to invest cards/resources/actions into triggering your (unless you're just praying for tokens). All in order to pay the resource cost of the events in your discard pile once you've triggered your . And you have to do all that in spite of the loss of consistency that comes with your slightly larger deck.

Its interesting that, despite being a interested in Insight Events, she is the opposite of Joe Diamond : He gets to play his events practically for free, while Agatha has to work extra hard to replay hers. I guess this is what happens when you have to show proof of your work rather than relying on a hunch...

With that said, this is not an unsolvable problem, and there are a couple of directions to go from here...

The Directions

• Use your : The new Eyes of the Dreamer / Breath of the Sleeper combine the typical "use willpower" spell effect with a means to trigger Agatha's , and make for good targets for the excellent Knowledge is Power. When looking to boost , Hawk-Eye Folding Camera, Mouse Mask and Whitton Greene (and Celaeno Fragments with 10 cards) are worth looking into. Finally, Sagatha is the first investigator who combines a of 4+, access to spells and access to Higher Education, which is probably strong enough to carry the archetype. Outside of that, the spellcasting is probably better left to Magatha, who has access to Prophetic and higher level spells that come with built-in skill boosts.

• Use your : There are plenty of ways to boost your to the 5-6 range where it can do most of the work : Crafty-boosted tools, static boosts from cards like Dr. Milan Christopher, Jeremiah Kirby, Archibald MacVeigh or Magnifying Glass, assets like Grim Memoir or Flashlight, free skills from Dream Diary, Higher Education (...again). You'll notice that many of the cards listed above are either cheap, or provide additional card draw or resources, making it very feasible to play those alongside the costs of your event / token-manipulation gameplan. For the record, the Sagatha deck I posted decided to mostly sidestep the issue and use the testless Forbidden Tome, not because other methods wouldn't work on Hard difficulty, but just because i wanted to give the card a shot.

A card I want to highlight for Sagatha in general is Ancestral Knowledge : providing skill boosts to her early game while you're looking for these key assets, helping you find them with the draw of Perception, Eureka! or Plan of Action, storing a potential Agatha with Analysis while making more room in your deck for events worth (re)playing. Speaking of, ...

• Use your events : I mean, Agatha litteraly has EVENT written on its front and back ! Maybe you don't need to boost your skill value to handle high difficulty tests if your events are here to take care of them ! For example, Read the Signs or Drawn to the Flame can power through the highest shroud locations with ease, and an Explosive Ward helps to lend a hand against small enemies. There are 3 pitfalls to avoid however.

  • Not finding the event you need for the task at hand : For example, you don't want to be stuck without your "testless clue" card against high shroud locations (again, 35 card deck, remember ?).
  • The opposite : if you have say 10 events for testless clues, you miss out on a lot of the power of your . Does it really matter that, unlike the aforementioned Joe Diamond, you get to choose which event to play (from your discard) each turn, if all your events do the same thing ?
  • The third is to run out of steam, meaning you probably want to have some form of additional card draw (aw gee, how are you gonna find that in the card pool) and/or a way to consistently and repeatably activate her . Which leads us nicely onto the main event (get it ?)

Agatha's Ability : Setup

As mentionned above, Agatha needs to put in extra work to activate her ability : In order to trigger her , Agatha needs to seal, cancel or ignore a chaos token before her turn ends. Notably, this does work if you do so during the Mythos Phase, or during another investigator's turn, provided it was taken before yours. With the exception of her , there are generally 2 kinds of activators you can find :

• Repeatable ones that come with their downsides. For example, Olive McBride makes your tests harder, Misdirection seals '0' tokens you would want in the bag until you get attacked, which can make releasing them awkward, Dial of Cataclysm needs someone to fail a skill test, Katarina Sojka forces you to deal with Symbol tokens (including the ), with Ocula Obscura being the only exception. As far as I understand, you cannot play No Stone Unturned 5 from the discard using Agatha's , but grabbing a copy or two may still be worth it for improved odds at finding Agatha's incredible signature.

• One shot / limited use cards with their upsides like Dial of Revelation, Heavy Furs (Btw, shout-out to Lonnie Ritter from a teammate repairing the coat, or, if you're really based, doing it yourself with Forbidden Tome), Breath of the Sleeper / Eyes of the Dreamer, Uncanny Specimen or Premonition.

I think the answer probably lies in the middle. Having to expend a card every time you want to trigger her is not a viable long term plan, especially with Glimpse the Void polluting your draws over time. And yet, finding the repeatable activators in your 35 card deck can be unreliable, unless you start packing many of them, at which point you run the risk of them being redundant after the first one. I find having 2 copies of one repeatable activator, + the Ocula Obscura is good enough to find one early, and a handful of limited use cards can allow you to activate her ability in the meanwhile and provide additional payoffs later once you have drawn them.

Agatha's Ability : Payoff

With the whole "If you sealed, canceled or ignored 1 or more token this round" covered above, and "Play an event" being self explanatory, I will focus on the interesting part : "from your discard pile". How do we get those events here ?

• Play Events : Probably the best and most enticing option of the 3, using Agatha's to double-cast events. Cards worth mentioning in this section are Farsight / Cryptic Grimoire for some fast casting, Crafty for resource discounts / boosts on Insights, and Lab Coat for an extra skill boost on events. Some types of events work particularly well here :

  • Economy cards (Resource / Draw) : I have mentioned the extra costs that come with setting up her ability, but the flip-side is that that replaying these cards can offset this cost. Again, The issue highlighted above is not unsolvable, just something to keep in mind during deckbuilding. The list of options includes Voice of Ra, Burning the Midnight Oil, Unearth the Ancients, Deep Knowledge, Cryptic Research and others.

  • Power cards : The ones that get things done and allow Agatha to pick up the pace. Casting Extensive Research or Correlate All Its Contents (among other examples) a second time, at no action cost, can provide a lot of clue acceleration. On the enemy side, the new Whispers of Doom and "I've got a plan!" can bring tons of damage to complement a fighter against difficult foes, and both String of Curses and Confound are just insanely powerful. Depending on what you are using it for (e.g, Eon Chart, Pendant of the Queen), Truth from Fiction can potentially fit in this category as well.

  • Support cards : Stargazing, Guidance, Cosmic Revelation, Barricade, etc .... All of these cards are cheap to replay and benefit a lot from being double-cast in terms of justifying their inclusion in a deck. Having guidance provide 2 actions instead of 1 feels so much better, and the value from a pair of cosmic revelations can set your entire table up for success.

• Commit Events : This allows Agatha to behave as a reverse Crystallizer of Dreams, where you commit the event first and play it afterwards. Cards worth shouting out here are Grisly Totem for additional icons and draw, and Guided by the Unseen, which lets you search for an event, commit it for a test and place it in your discard ready for use. Cryptic Writings is also excellent here : commit it for its icons, and get the resources later on. Finally, I will mention Logical Reasoning and Bizarre Diagnosis. Both of these cards have excellent icons and a strong healing effect. With Agatha, you can freely commit these cards and still keep them in your discard for healing later on in the scenario if the need arises.

• Discard Events : Besides Scenario effects, cards like Occult Lexicon, Occult Invocation, Forced Learning and Artistic Inspiration offer additional payoffs for discarding cards, with a few more spicy options like Scroll of Secrets, Scroll of Prophecies or Written in the Stars. Agatha is no George Barnaby, but her can still offset the cost of discarding her events. Also worth noting that Occult Invocation and Blood-Rite are Spell events that can be double-cast by Agatha, and that both the aforementioned scrolls work very well with the new Library Pass. Maybe End of the Road has found a home after all ! (if you play it using Agatha's , what happens to the extra action ???)

Conclusion

"So, you've mentioned about 80 distinct cards that do a whole bunch of different stuff ! What am I supposed to take away from that ?!" Well, simply that Sagatha is a fascinating investigator to build and play, that lends herself to a whole bunch of unique options and play styles, and has plenty of ties to all kinds of archetypes worth exploring (Clue drop with Analysis and Captivating Discovery, Curse builds replaying Gaze of Ouraxsh and Stirring Up Trouble, Science Precision, Big Hand with Farsight, etc ....).

Sagatha's main challenge is to strike the balance between her rational and her extraordinary Events. Which is quite a thematic home-run for Agatha Crane, isn't it ?

Having tried running Alton in two cluever decks (Monterey Jack and Seeker Agatha Crane), I feel that he doesn't really offer a lot for Seekers who already get a lot of in-class clue compression and very competitive Level 0 allies. On the other hand, Darrell Simmons benefits from pretty much every part of his package and the two should make a great duo.

As noted by other reviewers, Alton's evidence cost depends on the shroud of the location during the player window in which his is used, so the same shroud reduction tricks that worked on Lola Santiago will also work on Alton. Do note that difficulty reduction such as Gumption and Darrell's doesn't actually help because they interact with the test difficulty and not the shroud though.

Without shroud reduction, and with most locations in the game being between 2 to 4 shroud, you can think of Alton's ability as giving you 0.25-0.5 clues per precision success (which already takes some setup or luck in the first place), which is simply way too slow for the class who already excels at gathering clues. Without support, Alton's payoff takes so long to arrive you might as well run Working a Hunch if you want 0XP clue compression in Seekers that much.
Main class Seekers do have some access to shroud reduction, e.g. Arcane Insight (4) and Vantage Point, but then these are also pretty slow cards that don't see a lot of play, and I don't expect Alton to warrant a full built-around Seeker deck.
Another thing going against Alton is that Seekers probably have the best selection of Level 0 allies in the entire game. Dr. William T. Maleson offers better soak-for-money and encounter protection, while Dr. Milan Christopher and Jeremiah Kirby give a boost in a relevant stat for cluevers and either sustain economy or burst card draw, so on and so forth. It's simply too difficult for Alton to carve out a niche among such stellar allies.

On the other hand, look over to the Survivor cardpool and suddenly the possibilities open up significantly. Not only do they have more useful shroud reduction options (e.g. Winging It, Old Keyring, Matchbox), but also the recursion to repeatedly make use of said options and payoff cards for 0-difficulty investigations (Old Keyring (3) and Shed a Light). Darrell Simmons in particular would enjoy working with Alton (even though his innate difficulty reduction doesn't work with Alton as aforementioned) for the following reasons:

• Darrell simply loves anything that generates evidence.
• Darrell starts with 5 and doesn't need a static boost as much. On the other hand boosting his to a respectable 4 can certainly improve his encounter resistance and ability to work temporarily away from the team fighter.
• Artistic Inspiration and Steady-Handed are both in Darrell's cardpool and can reliably enable the precise success. Notably you can also toss Winging It as fodder for Artistic Inspiration for even more tempo.
• Empirical Hypothesis also works on a success by 3 as a side benefit.
• Thematically, Darrell and Alton seem to share a passion in photography.

Such a scenario is pretty likely in a Darrell-Alton deck and pretty much involves only cards Darrell already wants to run:

1. Darrell finds himself at a 4-shroud location.
2. Initiate an investigation at -3 shroud with Old Keyring (3) and Matchbox.
3. Further reduce the difficulty to 0 with Flashlight (3) or Darrell's own ability (Alternatively, have two Matchboxes in play and skip this step).
4. Proc Alton and Shed a Light for a total of 5 clues (2 from Keyring (3), 1 from Alton, 2 from Shed a Light) in one automatically successful action and 1 evidence.

Oversuccess also gives an evidence on Empirical Hypothesis, and if Darrell at that moment is testing at his innate 5 , he can also proc both Artistic Inspiration and Steady-Handed to turn that into an exact success by 3 for another evidence on Alton, turning the entire action evidence-neutral or even positive.

Overall, I feel that Alton may struggle to make the cut in a conventional cluever deck, but he is far from unplayable and can become an early (if painfully slow) payoff for precision tech or a fast and testless source of clues in the appropriate decks.

You know, looking closely at this card makes me realize... ins't this nut with Roland? Think about it, Roland with his 0-2 skeeker cards pool mean he can get a lot of money from just drawing, and this card can be played either as fast draw or stack money, so you can choose when you want to shoot.

So..yeah, good boy Roland eating good this expansion, Tommy can also use this, but he doesn't cycle deck fast enough to really abuse this thing, funniest combo is play as sister mary then turn your self in patrish for that sweet sweet 5 cards up keep, with a 30 deck (with 3-4 cards always in hand + 2-4 cards that draw more cards like glory) you can get 6-9 maybe 10-12 dmg out of 3 copies in a 8 doom clock game.

How does this work with Winging It and Improvised Weapon when you play those Events from the discard pile? The texts conflict with each other.

If this works with those abilities, Marion loves this even more.

I played this in a Dexter deck and took it later in the Scarlet Keys campaign. By that point, half the bag is symbols, even without any of us using blessings or curses, and in 3-player this triggered almost every single turn. Dexter cares a lot about continual economy and this card was a life saver.