I honestly couldn't care either way. On the one hand adhering to the Taboo List would help ensure no one is playing a potential NPE deck. On the other hand enforcing the Taboo List at events is one more barrier of entry for a potential casual player. Someone rolls up with their just bought Harvey Walters deck and everyone pushes their glasses up the bridge of their noses as they explain the changes to the Necronomicon or they roll up with their single core Roland deck to find out one of the few weapons they have available (Machete) is illegal in a lvl 0 deck. If you are savvy enough to create some OP and NPE deck build then you should probably be playing with the Taboo List. If you are someone walking in off the street with an Investigator Starter deck and a core set then who cares since you probably don't know enough to create these exploitative combos anyway. People with little experience and a limited card pool probably need the old crutches of 0xp Machete and original text Dr. Milan. New players often comment at how oppressive this game is until they get a good handle of piloting and deck crafting. All I ask is any OP event clearly states whether the Taboo List is mandatory or if it is not enforced so people can prepare accordingly. You don't have people rolling up with the deck they are excited to play only to find out it is illegal when they get there.

She's alot of fun and there's plenty of tools to make her ability fire without an AOO in the box. Obfuscation being top of the list. That's such a nice card for her. Also Cryptographic Cipher has been real useful. Between the two I had alot of freedom to avoid the AOO and still get the evade if the rest of the team couldn't get the enemy off her first. I've had less success with Eavesdrop, which should be a great card in her deck. My problem with it and why I eventually cut it is that in Seeker she has alot more less conditional ways to get clue acceleration. It always felt like the least valuable clue card. Though it's super flavorful which makes me want to put it back in and take something else out instead to force myself to use it. Likewise Followed feels like a bomb card in some scenarios, but often it's sitting in my hand due to it's restrictive nature which is interesting. In true solo having enemies following you around is probably going to be more of a consistent thing than in higher player counts where someone is usually itching to kill stuff. I do like that that archtype is in play now and potentially will get more support this cycle. Also all them snakes in TFA. This would be an interesting build to play in that cycle.

Mechanically both Kazue and Shahai are definitely very different. I like that Kazue is another cheap monk. Yeah I agree now that I study it more there are differences on Shahai's card thematically, but they are pretty subtle. Kazue's art is almost the same scene from a slightly different angle. She does have some flavor text on her this time which is nice. Though I'm having a hard time deciding whether this is before or after the events of her novella. I'm guessing both cards are after the novella since they both show the knot tattoo activating while she meditates.

Well I like that all the named characters in the announcement got flavor text. So if we can't get some flavor on all the cards I think they are prioritizing it correctly. I love that we have a Kaito Mai card. Tetsubo of Blood seems pretty crazy. I think Mon no Oni has a valid criticism that the new version of Kazue and Shahai don't feel like different versions of the characters all that much. Not in the way that Hotaru and Toturi's second versions felt like they were a plot advanced version of those characters. The art on both Kazue and Shahai's new cards look good, but also fairly similar to their previous depictions. So they don't tell us anything new about the characters that I can see. I kinda wish unique characters had thematic subtitles or something to set their different versions apart.

I do for the most part follow the taboo list since it does foster deck diversity. In the early days of the taboo list I felt it too greatly restricted Rogues, but they've since gotten more stuff in their card pool to make them more interesting so I'm less offended by the Rogue hate :). As someone who usually doesn't look for broken interactions stuff like DoN getting banned usually is less impactful for me. For stuff like that I might bend the list since it's still fun to play with those cards and others like them (Drawing Thin for example). Though it does at least signal me to where the card breaks down so I know to probably steer clear of it if I wanna not fall into a potentially OP deck build. Simplifying the "As If" ruling makes me happy. Not sure yet if it makes Luke better or worse, but I was certainly avoiding playing with him because I didn't feel like parsing the "As If" rule. Now I might actually give him a chance. The situation they describe was exactly me. I'd read the ruling, look at cards, get confused, read the ruling again, google a specific card interaction, repeat a couple times then say to myself I'll just play someone else. I just put Pathfinder in my Trish deck. I agree that movement effects tend to be extremely powerful and Pathfinder's almost universal value makes it hard to argue with when looking to spend experience. So it probably should be on the list. I think the bumping of Scroll Of Secrets interesting. I have never included it in a deck. Also I'm glad to see the boost on Winchester. Now it makes some sense as a weapon in a Bless or Bag control Guardian/Mystic deck. Particularly Jim makes it make more sense with his Skull effect and some bag control. Though if he's wielding a two handed weapon I don't know how he get's Blessed tokens in the bag as well to up it's reliability. I guess his partner could help out. Also it means Jim is out of hands for his Trumpet or other useful things like Ritual Candles and Grotesque Statues. I don't know. Having unreliable damage on a weapon is such a liability. As a 1 XP include it feels like Machete is possibly alive again in a post taboo world, which is interesting. While I didn't miss Machete it was also kinda sad to see a weapon taboo-ed into non-existence.

Doing true solo in Core with Roland is the most forgiving since he's the most well rounded of the investigators in the box. That test-less clue ability is a real good one. I suspect the only reason he's seen a slow down in deck builds in recent times is because we have so much to explore now and Roland has been around since the beginning. I'm certainly guilty of ignoring him now that we have all these shiny new investigators. Taking him through Innsmouth might be fun thematically considering he's a federal agent.

while that's true I guess it says something about me that I care more about that then other aspects of the card design If a card has good flavor and art I'll try and get it to work.

Yeah I can understand that expense being an issue. I assume all the previous flavor text for FFG was written by the card designers. Though that said I think they could lift stuff from the RPG material and fictions we already have to at lease give cool nods to people who are following the story. I will agree that I always dislike seeing blank space on cards when flavor text could have been inserted to draw you into the theme. The cards should almost be an advertisement for the fictions and RPG material. As to the pacing of the story I definitely fall on the side of this is a much much better presentation of the story over all. Especially since it does try and shake off the things that were problematic or cringe-y about the old setting and old story. Also it feels much more architect-ed rather than haphazard. From an RPG player's perspective this is all great news since for RPGs I just need a well defined setting and some hooks. I don't need the meta narrative to upend the story all the time. Infact that would be problematic for running an RPG game. From a card player's perspective a faster moving story is more attractive since you wanna have some element of plot discovery in the cards. I know as a card player I do enjoy that quite a bit. I will say under FFG you don't really get that unless you ignore the wider materials and only learn about the setting from the game since most stuff on cards has already been featured in the other materials. In that way this game feels more like AGOT than Netrunner in it's relationship to it's theme. Netrunner's cards drove it's meta narrative. AGOT's obviously did not since it had a referential relationship to it's theme. As to the concern that the game and story needs more excitement injected into it, I will say the big moments in the story have been very well executed in my opinion. Though I would agree they could pick up the pace as far as showing main plot elements move along. I for the most part enjoy every fiction they put out, but it is hard to ignore that some elements of the plot have been spinning plates since the game started. Some of that might be just that there are so many spinning plates out there to work on. I obviously can't be certain of the motive, but I suspect strongly it does ultimately tie into card game logistics as suggested. I feel like the cards are holding up the story since the cycles and boxes are thematically linked to things that are happening in the story. When we got the card spoilers for the Crane sibling civil strife we also got those fictions. When the story started focusing on the emperor's children we also got cards depicting those story elements. We may not be getting story spoilers in cards, but we are certainly getting cards that relate to the story. Since the cards lag behind the story that might make the card reveals less exciting and that might be what Mon No Oni is latching onto here. Would I want it the other way? Not sure since that I believe was the major cause of AEG's story feeling so haphazard and disjointed at times. The writers needed to address the wacky stuff happening on cards rather than the cards depicting characters and places from the story. In the beginning it was a 1 for 1 since we used to get fictions right in the packs. They've since took a step back from coupling the story and products since that was clearly setting too slow a throttle to the online fictions and limited when they could be released. Though I assume there is still a throttle since they don't want the two to get too far away from each other. If FFG is hearing a call to increase the pace then it will take a while to coarse correct that if they want to address the concern. My understanding is products are designed and planned cycles in advance so they probably know what they are doing for this game well into next year if not further.

Yeah I'm not gonna pretend that the FFG LCGs have easy rule sets. They don't though the intent is learn once and then play for years, which has been my experience. Also once you learned one rule set I find they have a very similar design across LCGs. So it's easier to float between their games once you've been indoctrinated. The nice thing for players now is we have the intro investigator decks and alot of pretty cool standalone scenarios. So after you get that core set there's much better options fro more bite sized buys rather than having a new player commit to an entire cycle's campaign. That said the campaign is still the strongest experience for the game.

Yeah the two games have very different philosophies about cards in hand. In Marvel it's basically an efficiency puzzle each turn. Running your hand down usually signals that you did a decent job solving the puzzle. In Arkham if you run your hand down to zero that's usually extremely bad since you have no options. So alot of the pilot skill comes from knowing what to commit/play and when. Alot of that comes from getting comfortable with the bag statistics and evaluating risk. The only class that gives you any benefit to running your hand down is Survivor once you get cards like Madam Labranche or Last Chance. Even then I think it's an extremely risky way to play. That said if you play as Patrice you might feel right at home coming from Champions.

Trish and Silas are going through Innsmouth at my house. I am also making a solo Dexter deck to try and tackle Return To TFA, but I haven't tried it yet.

You may be right that all previous token additions included the "for the remainder..." text, which definitely makes the bag state explicit. Certainly I can't find a contradictory example in my short search.

This is kinda silly. Seems like every time they under print these things. Hopefully they already kicked off another print run. I'd hate to reproduce the ridiculous wait we had for for Deep Gate's second printing.

I think it's not clear. I was clearing them out but I was assuming things that weren't written in the rules. I could easily see someone going the other way with it.

It is hard to reach R1. Though I'm fine with that thematically and other things in scenario 1 matter more than the resolution you reach IMO. My issue reaching R1 is they made an evasion strategy pretty difficult in this scenario. They gave you alot of room to run around, but they also gave the majority of the enemies 4 agility (and alot of enemies come out). It does feel like a desperate chase around the caverns, but if you wanna evade everyone you better have a 5+ base in your agility stat or tons of foot icons in your deck. On the other hand it's pretty easy to fight most everything in the scenario so if you get a weapon out and there are only a couple 3 health enemies to deal with in the deck. So it was interesting playing Trish since I needed to use her ability often to auto evade, but eventually I ran out of clues on locations toward the late game and she ran into trouble since my deck had few other native ways to boost her evade above her base (I was assuming that ability would do the heavy lifting). Usually when something is added to the chaos bag it stays there unless directed to remove it. I had assumed the Blessed and Cursed tokens would clean out at the end of a scenario, but I don't see anything in their rules that tell you to do that.

I also now can't get that out of my head when I read her name. Every time I see it in print now I read it as Wednesday.

Yeah they just moved the RPG stuff to the new studio. Asmodee seems to be splitting up FFG products to other companies that specialize in those products. All the novels went to Aconyte. All the RPG stuff went to Edge. It was confirmed that basically all the same people are working on the products. Sam has even been doing the podcast rounds talking up the new products in the pipeline. So no the RPG line isn't dead. It's got new releases coming as does the novella line and we have several L5R novels also expected. So Asmodee is doing stuff with the L5R IP. I am concerned about competitive cards games like L5R and the COVID situation. That said we are still getting products released. It's a bit early to see this as a sky is falling scenario. The only thing that is literally drying up for L5R is the partnership with Privateer Press for the monthly L5R themed mini. That I am sad about but they said their agreement only went out to 2021 which is why it's coming to an end. So when looked at it through that lens (novels, novellas, models, cards, RPG products and a board game) it's actually a pretty well supported line at this point. Way more supported than many of their in house settings like Twilight Imperium or Tanhauser. Is L5R the card game burning up the sales charts? I can't say. I do know it struggles with local play at FLGS, but I do wonder how much of this game's audience ends up being kitchen table, online and big tournament only players.