Deathwalker Class Guide for Frosthaven

hello everyone and welcome to Phoenix gaming I am your host Nick Henning and we are here for the fourth of our winter break back into Frost Haven where I solo hand for play solo forehanded played these characters um to to my side over here uh to to test them out so I could make some comments on how I think each of these classes run and in this instance I saved death Walker one of the starting classes for last and you know in a lot of ways for me I kind of saved the worst for last more on that in a moment so let me be clear that I actually really like that the death Walker exists um first of all valrath and quatal got did a little dirty in Frost Haven and I'm glad the valrath are here being represented by a thematically very very cool class for any of you that did play the um forgotten the circles expansion they clearly kind of took some Concepts from that divver class the kind of dropping these shadow tokens which are I don't remember what the divver called them um but essentially having these little overlay tiles on the board that don't really exist they kind of just are there for you to interact with um and put it onto a class with a a nice a very good I would say like Haven game theme uh that kind of leans into sort of the like little dark edgy um Arcane kind of character and certainly this class gives off Mage Vibes with its sort of like 6 S8 hit point progression um almost kind of necromancer except for we've got the bone shaper so doesn't really have the Necromancer side obviously we're very much on the um Shadow side there's some specific rules here about um targeting with our shadows but frankly what it really comes down to is this component with shadows this class runs on shadows and the reason that this is actually was my least favorite of the classes that I played in this 4run wasn't because of um the fact that it was unfun that the cards were unfair or anything like that it's that this class was very feast or famine depending on those Shadow tokens I found that what really mattered with this class was whether your Shadow tokens were available to you and how they were available to you greatly impacted the power of this class to the point that you felt like you were basically just sort of like a move to attack two kind of class if you didn't have your Shadow tokens set up in play appropriately um to where you were just doing Absolut Ely monster Wallops when you did have Shadow tokens up now as a concept I don't think that's a problem like the idea that you ramp up over time you have to do a little bit of Shadow token management I don't think is an issue my problem with the death Walker in this game came in some scenarios that I played and I'll give an example from what was really just kind of the most egregious uh to me I played in a scenario that was two rooms from the setup it was very clear it was only going to be two rooms and I started off by dumping a bunch of Shadows into play at the beginning beginning thinking that it'd be really easy to move them into the next room and when we moved to the Next Room the surprise text of the next room was just delete the last tile slide all characters forward into the next room but no comments about anything like Shadow tokens or overlays so I read that rules wise that they all just went away and so this class went from I took my turns to set up and then suddenly I was punished by the way that the scenario was set up other scenarios are maybe not going to be as brutal as this but there are scenarios where you're kind of like teleporting in between rooms and it's not entirely um effective for you to to really be uh playing this class in those situations on the other hand in rooms where you were doing more of the like you know there's there's a bunch of like King of the Hill scenarios um in Frost Haven and again I really like the scenario designs in Frost Haven uh but this class felt insanely powerful in those King of the Hill scenarios where you kind of were centralized and one location had to survive for a number of rounds because it took you a few rounds to set up but then you were just by far the strongest character in play and I didn't enjoy that feast or famine style of play sure it's really fun when you're kind of being really big and powerful um but the number of scenarios where I felt like this class was just far weaker than the rest of them and not really for any like fault of its own um was was a bit frustrating to me the thing that's really neat about this class is that it is an aggressive class sorry about that light being stubborn uh it's a really aggressive class it has a high rating on melee and ranged I primarily played this class as a ranged class um just to kind of round out the party that I had built but after playing a little bit honestly I think the melee build seems like the most fun um there is a strong melee build companion guide that you can find online but the reality is that actually you don't need to choose ranged or melee and actually when I was playing this class at its finest I was switching in between doing ranged and melee type attacks based on what was needed in the scenario and also based on what my allies cough cough Banner spear uh were doing in any given moment which I thought was pretty neat I do think there's something on here that's a blatant lie though they have Mobility rated as kind of a middle middling part of this class and I think mobility in this class was a really big struggle for me um your shadows can move through bottom actions on your cards but when you're moving your shadows you're not moving yourself and so transitioning from room to room was by far harder in this class than I think any other class I've played except for maybe uh summons based classes where you don't have as much control over your over your summons but they did actually change the rules around summons a little bit in Frost Haven compared to the original Haven games so they're even better than they used to be uh but why don't we go ahead and get into the cards to see what exactly it is that we're talking about so the these these category cards are going to be your Shadow Generation cards at level one and they're absolutely essential because you'll notice that everything in the kit cares about Shadows um to the point that I I do actually Wonder from a design perspective of just making this top ability a core ability of the class uh and making it a 10 card class instead of an 11 card class was a consideration sometime during the design process I have to imagine that it actually was they wanted to give people some options maybe and how to open up um but this top I would say is sort of the the default structure of the class if you play DND this is like your sort of hexing ability or Hunters Mark ability um where essentially you know you put this into play at the beginning like I said it's an 11 card class but I kind of think of it like almost Drifter like where you have to play this or the other card at the beginning I think uh in order to have a good time and this one essentially says hey when you hit somebody the next time that person dies if you haven't kind of marked someone else for death they're going to turn into a shadow which is going to allow you to start doing some nonsense in the future ideally what you want to do is attack an enemy in the midst of your other enemies that way when they die Your Shadow is in contact with as many different folks as possible and this persists throughout the scenario this kind of I've touched you therefore you are Marked for Death by me um and uh it also works for your summons which is nice and then you know if your summon manages to essentially kill somebody you can turn them into a shadow because the summons in this class are actually pretty respectable I think and uh then you get to go and sort of you can kind of override if you want to Mark someone else that your allies are going to go after if your dumb summon hasn't accomplished what you want it to accomplish um call to the abyss is a card that most of the time I think you're going to be playing right at the beginning of scenario but I'll say that a lot of times I ended up playing this second card that's going to come right after this and then I would actually maybe play call to the abyss kind of on the second cycle throughout the scenario part of that is that the bottom of this card also generates Shadows the problem is it just does it only once per you know rest cycle right um using a bottom ability to put a shadow somewhere within two lots of flexibility so this card is is demanding in that you want to play the top and you want to play the bottom um in fact if you could play the bottom more often you would be happy to do so it's just that you can only play this card you know every once in a while so man ing when you have access to this card is a big deal I think of and a big structure in how you choose to play this class the other way that you generate Shadow at the beginning is by playing eclipse and when I first read this I was like a loss card where you generate three shadows that are only going to essentially work in the first room that you're in um this seems like it sucks and uh I underestimated it because having a pile of Shadows in play is just so important that in many scenarios in Frost Haven you start on the back foot throwing three shadows down right at the beginning and then going crazy on turns 2 three and four actually is a very viable way to play with this class so you know if you watch my videos you know that I tend to grind out and generate value over time this is a class where I found myself playing this card eclipse on the first turn of the scenario way more than I would have ever expected upon looking at the class and if you're playing this class and struggling you know in the beginning of the scenario I'd recommend just giving it a shot like try to go really quick on the shadows and see how it goes on the the other hand it does suck to lose your move four at the bottom of this card um no matter what though I think this card has to come with you into the scenario if you're using it for the move fours and then you drop those three shadows in the last room that's great too so it does unfortunately kind of suck to have a turn where you're not really doing something but um we're going to see what those payoffs look like in just a second I've grouped your payoff Cards into two main structures like kind of quantity and uh quality these are the quantity ones they pay off based on the number of things you have the more Shadows the more impact and the top of this card is pretty straightforward it's a big hit based on the number of Shadows that you have now the most Shadows you can have on on in play is five but they don't care where they are so actually this card you can use if your shadows are left in the original room of all the ghosts that you've killed from Christmas Past or so on so forth and it's an attack six if you have all of them in play that happens a fair amount of time by the time you get later on the scenario and strength of the Abyss is a nasty card I think it's the primary payoff I would say at level one when you're playing this class it's very serious business you do have to be in melee to do it but it's well worth jumping in walloping someone for six probably killing them and then uh getting out of there after that the bottom part of this card is really fun too I didn't do it a whole lot but if you want to play like a proper DND style Warlock and you start your first turn with call to the abyss and then the bottom of this other card essentially your goal is to just kill people and every time they turn into a shadow you gobble up their Shadows for additional attacks um to make it easier to kill additional people and sort of like slide on forward this is really great for your um how do I say this like Samurai style or like western style scenarios where bad guys just kind of keep coming at you you're moving down a hall you have to be going somewhere but it's going to be kind of like a a March 2 March 3 March four every turn so take a look at your scenarios and see if it's the kind of one where it's like you're going to go from room to room to room to room um fighting people the ones that are going to be where you're doing that most often are where they have consecutive small rooms because there's not a lot of space to move in between um but you're going to be kind of killing people as you trudge forward throughout these scenarios and it's a fun way to play the the game but I did lean on mostly doing the top of strength of the Abyss just because hitting someone for six with a level one card is pretty nasty anger of the Dead hey everybody needs a pierce card in Frost Haven that's a part of the design metric clearly um and this one allows you to cash out some number of Shadows they do need to be close by in this scenario so that you could shoot someone for a whole bunch of damage the more Shadows you eat the farther you can shoot get a little bit of Pierce to get extra damage if you shoot him um this is a big big gnarly hit and the bottom of this card is actually pretty nice too um not to mention this card's initiative of 14's generally going to let you go faster than most enemies uh but if you have enemies that are standing on these Shadows or you know going to walk into shadow hex's that turn throwing a couple extra wounds on bad guys for free basically especially if you're doing a different range attack nice option on this card I use both sides of this card plenty of times because of its initiative I took it with me into basically every scenario for quite a long time and while it seems like your enemies aren't going to walk over those Shadow hexes the shadow hexes don't operate like traps or hazards or anything like that so keep in mind that if an enemy has an equal choice between two options and one has a shadow and one doesn't they're just dumb AI you can make them walk over whatever you want so um you can trigger the the bottom part of Anger of the Dead more than you probably think you can um rest in the shade ignore this this plus one here uh is going to be as good as your party decides you know you need healing uh the more Shadows there are the more allies that can be healed and this does require you to coordinate with your allies to be on those you know Shadows um themselves which is not unreasonable maybe they just stab someone and step forward onto their body to pick up the loot anyway so it's not out of the realm of reason that you can you know throw out upwards of six or eight healing on this card pretty easy the bottom of this move all Shadows up to six hex's is nice um you need that in some scenarios but it's a pretty painful loss card um it's kind of like frankly a comparison into Eclipse a loss to put three shadows in play um but really it's more like I'm later in the scenario my Shadows are behind me and I'm going to kind of pull them up so it is worthwhile in the right situations uh but it's really more of a consequence of of playing the class it doesn't feel exciting to do um but sometimes you just got to to continue rolling forward with what you're doing wave of Anguish here is the last of our quantity cards um and it's also a loss card this allows you to just turn all of your shadows into like like a little you know horrible uh again D and D reference arms hunger of haar or whatever arms of haar um reach out of all these shadows and attack the people that are next to them thematically very cool in practice I think as a lost card I'm not a huge huge fan because you need to have many many Shadows that are next to many many enemies and usually what happens is you kind of like are rolling where like a couple of them are next to enemies and it doesn't end up doing there there are are fewer scenarios where the top of the this card works in the way that you really want it to that being said you're probably taking this card with you for a bit because the bottom of the move to and move all Shadows up to one hack um actually does allow you to continue rolling forward it's not a ton of Mobility but it lets you um roll forward in a room where you haven't finished killing all the enemies but they're not necessarily stacked on top of each other a room where maybe there's a mix of melee and ranged bad guys um you're going to have uh situations where this wave of Anguish movement um and your whole Army movement your army being or Shadows just gives you the flexibility that you need to keep rolling these last cards are are this this huge group of cards is the quality group um meaning just oh we don't like that shadow Beast was messing with the green screen um they are not necessarily care they just care that there is maybe binary rather than quality they care that there is a shadow not necessarily that there are many shadows and we're starting off with a pretty cool one so Shadow beast eats a Shadow from adjacent to you so you have to you know expend it and summons this reusable summon right this is not a lost card it lasts until you want it to go away which might be when you rest or it might just kind of keep going and this thing moves fast packs a huge wall up and then takes a hit and dies maybe um but you know it's initiative is one that goes very very well with summoning a creature so there's a good chance that you can use the top of this card to summon a shadow it's going to go in for an attack three and then take a hit from an enemy that's an extremely reasonable use for a top card and a reasonable way to consume a shadow um as you're moving forward in rooms past bodies of enemies that you've uh destroyed I think sess am Apparition is is pretty good I didn't end up playing it quite as much in a four-player game things just got a little bit crowded a little bit messy and minions you know they can they can be a little bit annoying in those situations um but every time it was good to play it was very good to play for a level one card and I think in a lower player count counts this probably just helps even more honestly um the bottom of this card you know me I'm so so on uh loot abilities and the ability to teleport to a hex with a shadow is a little funky because a lot of times the Shadows aren't in the most ideal situations where you want to be sort of the the most common situations where it's good is where you've killed an enemy that's like you have two enemies that are in melee with your friend and you kill one of them they turn into a shadow thanks to your call to the abyss and then you teleport to that spot to make a big melee attack against them um but I would say most of the time I played the top of this card instead lingering rot here is a card that there a loss card that cares about where you are and again kind of like that little arms of haar thing that we attack Out of The Shadow and a bunch of people get poisoned and do a little bit of an attack eh whatever this card I played mostly for the bottom move three and poison enemy next to is just a a totally fine mid-range value card that's the kind of card that I like to play in this game but I don't think it's the most exciting you're not going to be playing it forever so I'm not going to be talking about it for too too long fluid Knight here is pretty cool this is um sort of like the the same the strength of the Abyss that big six attack this is a five attack it does require that you lose a shadow and that shadow then goes away and it your enemy needs to be next to the shadow so a fair number of conditions that are required here um for that to to go off that being said you're going to be able to trigger it at least sometime which is pretty nice um and the bottom of this card is the thing that I think makes the melee build of this class aside from one of the perk benefits um pretty viable the fact that you can take a hit and then teleport to a shadow and just negate the entirety of that hit lets you set up a lot of really really nice situations in this game where you know you know XYZ giant monster is about to wall up somebody and you just stand there like I'm I'm the weak little Mage I can't take it um and this you know repeatable card that costs you a shadow lets you kind of get out of trouble is a really nice way to um play a cycle with this so for example I'd have some Shadows set up move forward strength of the Abyss melee six attack beginning of the next turn play this card because I'm already in melee with some bad guys um probably go on the earlier side with my 24 and then uh especially if I'm you know I know the kind of bad guys that I'm fighting against and they're big big teth hit with you with a ton of things um do another melee attack use the bottom of this card they hit you you take zero damage and teleport out of there it's almost as good as a stun right you just like wasted their entire turn um at the cost of a shadow on the bottom of a card fluid Knight is really good don't sleep on this ability at all Shadow step on the other hand not as good and I thought it was going to be very good so 19 initiative is great and then move three attack three is very cool the problem is that you have to move to where a shadow is a lot of times you don't have control exactly over where that is you might be playing this in tandem with like you know a bottom that lets you move a shadow into one space but if you're using the bottom of the card to move the shadow somewhere it almost would have been as effective for you to move anyway so Shadow step ended up being more underwhelming just because of the the way that you needed to set it up or you know that it just it wasn't reliable enough and an attack three is not exciting enough for me to to want to be using this um as often the bottom of this card a move six loss card which drops one shadow on the way is that's a that's a lost card that I you know again I really need to be moving six and it's probably right at the end of the scenario if I'm doing this it doesn't even give me experience points for a loss card which just feels like insult to injury so Shadow step I thought was going to be amazing but for me actually kind of unperformed so if you know more about Shadow step than I do please let me know call of Doom I don't tend to like these do a Ply amount of damage against a group of people kind of things um as you might have noticed I mean this class is a little Mage class our our best sort of like defense is against one big wallup so the idea of me wanting to move up against a couple of different enemies and potentially take their attacks even if I'm muddling them I'm not super I'm not super inclined to do that um maybe if you have some mechanism where you're putting more curses into the monster deck and those muddles are going up in value for that reason you're a little bit more likely to play this um but oh I'm sorry I'm saying all that stuff and uh the adjacent enemies are adjacent to a shadow it's one of these like out of those things my mistake um it's the same uh same issue though of like the shadow step where like that needs to be um where it is so sorry for misspeaking on that one um the bottom here three and make a a knight is you know it's a role player completely does its job um but there's not as many night payoffs with this class as I thought so I didn't play Call of Doom for very long which is probably why I wasn't able to get the card right on first take these last couple cards are sort of the other cards which mostly actually coincide with cards that move your shadows for you and they also coincide with cards that eat your um night production so this might be why I think this class doesn't use that much is because I ended up using the bottoms a lot to move my Shadows into positions where I wanted them to be um but the top here is a pretty basic melee attack that's a little bit better if you have Knight sure whatever and the bottom lets you move all of your shadows up to two hex's which was generally pretty important for me um this card lets you uh attack a couple people this is actually pretty nice attack if you do have Knight cuz this is two attack threes in the right situation range two is not very far but when you have have a couple tanks in your group it's not not as hard to stand behind them and shoot so forceful Spirits for me was a decent I don't have my Shadows quite set up yet I want to shoot a couple people um system for for getting some damage out there and being helpful um and then the teleporting to a hex where a shadow is it kind of depends on the situation there are some scenarios where this ability is absolutely busted because it lets you essentially cheat the scenario anywhere where you have to like run back and forth and things like that um this card in some scenarios is just it's just insane like it it can win the scenario for you functionally but a lot of the time and in most scenarios it ends up being just a mediocre move um that doesn't really get you any farther than any other normal move would dark fog here uh is kind of lost card that I like it's a nice attack that I'm probably only going to trigger if I can hit all three people maybe if I can hit two people people um bottom of it lets you slingshot a shadow this is I think actually better than most of the ones that move your shadows like all your shadows one or two spaces because when you need to be moving your shadows usually you want to be moving them a lot of spaces this is the only Shadow card without a loss that helps you transition your shadows from one room into another so at level two I took deepening Despair and it was okay but I think I would push you more towards Restless Spirits let's talk about deepening despair to start off with I wanted another card that was that felt like a nice payoff for putting a lot of Shadows into play but it was a real pain actually to have an enemy adjacent to two different shadows and being able to attack them from infinite distance was usually not that important by the time I'd got two Shadows down next to that person anyway so that additional kind of infinite range perk just seemed a little weird here I think if you're very clever and you set this up this is very good in those like spawning scenarios which there are a number of and you kind of like post up in a corner drop a bunch of Shadows on that you know spawn spot and then it's easy to detect them from wherever you are I think that's kind of where this card most shines um and that is neat and you do feel really clever when you do it but it was more work to trigger this than I kind of had had anticipated um and it's really only an okay attack when you do so um the bottom of this card doing this like teleporting thing again in certain scenarios this is just a cheat to win card if you have you know the right shadow in this certain spot um lets your allies go from here to there if it's a sha it's a scenario where you really need to move um or you know one of these like escape from the falling ruin kind of scenarios there aren't that many of them but when there's something like that um this card can just absolutely shine uh but most of the time I don't think it's worth playing it as a loss card so you've got this kind of conditional top with a conditional loss card on the the bottom not as exciting as I as I as I wanted it to be I thought the top was maybe going to be a little bit easier to deal with um so instead I would recommend going the Restless Spirits path um doing three attack and a curse is okay but the fact that if you are you know and it's a melee attack as well but the fact that it can be a six attack if you're standing in the right position on one of your shadows um means that this card just has a much higher upside and at least a passable normal side on the top the Bottom's also kind of fun moving a shadow up to four hex's like I said I think moving one Shadow many spaces is better than moving all your shadows a little bit of distance so it kind of just gives you another option for doing that but the fact that this also gives you the option of just yeting that shadow into an enemy for three points of damage um on a bottom allows you to actually play a little bit more versatile vers more with more versatility um in those Shadows so I'd run Restless Spirits if I hit level two again at this class I think both of the cards at level three are pretty respectable and one is kind of the melee and one is kind of the ranged version but I think that you can sort of take the one that just feels like where you want the Gap um like I said I think probably the most fun I would have with this class is by playing a hybrid of melee and range so I would look where I need to shore on my weaknesses and focus on that so it kind of depends on what I took at second level and what kinds of cards I'm taking with me into this scenario um but let's start by talking about deadbolt deadbolts a totally respect a attack that lets you throw some curse on enemies it's definitely a lot harder to come by curses in Frost Haven than it is otherwise so if you're playing a party that cares about curses deadbolt might be a little bit more exciting moving all your shadows up to three hex's is a lot more Mobility for your shadows than you really have um otherwise the the distance we're talking about here you actually can sort of Move Your Shadow Army from one one room into another so I do think that that is a a very nice option I took ritual sacrifice because the idea um I did have some you know I was playing in in four player so when I have like a call to the abyss and there's some occasions where you have kind of a meat grinder and ritual sacrifice could be I mean in theory up to an attack eight yeah but that never really happened but it could be another Attack 5 six s um basically this is just another strength of the Abyss in some ways uh it's a little bit more Niche than that but also you can do it as an okay attack even early on in the scenario by throwing a um uh an eclipse down in any situation surrounding an enemy with it you can get an attack six right off the bat which is pretty good 13 initiative obviously really great too and then the bottom of this is It's not that common that you're going to eat some Shadows so that you can um throw a bunch of shields on people but if you uh paid attention to my other guides you might know that I was playing kind of like with a a tank based build and so having the ability to um eat some Shadows throw some shields on on someone actually gave me some additional versatility so ritual sacrifice was very very good for me even though I wasn't really playing primarily a melee build um because like I said I think dancing between melee and range is a nice choice and you can't go wrong with either card here all right um I played fleeting dusk I don't think I ever used the top ability it's a much better version of the squiggly arms attack out of our shadow um than the other ones but it is a lost card however I took fleeing dusk for the bottom just to generate those additional Shadows I was already bumping into these problems of just needing more and more Shadows so being able to drop them in play made a big difference to me um so if you're finding that level of frustration for me that's the take I wouldn't go back and change it however I do want to talk about how pulled across I think can be very good for this class um by focusing on the bottom the move to and invisibility if you really are focusing on that melee build kind of gives you that strike from the Shadows um kind of thing and this class is is paper right so aside from your one kind of get out of jail teleport ability you need ways to get out of enemy attack radi radi even if um you yourself are going to be in melee so having the ability to move and go invisible is nice especially if on the subsequent turn you're going to be long resting attacking an invisibility on a really low initiative bad initiative card like this um means that you're going to want to pair it with something that does go really fast I think most of the time get the maximum value out of it um the top of this I'm pretty low on Bane and frost Haven I understand that they needed to move away from the auto kill things but the it waiting for a turn and um every once in a while a stupid Shaman like throwing a heal towards an enemy um it it just doesn't 10 points of damage is nice but it requires 10 points of damage in the specific Condition it's a lost card the enem is going to get to attack again it's fun to pull off but I don't think that it uh it does quite enough for me to think that it's it's worth it as a l card level five is not one of these classes where it's like sort of a defining class structure in fact both of these cards are melee cards so they're kind of going to push you in that certain direction um I took dominate uh the idea of a six attack disarm was just too much to to pass up on um and costs you one of your shadows I guess technically you could argue this is r because you attack out of your your shadows so you could say the flexibility of that um but honestly I played this card a lot just for the move four and the decent initiative at the bottom so I mixed between those two for when it mattered or if I had the appropriate time to to use the dark it's a little funny to put a disarm on something that does so much damage because you're kind of just hoping to wipe that enemy straight out but you know there's plenty of guys in Frost Haven with just big beefy hit points and throw this on an Alo guard or whatever and you're going to be pretty happy with that so dominate does nice work medium on the other hand which I did not get to play um attacks for a little bit less and you still want that dark in order to attack for a little bit more this is leans more into the feast or famine side of this card you know you want to be able to kill somebody if you do kill them wonderful you get to get another Shadow along the way um the nice thing about medium is that it actually allows you to get your Shadow Generation started and rolling you don't need Shadow Generation to make this card good and so one of the things that I I think makes medium a little bit higher is if you have a way or a friend who generates dark that you can use um you could use this on turn one and maybe go later in the initiative try to finish off an enemy that someone has softened up for you get a shadow into play and not have to use one of those lost cards to do it which is pretty cool the bottom of this card too is a interesting way of playing this class allowing you to just constantly move your shadows with you this fully fixes your mobility issues of having to dance between moving shadows and moving yourself and then suddenly you can do all the things with this class so I I um was appropriately lambasted on the banner spear video for being concerned about um just the the moves for the explosive epicenter and I I I'm happy to walk back that mistake um and here I think I'm going to say that the bottom of this card I think is going to be very good for people who are playing um a kind of death Walker that needs to be moving a fair amount especially in the right scenarios where there a fair amount of movement required um and keeping your shadows up with you in a lot of ways the level six cards are a little bit more how are you designing your class defining I think than the level five cards were vengeful storm on the left um you get to gobble up shadows and shoot a whole bunch of people if you gobble them up um I generally didn't want to be gobbling them up that much because I already had you know strength of the abyss and things like that that wanted to use a whole bunch of Shadows that were in play but if you're finding yourself with over excessive Shadow Generation you're amazing at generating Shadows this is a very fun way to just pincushion people um as as you're as you're fighting the problem that I found with this or like with these kinds of abilities is that you needed those Shadows within range of yourself so presumably you've been killing people but if you've been killing people then there aren't that many people left to Target and so the dream scenarios of vengeful storm are few and far between um I also you know I'm not a big fan of lost cards um that being said a loss card that can wound and stun multiple people around a circle if you kill someone uh with your top ability they turn into a shadow and then every enemy within that like surrounded by them gets stunned is actually pretty nasty um you also just can not use this for that ability but speculating on playing this as a potential loss card I think actually is pretty spicy it's one of the losses that I'm a little bit more excited to play that being said I took Knight takes shape um um it's not often that I'm next to two Shadows but I like a big beefy minion a big beefy resummon minion um that yeah they enemies have disadvantage to attack it so it's going to last for a little while this was a lot of fun to put into play and I did find myself in situations where I would kind of have wiped out a room of bad guys and there's just a pile of Shadows there and I can't move all of them with me into the next room so turning two of them into a shadow horror was pretty cool also I think the art on that is absolutely rad so that one my approval otherwise um the other thing I'll say is that the bottom of this card while only really being okay it's basically move somewhere and attack three um is thematically just looks neat when you play this card for the first time and you shove one of your shadows and you teleport to that spot and disappear and attack somebody your friends are probably going to be like what are you doing so Night Take Shape was a lot of fun and for that reason alone I would recommend taking it Haim Mai I wish i' played level seven cuz these are the most exciting level seven cards I think I've seen on any class um you can notice that my enthusiasm for death Walker Rises as the levels go up and I think that's a reflection of what the cards are doing because it's not just make shadows and then kind of pay off with the Shadows there's something a little bit more unique in the structure of the level UPS let's talk about proliferation of the Abyss which is just kind of bizarre um first of all if you have some Knight you get to make another Shadow hoay but then ially for you know as long as you want this ability to be going for you can prevent damage with your shadows to you or Allies um only once you'll discard this card after you do it but it just kind of sits out there until you use it it's that same sort of like teleport and prevent a hit thing that you had before but you can use it for a friend as well I think this is pretty nice um there's by the time you're level seven there's a lot of monsters in this game that uh being able to cancel their attacks like is just pretty nice um I think Frost Haven compared to other Haven has a lot more kind of like walloping moments rather than Death By A Thousand Cuts moments and uh in a two-player game especially I would be leaning towards doing proliferation of the Abyss this again kind of counters an enemy's turn um at you know the expense of Your Action but um you have a lot of flexibility with it whereas your enemy is just kind of running on that robot mode the AI uh where sometimes they're going to whiff and sometimes they're going to hit and you get to know when it matters most and I think that's really really significant here the bottom here is also totally respectable a move that moves your shadows um I say it's respectable but I want to up my my my rating of that I complained about the mobility issues with this class of being able to move while moving my shadows and this card does both of those um and actually moves a fair amount especially if you have that Knight to use as well so I think proliferation gives you a lot of options don't think I said proliferation right there hungry gasps is thematically very fun again sort of horrible monsters coming out of the Shadow thing um two attack threes is fine for a level seven card it's okay um I don't think it's the most exciting but it definitely hits hard enough to be fun and the polling is quite good in Frost Haven lots of classes care about that so I think this one depends more on your friends than it does uh on anything else really the bottom of this card is hilarious um generally a lost heal is not something that people are doing but you can generate upwards of 15 heal and five bless in the absolute perfect situations uh with hungry grasps which is pretty funny um you can just pile them all in the same tanky level seven person if they're really hurt and they're just surrounded by Shadows somehow and that's probably worth a lost card in there both of these level seven cards are just rocking uh I but I think I I think in two-player I'm definitely taking proliferation hungry grasps it it depends on my friends I looked at these cards at first and I made a snap decision I'm pretty sure my snap decision is actually wrong I'm going to start off by talking about lashing tendrils which is the one I downplayed in my head I read the top I said it's a lost card with like conditional retaliate retaliates kind of so so in Haven games but the more I thought about it the more I actually really like this ability um you and your allies have a decent amount of control about when you end on shadows and persistent retaliate to range two probably Stacks up a fair amount of damage in the right scenario if you were playing with someone in your party and the party happened to be someone who was like defensive and like hurt enemies for attacking them or anything like that it might even be more exciting so I think that lashing tendrils absolutely could work in the right group um but not to mention the bottom is pretty respectable Moving Two Shadows up to three hexes we've already seen a number of cards that move our shadows so that's not the most exciting but if you move them kind of in tandem with each other and Surround an enemy with creepy Shadows they take three damage or five damage five damage on the bottom of a card is a lot so I think lashing tendal is probably the choice that I would make at this level Frozen in fear is not going to be awesome all the time but the times that it does hit it's going to hit hard um a uh pin immobilize an immobilize to enemies that are surrounding a shadow um is a variable use most of the time your shadows are going to be somewhere where enemies are already in melee but if you have a situation where you do have some enemies that are uh not in melee but they are melee monsters and you're able to pin them like you could have multiple people essentially miss their turns with this immobilize ability throw a little damage on them as well hoay I just think that most of the time the setup for this is going to not work out as well as you want it to um so the times that it works it's going to be a huge game changer but I think a lot of times it's just going to be eh fine and then the bottom of this card is a loss so with a top that I think requires conditional situations and a bottom that's a loss card I I would be lean towards taking the lashing tendrils instead um but it's worth noting the bottom of this card is uh is sort of like a it's basically like another eclipse right um puts two and sends them out shooting in various directions so another ability to just sort of cash out I think this class has a lot of like cash out either in the beginning or at the end um losses to like throw out shadows and and start going crazy uh which is which is I mean it's basically the structure of how it goes level 9 has a card that's hilarious and a card that's hilarious um when your time comes is the sort of if you ever played the old Diablo The Necromancer the body bomb thing or whatever um you choose somebody and then when they die they explode and do damage to people I think traditionally in the Haven games these effects have not been as powerful as they seem they just seem more fun than anything else I do really appreciate the attack on an attack here as well and it doesn't dictate that you have to attack the same person it's a separate attack uh you might want to to soften them up or you might explicitly not um or frankly you can kill them with the attack uh it's only an attack too but maybe you can finish them off so they explode unfortunately if you do you don't get the curse on them which is a little goofy but um that's a really fun ability I don't think that it's amazing and I probably am going to end up choosing black lance here but I do dig the theming of it a fair amount the bottom here is another way to generate Shadows but you need to have enemies dying and you need to have um dark in order to to do it I don't think you're going to be generating dark quite enough for this to it's not like you're going to be playing multiple per turn I don't know that I want to be using a level 9 loss card as just sort of like a generation of Shadows that's what my dumb level one loss card is for so it gets a lot more Shadow shadows in play quicker um but I think if I'm taking when your time comes it's because I'm planning on playing the top kind of repeatedly uh black lands on the other hand is an awesome payoff card uh you get to charge through a couple shadows and then for every shadow you can stab someone for a bunch of damage doing something like 10 or whatever attack is just absolutely hilarious if you have the setup for it I also just love the theme of running through the shadows and making this gigantic long Shadow spear so theme alone wins me on black lance and the bottom of the card is okay too it feels like one of those uh cards that was designed for mind Thief back in in Gloom Haven uh but they probably gave it to mine Thief at level one so it's only appropriate for it to be a level 9 card uh for any Frost Haven character which is fair generates some dark pretty fast initiative black lance I think is is pretty flexible both top and bottom um in a way that makes it really hard for me to say no to that card all right let's talk masteries this top one remov seven shadow in one round I spent only about 45 seconds trying to figure out how to do it and I couldn't do it and I gave up I I'm pretty sure it requires you to have a card that removes a bunch of Shadows in one turn so you get rid of five of them a ongoing ability that lets you remove a shadow maybe you're like block and teleport to a shadow that's six but you also needed to generate a new one with your super attack and then there's some other way to get a seventh probably with a similar type of thing that seems like a lot of work um and I mean it's a Mastery that's fair but it also seems like you need the right cards to make it work uh so maybe I miss missed it that you actually can do it with sort of the base level one cards but I actually think that you need some Like A specific group of cards in order to make this work um on the other hand the bottom one I think is definitely pretty doable placing or removing at least one Shadow each round is very in your wheelhouse you probably are starting with something like a uh one of the abilities that just generates these over the course of the game it's probably easier in a four-player game if you've got like call to the abyss up and Your Friends Are helping you to do this so the bottom Mastery requires persistence um and dedication you're also probably hoping for a shorter round this is going to be easier in one of those King of the Hill scenarios where enemies are constantly spawning and coming at you you don't have to move to them uh to ensure that you are either making more Shadows or uh you know cashing them out to to make attacks every turn so I think in the right scenario especially those small room scenarios um small single room type of places you're going to you're going to be able to pull off the second Mastery a lot more easily for the most part the perks are uh some of the more boring perks honestly that I've seen in Frost Haven that doesn't mean bad in fact it kind of means the opposite um because you just make a pretty good attack deck and this this class is constantly attacking so having a good attack modifier deck well well worth your time just removing some negatives along the way making that better always always good um you know if you played the original Haven games they don't have a structure like this for most of the characters so this is just straight improving your deck and you could play this class just straight improving your deck and be pretty happy with it toying around with random curse cards is nice and fun but I don't like when my attack modifier deck has a random curse card in it because I end up killing enemies and then they end up not getting cursed anyway generating additional dark is great if you are taking cards that want that dark thing it's nice to just incidentally have that and you're like oh now I can play this card this turn if I want to I was going to play it later but I have the option to play it now and that's pretty sweet I do really actually quite like a muddle and AR rolling modifier so I think these are fun to put in there I talked in another class about how much I think healing allies on a rolling modifier is actually quite good this is a nice way to just throw off random wounds and poisons I don't know why this is on this class in particular um but I would happily throw this in a in a deck um if I'm helping people out I probably would focus mostly on the attacking side but this is worth I think putting there um somewhere in the middle I'm not generally a big fan of the ignore scenario effects perks myself obviously lots of scenarios where bad things happen it's a chilly place this Frost Haven um lots of annoying things that happen that way but um I'm a little bit more come see comea and I'd Rather Make Myself by default look awesome I don't like when it doesn't do anything in a scenario but maybe you just like it good for you um that whenever you long rest you can move one Shadow up to three hex's I was not a big fan of because this class can get away with short resting a fair amount and often times I did so having this be sort of way wasted just felt really unfortunate but I did complain about how hard it was to move Shadows so uh pairing it with a long rest is pretty respectable if you're feeling that frustration um I don't recommend taking both of these it feels like you're just kind of competing with yourself or what sort of rest you're taking and this is I don't generally love these short rests eat a um element ones that there are on a lot of the classes but this is a pretty nice one a muddle and a curse they go hand in hand with each other um and you actually have probably decent range with it from where your Shadow is and um if you're short resting there's a good chance you're in Conflict already so I like this one more than I like a bunch of the other ones um but we've gotten to the one that I think is really the most important this is the one that I think makes the melee build viable and is just frankly really good even if you're not the melee build um making it so that enemies have disadvantage while attacking you for a shadow with just one tick mark I think this is one that you should be picking up early uh even if you're not going to be getting into the mix that much like I said I do recommend doing sort of like a hybrid of the melee and the ranged uh while playing this class I think it's probably the most fun way to play it and give yourself that flexibility of what you're going to do with those Shadows along the way that's going to bring us to the end of the death Walker I'm sure that part of my experience is covered by the fact that maybe I wasn't just wasn't very good at playing it um I just I I I also felt like this class was good it's just I didn't like that it was either really bad or either like very very good um it just didn't feel consistent and that lack of consistency I found to be frustrating um rather than fun when it was successful when it was successful it felt like the class was working correctly um and I had spent the time sort of like making the Shadows using the Lost cards you know having those turns where I'm not doing quite as much in order to have the turns where I'm getting paid off um in a lot of ways playf flow felt like The Drifter for me right where it's like you're setting something up but in this case it's Shadows rather than managing those little tracks um and then kind of cashing out to to pay those play those along the way but there was something about managing the movement of these pieces throughout that just ended up it felt more taxing rather than successful um in a lot of instances and it's a shame because there are a lot of really cool thematic cards uh in this class it just didn't land with me as well as it did with hopefully some of you um hope you enjoyed thanks for watching this video this brings us me to the the end of my my four class sessions so I'm G to have to do something like this again so I can uh get acquainted with the other classes and and make some more videos along the way but it's been really fun to take the winter break to return to frost Haven hope you enjoyed these videos um if in case you haven't already throw me a like And subscribe I'd appreciate that have a wonderful night everybody ciao

Channel: Phoenicks

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Id: go7c5y6iZJk

Length: 50min 53sec (3053 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 12 2024