UPDATED Frosthaven Geminate full review

hey everyone welcome to my geminate video this one was a really long one because of all of the cards so please stick with it there's a lot to go through with this video and i've tried to go through it as quick as possible but i also like to try and go as in-depth as possible for you guys so yeah this one's a long one if you do enjoy it you know the drill please do like and subscribe it really helps me out here on youtube on growing the channel and i've got many more frost having guides and gloomhaven guides left to go and i'll be doing a video like this on every single starting character for frost haven so i've done the death walk already this is my second one with the gemini and we'll be doing the other ones in the upcoming week so stay tuned for those i also stream regularly on twitch at twitch.tv slash manage request where i stream every monday wednesday and sunday so come hang out talk gloomhaven maybe play some gloomhaven with me on sundays and yeah just have a good old time okay i'm not going to take too long with this one because we take long enough in the video so let's get straight into the geminate so the geminate one of the starting classes from frost dave and one of the more complex one you can see there is five pips which is the max complexity uh on the scale it's got elemental affinities of fire ice and light so those the elements that this character cares about and you've got uh kind of a pretty balanced um kind of uh scale here on on all of the different sort of roles within the game so you've got melee ranged defense and control all fairly prevalent their mobility as well with support being slightly lower compared to the other ones there so this shows you that this character is a little bit of a jack of all trades this character has definitely got a lot of different things going on with it and it's not necessarily going to be a one-dimensional character so the unique mechanic that the gemini has is actually has 14 cards but it has these 14 cards across two different hands so you have your melee or what i like to say the left side of your brain if you like and you have the range which is like the right side and you can see they're delineated by the two different symbols what this means is that you can only play cards from your melee form when you are in melee form and you can only play cards from your ranged form your right side when you are in ranged form and what you do is over the course of the kind of game you will switch states you will switch between these two sides this is to kind of like represent the hive mind essentially of this character you've got kind of two kind of battling minds within you and uh the harewa kind of figures are these bug-like figures are made up of many many insects so the way this kind of like thematically sits is that you kind of got a warring brain if you like you know and you're trying to manage these two different forces that are trying to make you go different ways uh the way that uh switching switching states works is that whenever you play a switching state you then essentially switch at the end of your turn so you're only ever going to play two cards on your turn of the stage you're currently in one of those two cards may actually have the switch state symbol on them in which case it kind of works like an element after your turn is done you would then be considered to be switched into the other state and then on the next turn you would obviously start in the new state and you'll be selecting cards for that your discard pile is combined so all of your cards go into your discard pile when you start the game you can start the game in whichever one you would like and also when you long rest you can also switch forms during a long rest sort of as a as a freebie so if you do long rest you can now there are a few things that have changed with this uh it used to be i think that you couldn't switch forms during long rests and it used to be a bit of a concern that this character you could in theory exhaust yourself very quickly because if you only had cards in your hand for the left side and you had no way to switch to the right side to the range side from the melee then you would have this sort of issue where you were just exhausted because you wouldn't be able to play that no longer isn't really the case you're always going to be able to long rest because of that joined discard i mean that may have always been the case but i think it's worth clarifying here because i think that was like a common misconception that i certainly had when i first started reading this character about how it kind of actually works so essentially you can't really exhaust yourself unless you are i guess really uh really unfortunate but still you are you have that option of long resting to be able to switch forms to then be able to uh to play the other cards from the other side it may however affect your ability to short rest which is kind of important so it's worth uh worth bearing that in mind as well another kind of sub mechanic that this character has is precise range or precision range if you like which means a lot of our ranged abilities which rule on our right side in our ranged form they will actually have targets but they will stipulate an exact range so all targets must be at this range or within these two ranges if you have a look at the example here it's target three but only within range four and five which means that the target three is obviously very powerful a target three attack is great however it might be a bit more difficult for you to position yourself to actually get uh those kind of enemies four and five distance away one of them might be two for example one of them might be four and the other one might be three so therefore you have to kind of move around to try and uh capture as many enemies within those range ranges as you like uh one thing i will say about this character is not only is it kind of a little bit difficult but also this character is by far in my opinion from the ones that i've seen so far and i've looked at the one that requires the most pre-planning uh compared to any of the others so if you're going to be playing this character not only do i think you need to plan kind of many turns ahead in terms of what it is you're going to be physically playing but you also need to plan your build and your level ups very early on as well because this character definitely has some payoff cards that come later on that might require you to take cards at lower levels in order to enable them higher on and there's certainly some things that you unlock later that make it easier for you in terms of the form switching and some of your element generation things and stuff that we'll get into this character i absolutely really really encourage people that if you are considering playing this character then please do look at all of the cards all the way up to level nine and have an idea of like what you're going to do and what you would like to try and achieve with the character because if you pick a card at level two and then you know you pick a different character card level three and then level four and you you don't have this kind of concise idea in your mind of how you want to play i think it could end up being a bit of a mess another important thing to mention is about the hand size with this character so you have a hand size of 14 kind of technically however really you have two sets of seven and you must always have when you start a scenario two sets of seven you can't imbalance your cards into the melee form or the range form so you couldn't say take 10 cards from the from the left side and then only take four cards from the right that's not how this works you have to take seven and seven and this is important because obviously when you're leveling up when you level up you have the option of either a melee left or arranged right okay so you're gonna have to make those decisions and if you obviously go for melee melee melee every time you level up that means that when you do switch to your ranged form you will have your weaker effects or your level one cards there so there's definitely some kind of balance going on there and i think you will probably want to mix in cards from either side maybe not equally entirely but certainly you might want to um consider doing that just so that you're not useless maybe when you're in the uh the other form maybe when you're in the uh the other form one observation that wasn't obvious when i first started looking at the cards is that actually all of our xp gain for this character is tied to our burn cards and the use of the elements which generally means we have to use burn cards to kick those elements so this is a character where you are definitely encouraged and you kind of have to burn cards otherwise you really aren't going to progress at all in terms of leveling up with this character so if you want to get let's say on average 10 to 12 xp in a scenario you really need to burn through those cards so i feel like there's gonna be some good opportunities for this character to burn them maybe not for the maximum amount of value whereas other characters may consider holding some cards back to try and get the maximum value i think obviously that would be great to do if you can but actually this character you're going to need to burn cards in order to progress and level up so perhaps you need to look for those opportunities where it's still maybe worth it and not feel too bad about it either when you are burning cards because it is just part and parcel of this character and it is how you're going to progress with starting health of eight this character starts with medium amount of health that is in the mid-range four characters not the lowest and not the highest that you can get and this character does have a little bit of tanking potential through some of their cards which we'll go into okay so let's have a look at the cards so we're going to have a lot to go through because of the starting hand size of this character that means we have 14 cards at level one that we need to uh pick basically but also we have all of the additional x cards as well so this character has a lot of cards to go through initially and then you have your regular two cards at every level up so level one's obviously very important so we'll try and get through these a bit quick so that we can kind of really get stuck into the other more important things later on down the line one thing that this character also has and this is something that i've noticed is this character has quite a lot of burn cards which is probably pretty representative of the fact that they have such a large hand size this does mean that i've noticed that the burns are not maybe as powerful as as you might expect so some burn effects you other characters get especially characters that have smaller hand sizes their burns tend to be quite impactful and they're quite big and powerful whereas i've noticed that on the geminate character these seem to be a little bit more underwhelming but i think it's important to mention that now and in the vacuum of the fact that while this character has so many cards that you can't afford to burn more and i think that's been considered here uh with this character so the first card is icebound quills which is attack five with ps1 and we can consume ice to add an additional plus one attack and plus one pierce for one xp and it is one xp and it is a burn so this is maybe an attack six with ps2 which is not an amazing amazing attack however for a burn this is pretty decent the ps2 as well potentially that you could get will make this very relevant as you level up and will still mean that you can do some damage and even at low levels you still come up against enemies that have some shield here or there so it's a big attack for sure so it's not bad but it's not great by any means either however we've got 14 initiative here which is uh really important and we've got shield and retaliate on the bottom here which is also pretty decent for this kind of initiative so this is a kind of a little bit of a sub theme this character gets we do get a few sort of shielding and tanking options as we as we go along and uh this is not a bad one on 14 health if you don't need to move then this uh this is quite good uh we will be going through all of the melee form first so that's the way the pdf's been ordered but we'll go through all the way through all of the melee side and then we'll go through the range so as we go through so ice band quotes i think is is pretty fine the 14 initiative means that it's going to be useful as just to move to quite a lot of the time as well and this is okay it's a little bit underwhelming obviously because we have to start in the right spot to be able to attack something because we'll be in our melee form in this point of time so that does mean that we need to be able to start our turn next to an enemy to hit them most likely or be planning to do something else with our top packaging so iceman calls is just okay i think it's nothing amazing but it's just fine uh next up we have draining pincers which is attack three consume light to gain advantage and this could be uh like quite a nice little aoe here three in a row this is similar to like a spear you might have seen this for a few different characters like the brutal level one this is a little bit better though i think the advantage here really puts this over the edge if you have advantage then you're pretty happy the thing is though is that advantage is it is decent at level one however you still have some pretty bad cards in your deck so an advantage draw might you might still draw like two minus ones or a minus two and a minus one or a miss and a minus two right there's still some some bad draws that you can get so you can't really abuse advantage in the very very early levels but once you get some perks maybe you can improve your deck then things do get a bit easier but like i said again this is another burn so this is typically a card that you would not see a burn on i think for other characters then this would not be a burn um i absolutely think you want to consume the the light here to get the advantage i think that makes a lot of sense for this one not so much for this one i think this is obviously nice to be able to consume the uh the ice to be able to get the plus one and the plus one pierce but to be honest five attack and one pierce might be enough uh against a lot of enemies at level one uh however this is is i think more essential just because of the fact it's a slightly lower attack and also the fact that you're targeting three you're gonna get a lot of value from the advantage 72 initiative is bad for an attack effect generally speaking so that's not that's not really good we have a move three and jump and we have a switch form so this is a a form swap and i feel i feel like this is the best position for this kind of effect you're gonna want it on the bottom of a card and you're gonna probably want it as part of a move because then it allows you to set up to be in the right position for your next form and this is what we're talking about with planning so even though you're not going to be you know playing cards from the ranged form this round you do definitely need to have in your mind okay what kind of cards would i like to play next round and uh what cards are they going to be and what position do i want to be in i feel like this card here is an absolute role player this is going to be like a key key thing to ensure that you can keep switching states when you want to and switching your forms so this is just super important and i think um just for this fact here this card is an auto include for sure and this is like an okay attack that maybe you'll get you'll get done towards the end but you have to be careful of course because if you were to burn this card for its top you're losing this part of the card right so there are there's definitely some things you need to be careful about because if you burn all of your switch forms from one form then you have to long rest to switch forms and that could really slow you down and upset your tempo of play so there's definitely some some pitfalls to be careful of here next card is hornet stingers which the top is attack one ps3 with poison really nice aoe though if you have look this is i really like some of the aoes that this character gets because they're just a little bit different compared to what we're used to seeing attack one with ps3 as well this should be quite exciting because what this means is that this this level one attack is actually gonna scale the problem with attack one is usually like yeah it feels okay at level one but then once you kind of start getting into like your your level starts increasing the enemies start getting shield and then it just sort of completely drops off and it feels really bad but what this ps3 does is it kind of ensures that this card still stays pretty relevant and with a good card flip you have the opportunity to do some damage it's still only an attack one but perhaps you can actually do some damage with this the poison is of course great as well definitely worth an attack one if you could poison two or three things here i think you're you're very happy four things you're over the moon you're ecstatic the real downside though is this this piece of text here which is target all allies in the red hexes of the attack abilities you can poison your allies here similar to a uh a certain unlockable class from gloomhaven and that is a substantial drawback it is this character does have access to some heels so we will have some ways to maybe um remove that from our allies but this is a pretty substantial drawback so you've got to be careful but i feel like the the upside of this is worth it you've also got switch states here which is as we know is going to be very important mechanic and it's going to be a you know a big deal so we need to make sure we keep an eye on those and how many we include for me this is this is actually pretty decent i think i'll probably be playing hornet stingers 23 initiative as well is is a is a good place for this kind of attack hopefully uh we can the enemy kind of ends up forming up in this kind of uh situation and we can go in and we can we can do this with 23. the bottom of this is move three with all attacks targeting you this round gain disadvantage i don't think this is a hugely great effect i think this is sometimes slightly overrated but this character does have a bit of a tanking sub theme going on and if you do decide to go down that route if you combine this with maybe shield like shield one shield two then actually uh this could mitigate quite a bit of damage over uh of course of us uh around but the thing you have to be careful of is this advantage does not guarantee that you don't take damage there's still a chance that the enemy draws times two and a plus two together you know or two plus ones there's still bad draws out there for you so it can help but it's um yeah it's not pure damage mitigation always but i think that this is like fine and it's nice that it's tagged onto a move three because move three is going to be useful on 23 initiative anyway i think hornet stingers is a is a slam dunk pick and also this is a non-burn top which is something we we want to look out for a couple of non-burn cards to keep keep us going too next up we have changeling's boon which is attack two and then attack two again on forty initiative this uh is sneaky good mainly because of the enhancement dots that we have here purposefully it's quite funny that they've decided to ensure that we can't fully choose it but this means that we can uh enhance this with a plus one if we like this one actually opens it up so that we can enhance negative conditions so we could enhance poison or wound or anything like that in this uh or curse potentially i mean the cost for adding like things like that might be quite expensive now we don't actually know how much enhancements are going to cost or how enhancements are going to be done but we know that they're nerfing a lot of the potential because they want people to to maybe make better use out of the plus ones and not to just rush to to buy the most broken enhancement on an aoe for example but this is uh this is obviously a very uh very good one for that kind of thing this feels to me like a really good potential for enhancement this particular hex so keep an eye on that but yeah attack two attack two that's always gonna be good especially against a poisoned enemy and we know that we have a ways to poison enemies so if we can poison an enemy then we can hit them for this this two turns into a three this two turns into a three and it's a very very strong attack 40 initiative is not great though so that is a bit of a knock against this top attack but we have bless um self another enhancement dot here so in theory we could enhance this with strengthen but this is a burn and there's not usually many burns that you you end up enhancing because it's just you sort of throw money at something that you can only play once in a scenario it's not so great but what this says is at the end of each of our turns we may consume an element to create fire or light so this is kind of like a new symbol for elements which says either or so this is fire or light so if you see them combined in this in this way it's basically just saying one or the other and then switch states importantly this card goes out into your active area so it is a burn it is an active thing and you basically get this for the rest of the game you do not get this for the rest of the round this only happens on the turn you play the card and then on in the active area it only does this and then you obviously can choose the end of each of your turns including the turn that you played it blessing yourself is going to be great i think and if you if you did put a strength on that if you had all of the gold and it was possible i guess it would be even better but but i think this card's kind of okay it depends really on what your party is now the way that the elements work for this character is that the um the melee left-hand side cares a lot more about ice and the right hand side the range side cares a lot more about fire and they both kind of equally use light so lights kind of the element that goes between the two and fits between the two so what this is actually doing is this is actually giving you a way to improve the range side of your uh character not your melee side so that is important this is something that you're burning but it's on your melee side but actually it's gonna be hopefully helping out your range side and i think that's just like a way for you to obviously not burn as many ranged cards you're going to be burning your melee cards as actives and keeping your ranged cards for your attacks and your damage and things like that i think that this is a it's an interesting card it's gonna very much come down to your party though if there's elements kicking about left and right then you can use it there's also some sort of upside here where if you're against certain types of enemies that if they were to consume an element on their turn that can be super super bad for you so i'm thinking night demons wind demons there are some that when they just consume it it's just awful even sun demons for example it's just it can be really really bad so this just gives you the opportunity to maybe steal an element away from a problematic enemy as well so it's not a super super relevant and i don't think you would play a card just for that reason but it's worth mentioning certainly there's going to be a couple of occasions when you'll want you're going to want just one of these two elements maybe once or twice over the course of a scenario next up we have reckless jab which is attack two and then we have optional effects here so we can wound ourselves to add disarm which is very very powerful disarm is now pretty much as good as it gets stun is the best effect obviously in the game that you can do to an enemy but they've definitely made both dasam and stun much more premium and cost lots more both in terms of being burns rather than replayable and downsides and drawbacks as you can see wounding yourself is a pretty substantial drawback for adding this however i still think it's very very good being able to disarm an enemy is often the same as stunning them and it is often as good as just taking them completely out for a round so we can also poison ourselves if we like to do the do the double dirty and we get plus two so we're gonna attack for four now if the enemy is poisoned already of course then this could be an additional uh you know we've already gained plus one so this could be an attack of five you know four or five potentially with disarm that's really really strong so reckless jab to me is is a slam dunk card 38 initiative is really bad for this kind of effect though because obviously an enemy has had a chance to act and realistically whenever you're playing disarm or stuns and we've got a stun on this card too which we'll get to realistically you want to go as early as possible because you want to find the troublesome enemy for the round and take them out sometimes you do want to do these things a little bit late because you want to see how the board progresses and then maybe disarm them for the future turn but of course then a lot of enemies have things that don't attack they might just heal or do something like that so you have to be a little bit careful with going late on a disarm because you could disarm them for a round where actually they weren't going to attack anyway so you have those kind of problems so really disarm is a premium effect that you want early in a round i would say and 38 doesn't really do that for you the bomb is attack 4 and you can consume either ice or light to add stun and get 1xp that's obviously very very powerful to be able to stun but it is a burn so attack four with stun potentially if you have the element and by the way i think you're only playing the bottom if you have the element i wouldn't be playing it otherwise unless it's literally life and death and you may win the scenario off the back of it i think i would really steer clear of just using it as an attack for one of the big problems with this though is its location on a card as well because it's on the bottom you're gonna have to either start in the right place or you're gonna have to find some sort of movement on the top of a card because you can't move and use it which does also severely nerf this kind of effect in my opinion so that's definitely worth uh talking about next we have dragged down which is attack two and immobilized and it has this cool little pattern here which i really like kind of arcing off from you uh you got the potential there to add another hex if you want to and this is pretty good attacking maybe one or two things here like these two i think is super relevant this guy obviously not so much because of the immobilize you might not want to move away or maybe you moved in to do it but i think being able to immobilize two things you know a hex away from you is obviously very good two hexes away from you is very very good so i like drag down it's also a switch state which sometimes it's hard to evaluate completely at the moment because i haven't quite got in my mind the sequencing and when you really really want to but certainly sometimes this might actually hurt you because you actually want to stay in your current state but you are forced to change states so there are some times when you might play this and go actually i would love to have followed up with something else but unfortunately i can't 34 initiative is not great again similarly similar to the other card it's really you want early for these kinds of control effects control effects always really want to be on early initiatives most of the time and the bomb is move four with jump and it's a burn but we've got disarm target two range one no other stipulations just we can do it and this is a really good inner pinch control you can then play this disarm a couple of enemies maybe do some attacks and then you can then use the next turn to follow up and do even more attacks as well so i really really like it i think we're not going to see the same tier of control that we saw in gloomhaven i think those days are gone that ship has sailed i'd be very surprised if we see unless a character is i guess particularly a specialist at it maybe an unlockable character that is particularly good at that element of the game i think it's very unlikely that we see uh aoe disarms uh on non-burns anymore and this could well be as good as it gets for us uh in frosthaven so i think you take it the move four and jump is also just super useful to ensure that you can definitely do this and get what you want so yeah i think uh drag down is an absolute auto include card and you're gonna be taking that so next up we have horn beetle carapace now this is like the first card that when i saw it i was like i'm getting a little bit excited so on your next four attacks add plus one attack if you are in melee form or plus two if you are in ranged form so this could be a lot of damage if you uh can use this in range remember though you can't choose this so this isn't you get to choose when you want to use it it's just your next four attacks so it's important that you sync this up but if you were for example use this with the move switch states right then suddenly we're into range state for the next turn and we can start you know using this straight away to get this plus to attack so i think this is actually really really good buff plus two against uh you know for four attacks you're definitely taking that that is great great value so yeah excellent it's also 20 initiative which is great which plays really well into this bottom effect so we have move one which is underwhelming but at least it's something you can always maybe use a pair of boots or there is an enhancement door here and then you've got shield one consume ice to add another shield and you get one xp so when played right and you can get ice this could actually be a move one shield two which i think is excellent at level one like truly excellent that is um a really good tanking card early in the game a lot of enemies are gonna struggle to get through to shield and do substantial damage to you the only problem that this character has and you may have started to notice it already or maybe not is the element generation on this character is sparse to say the least you don't do a lot of self-generation you do have a few big burns that will generate an element for you but most of the time you are reliant on your allies kind of generating other elements and then you converting them into your elements so you kind of like steal what steel i guess well i guess kind of steel steel the element and you change into something that you need right and that's kind of thematic to what the character is trying to do so that's uh that's definitely an element so although this looks like hey this is really really good generating this ice is actually a lot harder than uh than maybe first appears so that is worth considering but very very strong i think you're still pretty happy with just move one and shield one uh in a melee form anyway a lot of the time next we have flailing tendrils which is attack one with muddle we can consume lights at plus one attack and then we have this crazy aoe again another really cool different style aoe here that just goes out in all different directions you can even enhance these three around here to make it even uh even crazier i don't think necessarily you really want to but maybe maybe you might but also here's the downside we target all allies in the red hexes of the attack ability and they get muddled so a little bit of a dirt tornado style effect going on here but this is a melee attack so it is uh considered to be and we have the opportunity here to maybe make it an attack too which i think is pretty decent when combined with something like this obviously each attack would be plus one so you might have an option like that i do think you want to use this in range to get this additional damage the model is the significantly less of a downside to your allies compared to poison compared to the last one that was poison however model at early levels can hurt players you know i wouldn't like to be an ally who gets muddled by this and then attempting to do a one big turn that could really hurt them the bomb is a wound target all allies and enemies at range two create fire and burn so realistically this is not a this is not a a great effect in my opinion uh for a burn for a burn i think this is actually very weak compared to what we may see with other characters yes you could wound quite a few things but this allies thing as well makes it really really awkward i think even if it didn't say allies here and it just said enemies i would probably still struggle to say this is a great value burn i can see what they've done by making the range 2 because they want to make it so that it's not just auto target allies you actually have some benefits for positioning but because it's on the bottom of a card again you're gonna have to be in a bit in the right position now the 12 initiative makes it possible maybe you go late the previous round move into the right position and then you use this so there is some sort of play there that you can do but i don't really think that this is representative what a good burn effect can be if you could wound three enemies i mean that's fine but it's really not great but it does generate fire which may be super super important for you which we'll get into because this is a very good element at times this is potentially not really worth it as a burn effect but i guess towards the end of a scenario for one xp and to create your element maybe it's worth it but this is this is strong so the last card we have in the melee form is whenever you kill one or more enemies during your turn you may switch forms or ignore any switch form icons at the end of that turn which is like really super awesome means that you can just ignore that switch from so you wanted to stay in a form great now this to me feels and i've got a history of this if you've seen any of my other videos i don't like the l i like to call them the lazy players cards and this to me feels a little bit lazy what i mean by that is that it it encourages you or it kind of gives you um if you like a free pass to not have to really engage maybe 100 with the mechanics of the character right it's now saying to you that hey actually if you kill an enemy you don't actually actually necessarily have to interact as much with that part of the character like if you're struggling with it or for whatever reason and i typically don't like those cards because i feel like they they just don't reward the in-depth strategy and the fun of playing a character to his mechanics but i understand that they need to exist because you know sometimes some players find it more difficult to play them and actually something like this could be quite fun now this card's slightly different in a way it's not quite full lazy card because there is a potential here that you could really try and focus on just one side and perhaps this would let you do that however because it's a melee side and it's a burn i would probably suggest that means that you're going to be focusing on the right side the range side not the melee side and that's kind of like the way that it is right because you're going to go down to only six cards by burning this on your melee side and you're going to have seven cards hopefully on your your right side your range side so that's the side you're probably going to end up focusing on it's interesting it might have some kind of like nice kind of combo potential and some strange builds and some fun things you can do with it i'm sure however for me it just kind of like it doesn't really excite me as somebody who wants to play around with the switching of the states and really get my teeth into that mechanic the bottom here is loot one with all adjacent allies and enemies suffering one damage this is like my least favorite loot effect you can decline the bottom here importantly you can just do the loop one that's why this little line is here that's delineating that they're two separate kind of actions in the same ability if you like so two separate parts so you don't have to do uh one without the other or so it is possible for you to do either the top or loop one or this so you could also just do this if you wanted to and so there might be some use there of just hurting some enemies for this rumbling advance has always been very very good so there's there's always that which is the the crowd car car but the important thing with that is it had move written on it and this does not so for me this is probably one of the worst loot cards again because it's on the bottom you're going to have to set it up so feeding frenzy for me is a card that i am not ex particularly excited to play on it it will not be making my initial kind of level one hand until i think maybe there seems to be a better reason for for playing the top of this or a reason presents itself the next card is uh selfless offerings we're switching over now to the range to the right hand side of our hand of our brain if you like so we have heel three target one ally at range three and we can consume fire there's that fire element to add uh rejuvenate regenerating to to that character and this is a new uh effect which essentially uh is like opposite to wound so it can heal and remove negative effects at the beginning of a player's turn so if you've poisoned then this would remove that and it would stay there and it would keep going until you take damage so at the point that you take damage this then gets removed this could be a really nice little effect to drop on an enemy who has maybe taken a few hits needs to disappear and retreat to the back of the room for a few turns maybe just take a few turns off you can chuck this on an ally and then they can sit there and they can gain some incremental healing over time this also is the first card that we're seeing of the kind of support element of this character so there is kind of a few different builds there is kind of like the melee uh like damage build range damage build there's the kind of tanking sub theme build going on and there's also this kind of support build also kind of going on so there are lots of different things you can do with this character and you definitely kind of mix the builds together much more than maybe with a traditional character with a traditional character we're all in maybe on one sort of style of play or we're very much like 80 90 percent one style of play this character is definitely not like that this character is is more of a 50 50 style character sometimes like you know a 33 33 33 you know infinite recurring style kind of character with some other types of builds so you do have to be a bit careful in terms of like the ability i think it's okay for a level one heal it is fine you know heal three range three is actually just kind of like bog standard however this target one ally means we cannot target ourself which is a bit of a drawback considering that as you know on our melee form we were doing things like wounding and poisoning ourselves so we we do need to be able to heal ourselves at some point this card does not do that which i think ultimately makes it a bit weak but it is a dedicated support card like there's no question about it the bottom is uh is move three and switch states which we know is just super useful so this card is probably gonna make our rotation regardless because move three switch states sounds good to me i think we probably want to play both of these from the two sides 27 initiative as well is a it's a fairly decent initiative it's nothing amazing but it's just okay so i think selfless offering probably makes it just for this but this does give you some nice situational things you can maybe chuck him uh in between rooms or an opportune uh time to just uh heal an ally next we have into my embrace which is attack three only range three or four so there's one of the first cards we've seen that actually just stipulates the range and it only can target range three and four and then it has pull two and you have uh switch states on the top here so this is essentially attack three range three or four exactly uh with pull two which is decent i actually feel like this is pretty decent push and pull are going to be substantially um more important i think i mean they're already quite important in gloomhaven especially higher levels of difficulty pushing high shielded enemies through traps and things like that getting them dead really quickly but i feel like now with the changes to the rules in which you can go up to the maximum pole especially is going to get more useful because it used to be that you had pole and you didn't really want to pull maybe an enemy all the way up to you because then you know you would be the focus so they would then attack you which would be awkward but now you can just pull them that one hex into that trap in front of them then that's it you don't want to use the full two and then perhaps they'll focus somebody else or they're in the right position for an aoe from your your fellow you know friends so i feel like that's um a really good change and i think paul will be a really you know really really benefit from that change which states on the top is is fine we're gonna need more of these and this is like a bog standard attack so i feel like this is just fine this is basically uh in line with what you kind of expect level one power level to be the bottom is heel four self which is nice so this is a way that we can heal ourselves and it is uh regenerate rejuvenate so essentially we can uh heal one at the beginning of all of our turns really really good for removing poison removing wound so we can kind of keep that uh going it is a burn though which is huge we can consume an element though to consume either fire or light to get strengthened as well at the same time and strengthening is very very strong we know that it's very strong especially when it's on the bottom of a card so that is uh very very powerful if you can do this once in a scenario i think you're going to be pretty happy about it especially if you can follow up with some really decent attacks however a lot of our decent attacks do also want us to consume an element so we're kind of consuming an element to get the strengthen rather than using it for the attack action which is fine but that is worth uh that is worth kind of considering i think this is serviceable i think that this is probably what takes it over the edge because that additional heal that you're going to get is going to be very useful and this is this is obviously incredibly good if you can if you can get it going so try to get this i think but it's going to be quite difficult but the good news is the top is very usable in the interim anyway next we have firefly swarm which is attack three only at range three and four and we have a classic three hex aoe pattern here that we're very used to from gloomhaven and we have consumed fire plus one attack now this to me is like our best ranged burn attack i absolutely love this four attack in this kind of thing is similar to what we've had like with the tinkerer for example or with the spell weaver at uh low levels so it's nothing like really to write home about from that respect but where this gets really good is obviously if we've used horn beetle carapace if we can put plus two to all of this it will use three charges of it though so that is worth uh worth noting because this is attacks not attack action so it just gives you plus one the attack not the attack action so you uh across the entire attack action sorry so you do use a charge every time you hit something essentially so so this is um uh well when you go to it go to attack something then this is essentially very very important and this can be really really uh good and a lot of damage right we're talking six damage across uh on each figure you know 18 damage across three you're you're absolutely so happy with that that's crazy for level one so yeah something to keep an eye on and i think this is definitely a really powerful attack and if we can use it then that's great a couple of things that's gonna hurt us though the 76 initiative that's not going to help right 76 initiative means that we have to do this towards the end or we have to pair it with an early initiative in order to get it when we want it so makes it more difficult for us or at least more of a setup but the bottom is very usable though which which is good which is just a straight move for that's always going to be good that's never going to be bad in gloomhaven or in frosthaven or in any of the havens i expect move four is always going to be good next we have scab flight which is attack two only range three or four with push one and it is a little three hex it's a very interesting one that and they all have to be a three four like in that kind of pattern it's a it's a bit of an odd one actually i kind of like this uh this pattern but it's it's a very strange one attack two is obviously not particularly great the push one is kind of okay it might have some situational use i think this one is just fine this is a fairly weak attack i think but again if you were to be able to use the even with this if you're able to use the horn the hunt carapace if you use the horn beetle therapist and get plus two i think you're very very happy with that too so this is the kind of like situation that i think this character is looking for this is the kind of thing this character is looking to do or at least for me at the early levels is to really maximize that uh potential damage that they can do thirty initiative is just okay nothing great on the next four sources of damage from attacks targeting you gain one shield if you are in ranged form or two shield if you are in melee form so this i think is is similar to the damage thing right but it's flipped we get more if we're in melee rather than the range now obviously doing damage is always going to be better than shielding i think but that's it's always better to kill an enemy before they hit you rather than shielding up for when they're going to hit you right just just stop them from hitting you just kill them always going to be the best and cleanest way to deal with an enemy but this is a pretty decent amount of tank at uh at level one so i can see this being pretty playable especially considering that the top is like i mean it's an average attack it's nothing amazing but it's something that you're going to play i don't think this character is necessarily like an all out kind of tank but certainly you can jump in and take the focus off maybe uh another character so if you wanted to have like split tanking responsibilities if you like between other kind of frontliners then i think that this character has the potential to do that if you've played the brew and you've played warding strength that is a car that you're usually pretty happy to play at level one if you're going down that route of being a bit of a tank and this is double that effectiveness so you're definitely uh you're definitely taking this next up we have mine spike which is immobilized target three only range four or five a pretty specific and quite far away range which is not the best for this kind of effect right immobilized in general you're going to want to do to melee enemies and the chances are they're going to be getting closer to you every single turn right so this is maybe a good room opener i would say you could kind of open the door then ensure that you have some movement left over so you can move into a position to do this to the the enemies that you need but if your mid room and the melee enemies have all started to move towards you chances are this is gonna like immobilize an archer which is just not gonna do anything because they're still going to attack so i do think that that's a bit of a downside to mind spike all attacks have the immobilized ability suffer one damage or if we were to consume light it's two damage now that i think is good if you can get uh too pure damage to anything with shield or anything that you know is relevant and and do that i think that's that's super super useful is it burn this card though so it's a one time use the whole thing i think it's like an okay effect for for this i say the problem with mind spike is that i think you need to really know when you want to play it and for me it's probably going to be room opening and i i can't see it being at any other point that you're going to be able to do it because it's going to be very difficult for you to position that range four and five onto the enemies that you really care about and mobilizing because they're probably already within you know two or three hexes of you before you've uh had the chance to play it 18 initiative though doesn't mean that this is going to work it's going to be very useful and the bomb here is actually pretty good too it's a ranged attack here only at range three and four but it's attack two and an attack on the bottom of a card should always get you excited as i always say it's always great to see either a move on a top or an attack on the bottom because what that means is you can do a double attack so you can uh you can try and kill something very fast in a round potentially this is very strong it's got switch states on there which i think mine spike for the bottom alone is definitely worth playing the top i think is maybe like bust open the door and uh have a big kind of effect style thing and again certain enemies obviously immobilizers gonna do nothing but i like i like the fact that there's at least this so even when maybe the immobilized doesn't do anything particularly great you at least still get some damage which is nice so harvest the essence which is ward self so ward is a new ability which is the next time that you take damage you take half that damage instead so it's like damage reduction and i think ward is going to be a super sneaky like best new condition for allies i think because ward is it starts off not great because at level one a lot of enemies may be attacking you for two or three maybe they're not doing that much damage but ward it tends to start scaling incredibly well towards the the end of the game when you start you know really getting levels your party levels going up the enemy level is going up and suddenly you're being attacked for six or eight and this is like real decent damage mitigation in those sort of instances so ward although i think starts off being kind of a bit underwhelming i think once you really get into like the swing of playing and you get some levels ward is going to become sneaky good and uh yeah keep your eye on ward i think it's going to be a a powerful and really well used effect so we have that and then we have at the end of each of our turns we may consume an element to create either ice or light so this is like the counter to the other one so this is setting up the the melee side of our character and giving us the the two elements that we care about for that well ice in particular but we we can use both of those elements on that side so that's it's a very simple thing i think the wards self on the top is a bit awkward though because you're giving up on an attack also you're arranged so what this could do though is you could play harvest the essence which could be quite nice maybe create ice uh and then you're going to switch states into your melee so that next turn when you go into your melee turn you could maybe go early you know use that ice to do some sort of big attack or a big effect or use the light to do that and then also you'll be in a probably a pretty prominent tanking position and then you can tank and use that ward to good effect it's kind of playable in the same way that the other one is playable this is kind of playable because it's going to set you up to do one big turn and i feel like this character is is a character with many big turns in their arsenal and you just have to kind of time them in the right way which is going to be difficult but uh there's going to be some payoff for that for sure 16 initiative is not great but you don't really care about it with this kind of effect i don't think unless you really wanted to go early and prevent damage that round but you're ranged at this point in time so chances are you're not the focus so i don't mind it too much and the bomb is moved to heal to self no enhancement dots here folks to add strength into this unfortunately gone are those days we're never seeing that again but i think that this is very versatile as you know and you've seen before we have a lot of cards that that poison us a wound us this uh reckless jab this is super super powerful and it's definitely something we want to use so now we've got a at least some way that we can heal off some of the damage that we're going to be taking i think harvest the essence just this bottom here makes this super playable and the top i think sets you up for potentially a very very strong next turn so so that is worth something to me so i think harvest the essence will probably make the cut next we have hail of thorns this is a tank to target all at range two with muddle now that should have you pretty excited i love cards that basically target all because straight away i'm like great i can break this somehow there's a way that i can break it uh the model effect is nice but we do also have to muddle all allies at range too but we do get to create ice so this is a way that we could potentially create ice there's only a few cards that do this we need to keep an eye out for cards that just generate for us as a one-off burn and this does it so i can set us up for maybe another burn on the following turn so i like this i think this is uh this is very good it's a burn of course and this effect should always be a burn i think i think every character this would be a burn on not just this one it would be nice to have had something a bit better than muddle there but i think that would maybe make it a bit too good i think halo thorns is a big obviously a big attack a combo piece encourages you to pump a load of power potions or buffs and things like that into it to make it really strong so yeah a very strong burn attack and the bomb is move three and we can consume lights a wound target one that i think is great just being able to chuck a cheeky wound on an enemy is always going to be lovely 88 initiative though you kind of sometimes want to do this thing early but it's okay you're probably playing it mainly for the move 3 anyway so generating the light is going to be tricky the big my big reservation with this character from what i've seen so far is that it's not very self-sufficient with elements and that is a bit of a worry for me but halo thorns for a top attack this is about as good as it gets for a burn attack for this character so yeah we really like that so on to our next card smoldering hatred which is attack two only range four or five muddle south to add plus to attack importantly both of these things happen before you perform the attack that was one thing we talked about on stream make sure that we we got that correct so you can muddle yourself to add plus to attack and you can curse yourself to actually make it a two hex aoe instead so this model is going to affect us on this turn so yes we're attacking for four but we're now going to be attacking a disadvantage yes we can curse ourselves but then potentially we could draw it right because we've muddled ourselves so there's a the chance that you could draw that curse that you've just put in immediately that is a concern there's something to think about is it worth it i believe it is um the plus two attack is worth the muddle is the curse worth the target too that's trickier i probably would lean towards no but sometimes it may be worth it and i think it's going to come down ultimately to how much advantage you can get yourself to try and mitigate that you know how many perks you have and what perks you've got and how you really want to manage that and your party my gut feeling is that i will probably always be adding the plus two i think that's just a given but i may not be uh always doing this even if i have the options so unless i have the option to maybe kill something i guess so we'll see i still think that this is a decent top attack though and it's a non-burn as well the bottom is immobilized target two range one and then four move with jump so we can run away so immobilize two people then run away i think for a burn this is is weaker obviously we had the disarm on the bottom that did this much much better this is a lot worse compared to the disarm one of course yeah is it worth a burn maybe not but again it's paired with something that's a very good top that you're probably going to want to play over and over and over again so i don't mind it 32 initiative is not uh it's not great for this though if you wanted to defend yourself against certain enemies they will go before you and therefore you know the immobilizer will work on the next turn but that isn't always the effect you know if they're they're up up in your face and they're attacking you you really want to try and get away as fast as possible so you're going to have to pair it with a the low initiative and our final card for the right side is reshape the guys which is loot one on the top with regenerate itself so that's i think this might be the the best loot cards we've had the worst loot guard and maybe the best blue card that i think i've seen so far with uh with frosthaven this is just awesome this does everything you really want it to do it's gonna help you remove the poison help you remove the wound any kind of other negative effects that we will get into as we go through the level ups on the top so you can move into a good position to do the loop one to be able to get a few tokens hopefully it's just really really useful i would probably play this as just to regenerate itself i think that that's probably playable it's nice that we have a really useful loot card here that we would probably play without the loot on it so yeah i like this the bomb is during your short rests you may choose which discarded card to lose instead of losing a discarded card at random and you may switch forms so we kind of have another um another lazy player card if you like i actually feel like this one is not quite as lazy though and this one's actually quite interesting it takes away i think one of the major major downsides of this character which is that switching forms sometimes you have to you have to long rest right to switch forms because if you make a mistake this sort of takes that away you can now do short rests and you can choose the card which is important because if we were to accidentally discard to a short rest one of our switch forms cards that's super important but obviously that's going to really hurt us in the long run this character is actively incentivized heavily to take long rests in my opinion because the fact that not only do you get to choose the cards that you recover but you also get to change your state so long resting is like really like where this character is i don't perceive anybody to be short resting too much unless it's like oh i really really need to because i've messed up or something because your hand size as well right you've got 14 cards to play essentially right from level one so your allies will be much more likely to need to short rest you should really be able to stay alive you know play all of those cards right you're going to play all of those cards that's seven rounds of play before you need to consider resting if you play it correctly and you switch forms at the correct time and most enemies should probably be dead in the first room which means that you should then be safe to long rest this is an interesting one i'm not too sure where i sit on this as i say traditionally i usually don't like these kinds of effects but actually i think this one might just make the class better not just uh not just you know give players a safety valve if you like for if they're struggling i think this actually might just make the character better could be a sneaky good one i'm not going to uh i'm not going to commit either way at the moment but i think the bottom could be sneaky sneaky very very strong so we'll see but i really like the top of this anyway so we're probably playing this okay so on to level two so our first card level two is a melee size it goes uh melee then range melee then ranged on the card selection here in this pdf so that's what we're gonna do so the first card we have is venomous barbs which is retaliate three and we gain one xp whenever we retaliate now that's a burn it's a one-time use so we get it for the round essentially and then it's gone this i really i kind of dislike to be honest retaliate can be very good but imagine your plan is to play the top of this and then the enemy just draws their heel or they don't move or they play their summons or whatever there's two in my opinion retaliate especially one turn retaliate it's just far too situational to ever really be good this isn't range either which means that against certain enemies it does nothing and that i think is a is a big problem for this the game one xp whenever you retaliate yes if you play this in the right time at the perfect situation against the perfect enemies you could get quite a lot of xp but you also only have eight health and level one so you have 10 health now you're getting to level two i don't think that that's um enough to really be able to tank even with your shield cards and things like that i think that this is a bit much i would much rather be just doing some damage to an enemy through a normal attack i think the good news though is that the bomb of this card and the initiative is excellent so we've got a 17 initiative and the bomb is attack 2 with poison and that should get you very excited because it's again a tag on the bottom of a card which is always good this also combos incredibly well with our two top attack uh level one card that we got changeling spoon if we do this we attack two then we poison that means that now this turns into an attack three and this also turns into an attack three so i think the bomb of this card is absolutely uh it's incredibly powerful uh incredibly playable it's nothing glamorous but it's uh it's very high on the power scale for me this kind of effect especially if you're good with your positioning or if you have allies that can position you for example next card we have is locus host so this is the other level two that we have and this is for the ranged side which is attack two only range two or three we've got a fairly interesting pattern there i think that's that's a good pattern because it includes the the standard three hex pattern but it's got the added bits on the edge right so you've got a good chance i think of hitting four things with this you get to place a character token on each target of the attack ability heels targeting those enemies this round have no effect now this aside from like being frosthaven loads and loads of enemies suddenly getting random heel effects or like there's lots of shamans in every single scenario i just don't think that this is very good obviously if they've got poison on them and you're just trying to stop them from removing the poison or stopping them from removing their wounds it just feels so so corner case to me that you do this attack at the right time on the right enemies that have heal and it matters i'm sure it's going to come up in games but for me i would just disregard this line of text and just focus on the top attack like is that worthwhile and i feel like it's pretty average to pour for a burn it is 2xp it's a pro it's a full-on burn though and that to me so what signifies that this card is not great i don't think that i can really recommend the top of locus hoes as a reasonable attack yes with uh carapace it could be more i i do think that it's a pretty good target for carapace but i also feel like we can just maybe use our other attacks you know like our simple three hex patterns or our line patterns there are other things that we can do to still target a good amount with it uh we do have 23 initiative though which is decent very good and we have a move one we have push to target all only range two what this does is that we can push enemies who are range two away two more right it's kind of a bit weird so we move and then we push enemies that are two hexes away away another two so they're now four away could be good for setting up some of our other abilities and i think that is really worth considering so this ability can just increase and improve your ability to set up your other hexes and your other aoes comboing as well with some other characters so i'm looking at like the death walker at level one who really does care about enemies and their position to the shadows and things like that so there's some synergy with that character here too and with push and pull that this character gets also you could argue for the badass beer and the different formations and things right so push and pull is going to be interesting and useful i think this is more difficult i think than it at first seems i think venomous bob's bottom bottom attack is just insane but i also believe that this is going to be very very useful as a utility effect that shouldn't be understated personally i'm probably going with venomous barbs because also just a 17 like move two could could be useful at some point but i could see people going for this because actually this uh this can set things up quite nicely for you like i said at the intro you have to be very careful here because you need to be considering other cards so unfortunately we can't just consider all cards in a vacuum you know take each card as it comes with this character you know sometimes you might have to take a weaker card or a card maybe you're not so jazzed on because actually later on it becomes more powerful or it enables you in different ways right so level three we have mandible storm which is an attack three with immobilized and it has a really nice pattern here reminds me a lot of stone pommel it's the same kind of pattern as that from the crackheart a super useful one and i think you can pretty comfortably target two things with this if you were like in a room full of enemies so you can you can make this work you muddle yourself though but this is after the attack so you can perform the attack then you're going to model yourself and then you switch states so this means that you're going to be modeled for your next turn in your new state but the good thing about this is that this is a top action so you're going to mobilize and run away and that can be incredibly powerful this means that you can uh easily control maybe a few sets of enemies the 13 initiative does make that more difficult you need to pair it with something maybe a bit lower but i really like this i think this is incredibly strong it's not a burn either and you know it's quite surprising really because i feel like this is powerful enough to maybe warrant maybe a burn um so this is yeah slam dunk i really really like mandible storm got to be careful about taking too many left side cards though but we'll see too many melee cards which states can be a little bit awkward obviously you don't really want to go into your range state models because you have some really good multi-target uh aoe style attacks there so that can be a bit of a hindrance the bottom is uh move three shield two and we can consume ice or light to get plus one shield and one xp and that is a burn so potentially we can get shield three on move three that is excellent really really good and that will probably go uh a very far in a single round uh at this kind of level for this character i would think so at level three if you play on normal difficulty i would imagine that shield three is not necessarily going to completely solve and absorb all your damage but it will go a long long way i think at this level this card in general is incredibly strong i think you've got an amazing top attack here with the ability to control and move away and you've got a really good situational burn tanking ability that can just save a load of damage maybe in particular scenarios where you might need to survive a certain number of rounds or something like that this could be really really useful so mandible storm i think is a is one heck of a card i just wish i had slightly uh lower initiative the other level three card for the rangefield is a dragonfly surge which is attack six at range four or five only at range four or five and you can consume fire or light to gain advantage and wound and one xp now this is in my opinion very similar to the level one that we had where it was added pierce right that was kind of like it's this is a bit better because the advantage means a lot and wound is a lot so the fact that this doesn't have ps might be a little bit bad however we can also use the buff from carapace here to add an additional plus two i think this is fine it's a little bit underwhelming for a burn you know if we look at other cards like this traditionally in gloomhaven you would not pick a card like this i'm looking at you crankbow that's a card that wouldn't be taken or wouldn't be considered to be very strong because it's a a single target big damage attack unless it's you know got the potential to do something crazy like backstab in combination with smoke bomb like those all those kinds of cards they can work but they work because the damage can get really out of hand right and you can set it up in an interesting way to help kill a boss or a really tough elite enemy and i think that this is probably just on the slightly weaker side i don't think it quite gets there but again this character can sustain a lot of burns and it's by no means a bad thing but yeah i think you really really want to consume the fire or the light to make this happen otherwise i think it's very underwhelming as a burn for just a six attack at range four or five that is incredibly underwhelming but if you can get advantage and wound and then your you know attack six can suddenly maybe turn into a seven or eight damage with wound and then maybe that's an additional point of damage on the enemies turn on you know it says nine that that starts to make it worth it in my opinion 50 initiative is obviously slap bang in the middle but in gloomhaven bang in the middle is not really 50 it's probably more likes or 30 so so this is uh pretty bad gain advantage on and add a plus two pierced all of your attacks this round uh you got poison self and switch states so you can gain advantage on all of your attacks and you get to add ps2 to all of your attacks but you have to poison yourself and then you switch days now this should get you pretty excited because this is basically strengthened but it's a one-turn strengthen but it's on the bottom it's in the right form it's on the ranged form suddenly this is going to start making those aoes even better so remember that big aoe that we were talking about before with the fire you know the three hex fire flying swarm imagine having advantage on this now our initiative absolutely sucks though it's either 76 or 50 right to do this kind of combo and maybe the enemies have split up and it's not possible anymore but i still feel like the bottom of this card is is very very strong being able to just give you pierce which means hey your attacks even your small attacks now matter and the fact that you gain advantage is really really good the switch states is kind of useful for this kind of effect it doesn't necessarily uh really matter i don't mind that it's there and perhaps that can help you help us out so in terms of choosing a kahad between these two again you see what i mean by perhaps maybe you wanted to take locust hosts because you know having the advantage and the ps2 on this attack two would have been very very good this is just very strong to me really strong uh compared to the two this bottom here has the potential to just combo so nicely with with some kind of big attack that you have if you're the kind of player who really really likes to like just go for the all-in play which i kind of do i feel like this is probably it whereas if you want something a little bit more reliable as some reliable damage that's like non-burn and like fairly decent then get this i said the problem with this card as well is the top burn is kind of a little bit underwhelming whereas i think that the bomb burn for this could actually be like situationally pretty good whereas this is obviously a big attack which is nice but yeah both of these cards you don't want to burn until like right towards the end anyway you know right so yeah i think this is like a dealer's choice here you take whatever you feel but again you need to be thinking about the future with both of these picks level four we have this insanely good melee card actually attack four attack three attack two generate lights one xp and a burn that's just like so good and you can see here that why you need to start thinking about other cards right if we took venomous barbs at level two suddenly we can poison as well which is going to turn this into an attack five attack four and attack three and you've got the generate light which is super super important we need to just have a couple of these big generators and this will do it for us to set us up to maybe use that on a subsequent turn this is this is like the difference i think between these two this is um something that i think you're you're you're okay with playing whereas this i think like wow like this this has so much more potential to it compared to this even though this is obviously potentially got advantage and and potentially wound on it this i think doesn't necessarily require a heavy setup and can just be used really really easily i really like the top of thresh and fail 43 initiative is not good though so that's a bit of a problem this character does have a few initiative problems and there's definitely some times when you're going to be using your low cards as just move twos you've got pull three target four here and you can consume light to get plus one target and uh generate fire or ice i want xp so you can kind of get an additional target and then potentially be able to um to make an element that's relevant for the next turn for you i feel like this is pretty good like i said before i i kind of like pull i'm starting to really warm up to pull and push a bit more and uh those buffs i think are are really gonna help and what this does is that you're in your melee state anyway this will actually pull that enemy closer to you maybe through a trap and then allow you to do a big attack maybe when you don't want to move maybe you want to stay at the back and you want to bring the enemy to you rather than you going to the enemy right i like this you've got a very very good burn um attack on the top and you've got very nice bit of like manipulation if you like on the bottom here so yeah i i like fresh and flair i think this is good so the other level four we have is luminous descent which is a heel four target one ally within range three just a slightly upgraded version to the other heel that we that we had earlier i think that that's pretty weak heel four like one ally at range three you can't even heal yourself is actually below the um the power level in my opinion this could easily have just been healed for like anyone i get the reason why the reason why they don't want this to heal yourself is that they don't they they really want those drawbacks for you taking that poison and that wound and they want those drawbacks to matter but they also want to be able to give you the tools to help your allies when you poison them because they were in the aoes that you were doing right so they want to give you those tools but they don't want to allow you to kind of bypass if you like those very real drawbacks of that poison and that wound disappointing though because it does in my opinion make it a more underwhelming um and more underwhelming ability because of that if you could heal two things with this you're pretty happy to be honest you may be wanting to use that element for something else on a different card so if you can heal uh two allies for eight obviously quite strong but will you ever get to do that i guess this is the problem a 67 initiative is not good for a heel ability sometimes you want to play late but sometimes you want to play early usually you want to play early because an ally is maybe wounded or poisoned or that they're in trouble they need some help so i've typically i've found the heel abilities uh are most useful when they're around the kind of like mid-20s something like that i i like them on earlier initiatives you can occasionally throw in a light heel here or there but maybe that's just personal play style but that's just how i how i feel about it we've got move five with jump and then we've got stun target two at range one and generate light so this is huge this is so good like we said before about how stun is going to be very premium i think that this is like what we're looking at moving five with jump and then getting to do your stun that means you can get straight into the back line you can get straight up to those arches you can get straight up to those summoners all of those annoying enemies that just hide behind the other enemies right hiding back there and they're just causing you grief because they keep summoning or healing or disarming you or doing whatever that's really problematic enemies this very cleanly solves that issue however it is a burn again traditionally stun burn effects have not been great but this does also have a move five jump tagged onto it so not only does it stun something but it allows you to open a room with just incredible ease this is like an amazing room opening card this is incredible obviously if the the room is huge you might struggle a bit more because five move might not get there if you've got a pair of boots in conjunction with this you're just away so i really really like this i think in terms of door opening there's no other as clean ability as this to open a door in in frosthaven that i've seen generate light is obviously very useful and you're going to be able to use that ourselves so we're really happy about that now between these two cars i think it's very very difficult because i really like fresh and flail i think this is a great attack and you know the the do damage player in my mind really really wants to take this but i feel like this might be it like top tier and it might just be that uh this is the best stun that we we see most of the time right this this is going to be up there as discussed as being one of the best maybe available stuns in frosthaven possibly when we finally get to see all of the other characters and things i i think that this is the new kind of power level of stun i think this is the new cost of stun and we're going to see this more and more and at first as you know gloomhaven veteran i think a lot of players are going to see this and be like oh no there's no way it's not worth it right a lot of players are going to say oh no it's not repeatable i'm not interested you know no thanks i think the more and more people play the more and more we see that this symbol has just disappeared and we don't see it very often anymore it's gonna make this stuff really valuable i feel like you can make a a really good point for either and again you need to be considering your future cards and your previous picks within this but i i do actually think that this is uh this is very strong this is the problem with this though is the top of this is quite weak in my opinion so that the fact that you've got kind of like a weak action to just carry a very strong action throughout the game that might be a bit of a problem for you at level five we have formless grace which is healed to target all allies at range one then once during each of our turns we may suffer two damage to basically create fire or light so here we go here is an ability a way that we can now generate elements and i think that this is going to be you know maybe sneaky good again this is kind of like a lazy player card i said before i don't really like i really like to join but i just feel like this is the way the character operates this character does not operate like others we've seen where they can move generate and next turn consume move generate again consume move generate consume that's not how this character works this character very much kind of just sets them up steals elements and converts them where possible and plays the right card at the right time into capitalize on the element and have a big turn it's not always going to be down to you always having your element available to you this could end up being quite good the two damage to you is a real drawback but you can choose when to do it including the turn that you played it so it does set you up quite nicely because again this does swap you into your ranged form and obviously fire is very very good in your ranged form so that does immediately allow you to use that so i think this is potentially pretty playable this heel to all allies range one i think is okay nothing special you're playing it because of this you do have to be careful about this two damage that you take though but you can also use like regenerate and things like that so you could take a bit of damage then maybe chuck regenerate on you and just heal up over a few rounds when you don't need the elements so it's okay 75 initiative is is fine for this kind of effect generally speaking you could also just ask your allies to end their turn next to you you know that's something that you could do the bomb is move for with jump which is uh super nice it's a big amount of move and jump and jump is um usually pretty underrated uh i i really like jump i think it just gets you out of so many problems and especially a character like this that needs to position themselves to ensure that they hit the correct range so regularly jumps going to be very important so consume ice though to get ward as well which is again very very good i think the bottom of this card is is actually excellent the chances are you're not going to want to maybe play the top straight away it feels like the kind of card that maybe you do want to play very early on but actually it's much better to to maybe play the bomb for a little bit and then play that on the few turns when you need to like ramp up like you've you've kind of got some momentum going and then you just need a couple of a few turns in a row to hit your elements so you want to create fire then light then fire maybe for like three turns consecutively and that's when formless grace top really shines i like the spot effect a lot and again i i honestly think the ward is gonna be um it's to be very highly sought after in frosthaven so the other five that we have for our range side is chitinas horde which is one ally within range three may perform shield two so this is a really nice support ability to help somebody else do some tanking the target of the shield ability may perform consume fire to strengthen itself so you could strengthen somebody 15 initiative as well which is obviously very important for this kind of effect it needs to be early in the round i think this is uh this is kind of okay this isn't anything um crazy giving an ally shield 2 is very interesting the way that it says may perform shield 2 the reason why that stipulates that so typically this is probably written in a very weird way because in gloomhaven this would probably be an aura effect or it would have been something like that i'm thinking like enhancement field i'm thinking the bottom of flamethrower you know allowing all allies within certain range to get a bonus and the reason why it's been done like this is so the the ally could move away if they wanted to so you can give your ally the shield too perhaps strengthen them and then they can move away and do their own turn as they like which is nice i think that does give you a lot more freedom rather than saying you have to hang around in my aura in order to get the shield this gives that character a lot of um freedom to then just be like cool i'm gonna run into the middle of the room and i'm gonna do my thing because you've helped protect me so in terms of like as a support ability this is probably one of the best shielding abilities we've seen it's early initiative you can shield something up and and compared to some of the other things in gloomhaven i think this is actually more powerful or on par because of the ability that they can move and not have to worry that's a big deal and obviously the strength itself could be incredibly useful um because then they might be moving in and doing a huge attack and they're just you know going to shield and stay there and if any enemies don't die they don't get hurt so much on the crack back when the enemy comes back and retaliates and tries to attack them i like this for a support ability this is very strong uh very very strong the bomb is all adjacent enemies suffer two damage and then one string is your turns you may have one adjacent allies suffer two damage to create ice or light so this is like the alternative right so basically at this level a level five you're being given the choice would you like to play the top of this which is basically enabling the ranged side of your character a lot more which is the ranged damage and support side of your character or would you like to empower the melee side of your character which is more of the melee attack damage and tanking side of your character right so you have those four things that you can do what i will say though is the bottom of chisina's horde this is a lot harder to trigger than the top of former's grace and that's a real consideration here this is just we can choose to take two damage on our turn and as a support character or as a ranged character that's not so bad we can basically take a bit of damage ourselves we're probably hiding at the back so maybe we're not getting attacked as much however this being adjacent ally this is actually kind of like counter intuitive to what our character does almost in a way right we are doing damage to our allies but we're supposed to be the ones that are the the tank and also we can't move to do this which then means if we wanted to do this on like you know if we wanted to to do this we have to ensure that an ally is next to us on our turn and that's awkward this ability here is going to be much harder for you to trigger because you're going to need to actively be moving next to your ally and maybe your ally is not in the position that's useful for you maybe they're not set up in that way maybe your team composition is not set up in that way so this is much harder this just puts all of the power in your hands you choose when to do it this does not so i would i would i'm worried slightly about this one i think this is much harder to do i like the fact that we can choose to do this whereas this is some sometimes we're going to want to do it and maybe we're not able to because our ally is in the wrong position so yeah kind of sucks so on to level six we get corrosive acids for our left side which i think is possibly the best card that this character pretty much ever gets i'm absolutely in love with this card so this is attack two and we've got a nice little sweeping blow style pattern here which is just three in front of us or three behind us whichever way you like to look at it but it's to attack and we can brittle ourself to brittle an enemy what brittle is is it's a brand new effect bristle means that the next source of damage an enemy receives is doubled so it's like it's like a kind of like a crit but not really a crit but essentially it's like the next source of damage is doubled now that next source of damage could be wound so it would double a wound from one to two it could be a trap a trap could trigger this off right so there's lots of ways that this could happen and it could be removed however obviously attacking an enemy for a large amount who is got brittle on them is is going to be very strong but you do have to brittle yourself so that is a real risk here you could end up taking a big hit the other thing we can do is we can injure ourselves to add poison now injury is a brand new effect again and what this means is it means we cannot use items until the end of our next turn so that means that both after we play corrosive assets if we chose to use this and until the end of our following turn we can't use items and the reason why this is this can be quite detrimental is obviously if you have a stamina potion or something that you want to use or a pair of boots that you need to use to get away all of those things you are unable to do now with brittle as well brittle can be removed by heel so it kind of works a little bit like poison um it doesn't block heels but it will remove be removed by heel action so there are ways we can mitigate the brittle quite nicely which would be using either regenerate or something like that that will actually get rid of it naturally at the beginning of our turn so brittle we can maybe deal with the injure though stops you from maybe playing a healing potion to get rid of that brittle immediately you know stops even playing stamina potions and boots things like that so it's worth that is a real downside sometimes and that is something to be worth considering but this is one hell of an attack as you can see it sets so much up and if you've got an ally who can then follow up from your turn to just do a huge aoe and maybe attack these three things that's great you're probably pretty happy attacking one or two enemies with this if if i was just attacking one enemy i would be pretty happy to just brittle them or or poison them if i didn't want to maybe take the brittle because it would be too dangerous this has a lot of versatility and i think it has a lot of busted potential also has a really interesting hex here whether or not we'll ever be able to afford it we'll see but yeah chris top is super super strong really exciting kind of combo piece and it's nice to see this character is kind of like this is a card that i think that you're really working towards having this in mind like corrosive acids how are we going to use that more in multiple interesting ways and how are we going to abuse this similar to what i'm saying about ward brittle is going to be one of the new mvps it's probably going to be better than bain bain being the effect that sir changes the assassinate effects it's been replacing those and bane is basically just 10 pure damage at the end of an enemy's next turn this is going to be better than that i think because it allows you to immediately jump on the enemy and do some additional damage the bottom if we ever choose to play it is move three all figures gain minus two shield while adjacent to this round i actually don't mind this i think that this is kind of okay it allows you to maybe go in and remove some shield from an enemy it's kind of work like a ps2 against an enemy and maybe get an attack in it's stuff like a fine utility item uh utility ability sorry it does affect all figures though so that includes uh all of your allies and all of your summoned allies and all of that stuff is basically included it's all figures right so this could potentially hurt your uh your allies if you were to play it in a certain situation but again it's a separated ability it's not joined to the attack so you could always you know decline that part of the action if you wanted to situationally good but i think you're always playing the top of crows of asses so next we have herodo therapy harudo therapy try saying that this is uh supposedly the study of leeches i didn't know that until my stream taught me and so but yeah it's to do with uh leeches and the use of leeches in medicine but up to two enemies at exactly range two to three uh suffer two damage which is pretty decent and very thematic to the the card name there is that uh you can just straight up do two pure damage to two enemies at exactly two and three that's legitly very good because you're always going to take pure damage going through shields dealing with difficult enemies not having to draw modifier cards and potentially missing yeah i like that and then we can heal self where x is equal to the damaged enemies suffered with the damage ability so if we were to deal uh four damage would heal four so deal deal four damage heal four is incredibly strong so if you did decide to go through of of uh the fire and the light generation you wanted to take two damage to generate fire or light this is a way now that we can start healing ourselves so we don't have to necessarily worry so much about that so i think that that's really really cool really really neat and a good use of the ability this is good this is a very very useful top it's going to do damage it's going to heal it's going to be useful over the course of the scenario so yeah i can't say anything too bad about it it's not as good in my opinion as a top as acid but it's uh yeah it's still very good and it's interesting too 92 initiative is okay i think it's generally on it's generally sort of on the weaker side for the this top kind of effect i think you sometimes want to do this late you do sometimes want to do this late another good use of this kind of ability of being able to do two damage is that perhaps your allies can't quite kill something maybe they drew a minus one instead of their zero or their plus one and so an enemy ends up on one or two health so going early to be able to kill them before they act could be really useful the bottom is move three attack two only target range three or four which is fine an attack on the bottom you're pretty happy about we can immobilize ourselves though to add immobilize which is a bit annoying it's kind of a an awkward one for us right because we we don't really want to be immobilized ourselves because if we do we kind of end up in uh in an awkward position sometimes with our precise range targeting abilities if we are immobilized and the enemies move around a little bit then it can be a bit tricky for us however what this card does do is it lets us move before we take the immobilize right on the attack so that's nice so you you should be basically planning where you want to take your turn from next turn and 92 initiative does kind of let you do that because that means that you know most of the enemies have probably gone so you know that okay if i go here uh on the next round i could go early and i could hit these people with an attack and i don't need to move so so i don't mind it i think like it's a downside but actually i think on this initiative and in this purpose i think it actually isn't too much of a downside is it worth doing an attack two and adding a curse maybe it's it's a very tricky proposition personally i don't like curses unless we can get a lot of advantage we do have some some very good ways to get advantage especially if we took that bottom uh active that allows us to do that to just get advantage on all of our attacks this round so we do have ways of mitigating taking curses but yeah man just taking your curse feel bad sometimes so terms of these two cards though for me corrosive asses is just like i love this i love this so much and i just want to play with it so that's what that's what i'll be going with i think that this is actually a very very solid card so i can see this being a very equal pick and for certain builds if you're playing ahead you may actually really want this so the melee card at level seven is attack four shield one and then we can consume any any element to generate both ice and light so this gives us both elements so this is obviously very very good for us because we are making two very very relevant elements for the the right side that we're in because we are in the the melee form right now and these are the two elements that we really care about in this form so that's nice but we do need an element there to begin with which is a significant downside that is something that you need to worry about maybe in certain pie compositions there will be elements just chilling out like i said before the sometimes you're against enemies who just create elements and so then they're just chilling out and you just want to take them and stop them anyway from being able to use them so in terms of an attack this is probably a little bit underwhelming for a seven i would say just four and just shield one i think if this was shield two then that would maybe put this card over the top and being like really really cool and really useful but because it's only attack for shield one i find that to be a bit underwhelming at a level so i think you really need to be able to make good use of this effect for this character in order to maybe justify this i mean it's not bad by any means but i don't think this action alone is really worth it at level 7. 21 initiative is obviously good for for this kind of effect being able to go early enough to do this the bottom that we have here though is very interesting so the bomb here is a push two and this is the kind of pattern so this isn't an attack this is just a push to action but it is done in this kind of uh pattern uh we add brittle and also we can consume ice to add immobilize consume light to add disarms this could be very very strong but it is a burn so we can only use this one time i think this is pretty good one important discussion that we had uh on stream to clarify the rules here uh the push happens before the brittle so unfortunately you can't uh brittle everything then push them into traps and watch them all take double damage fortunately that that doesn't work like that you do the push then you're going to add the brittle at their final resting spots where they where they finally finish their their push uh same with these obviously as well the order in which they're resolved so that does make this slightly worse but it does mean that you can push them maybe into a very a good pattern for either you or an ally to to have a really good attack and because you've added brittle that obviously means that the follow-up attack to this is going to be pretty nuts this card in general i i really liked this effect to begin with the first time i saw it and i think the disarm is obviously very good you're good to sound for enemies you're going to be happy in a more practical sense this is probably going to end up only targeting two or maybe three enemies and yeah i'm not sure if it's as good as like acid and things like that so i'm not hugely up on uh two-pronged entrapment i think uh i think this is like an okay effect this is obviously really good and maybe might be just required straight up required if you want to play your character well it may end up being that way but my general feeling is is the this is a bit weak and this is also a little bit weak for a burn at level seven two the range card we have is alluring pheromones which is actually a fair bit better in my opinion than the other one so we're pretty happy about that we have attack three only range four or five and we have pull two a really nice little arc pattern here where we can pull them towards us and this one is the other the other element so consumed to create fire and light so this is the other the other two well the other one but with light as well because light is the one that goes between them both but this i think is is a nice little attack the pull two as well pull them into a trap maybe pull them into a nice way to set you up uh and uh honestly fire to me seems like the real element of choice or at least it does at the early levels and also a really good way that you can play the support build as well support build really benefits from some of these elements too i think this is probably the better of the two attacks but it's still by no means great because it is only just an attack value three it has decent range though and pull two so again you're probably only going to target maybe two things with this and that's um that's gonna be okay it's not gonna be great the bottom here is probably weaker than the bottom of the of two pronged entrapment unfortunately it's kind of hard to judge because this could be bonkers it could also be weak and it really depends on how many players you're playing with how many characters you're playing with and uh if they've got summons or not and also their position so the bottom is he'll to regenerate bless consume fire to add strength and consume light to add another bless and get one xp and this is the kind of pattern that you that you use it with and the thing with this is obviously it's on the bottom so you have to already be in these positions in order for it to work on your turn unless you have some way of being moved or another way of moving so it's a bit uh awkward i think to set this up and if let's say you could target two or three allies and give them and give them everything right be able to give them everything which is pretty hard because you need to play the top of this to be able to get them both this is like the only real way to get both of these elements it's pretty hard to get both of them together usually you have one or the other through the previous cards right especially because you you know you're taking damage you can take damage to create one or the other not both so you can obviously use this to consume them to make both but then obviously you then need to somehow short rest get this card back and then play immediately well i i i think that this is obviously if you can do this to summons if you could do this to four or five allies and you could get everything it's ridiculous value but honestly i think it's probably going to end up not being as good as that it's probably going to end up being three allies and it's not as broken as it first appears i think and the fact that you can't do it to yourself as well because it's an n a a we it targets means that you can't just immediately go into a big attack maybe when you're strengthened and blessed it's interesting i think that this is the weaker top action this is the stronger bomb action this is the stronger top action this is the weaker bomb action probably so make the choice that you would like i will probably depending on how you do it i will probably end up taking this because i feel like i feel like the ranged elements are a bit more premium and a bit more worth it at least how i want to build my character i think so level 8 we have accelerated metabolism as our melee card which is consume either fire or ice to strengthen itself so this actually works across both sides so far and ice they are the opposite elements in this for this character so that's interesting and you can then attack three target two with ps3 so we could be strengthened for that now that is really good being able to strengthen and then do the attack we do also have like a couple of bottom attacks on this character so we could make use of that strengthen again so there's some there's some good things that we can do here our positioning has to be spot on though and with 85 initiative that's pretty hard again this is another kind of slightly underwhelming attack right so non-burn the ps3 is really nice doesn't mean that it's going to it's going to likely do damage it's it's likely that you do damage with this and the target 2 is again nice but not always going to be great nothing too crazy if you can get the strength itself obviously it makes it much better but it's not we're not breaking the game over here right with this card we're just we're still playing why we're considered to be fairly fair gloomhaven at this point in time we're not doing anything too stupid the bomb is move six with a lot of enhancement dots there too i don't know if we'll ever be able to afford that though at the start of your next turn play one melee card from your hand and immediately perform the top or bottom action of the card then lose this card and then this switches forms so what this allows us to do is it allows us to play an additional card for a start which is nice so we're going to be playing three cards in a turn which is always going to be good because you're basically just you know you're taking an extra half a turn and that's very very strong also allows you usually to set up some broken combos it just gives you the opportunity to do some some really nuts stuff and for example with this one it allows you to to like play for example acid which is just insane right play corrosive acid as your first card set up brittle then you've got two more cards to play so you could move away and then do your big ranged attack on the enemies that you've just inflicted brittle to so there's um a lot of potential for a combo there with that this i think is uh got combo wren all over it is a burn you can only do it once but that makes sense but this is uh a big combo piece for this character will set you up for an amazing turn so i really like it you've got a top action that's a bit underwhelming but it's a useful attack and you've got this which is just like super super like let's let's go let's uh let's do a lot of damage let's kind of break the game a little bit on the next turn the other level eight card we have uh is oscillating entity for our ranged side which is attack four only range two or three two good enhancement dots there but again are we ever going to have the money to do that that is a pretty underwhelming i mean it's a very underwhelming attack for level eight just attack for vanilla range two or three and the top of this one actually has the same deal as the last uh one but it's at the top this time which is at the start of our next turn we play one ranged card from our hand and immediately perform the top or bottom action now i definitely prefer this on this card much more i like it when it's on the bottom because what this allows us to do is it allows us to set up with like a maybe like a big attack already consume some elements maybe another big active or something like that um your top actions are your most premium actions in gloomhaven so the thing with this is that yes you do get a little attack before you start but you're also then probably gonna have to pair this with some sort of movement you're probably resigning yourself to having to play a movement card here um this gives us the freedom to have a huge amount of movement and the freedom of playing whatever we want on the top really we've got loads of cool things we can do this however means that we have to play a bottom with it and most of our bottoms are kind of moves right so a little bit awkward um we might need to just move to setup anyway so i i definitely prefer this one to uh to the other one for sure i think that's just like personal preference maybe a little bit but i do think it's more powerful to have this effect here and the move six is great for just setting you up 55 initiative is obviously better though so that is something and it's move for bless self uh consume fire and ice to get strength now this is nuts right now this is the kind of power level that i think a lot of people are used to or a lot of people will try to enhance in gloomhaven to get these effects you know everyone's chucking these kinds of effects onto every enhancement that they can if they're allowed to on bottom moves so that should tell you how powerful this is this is very very sneaky powerful well not even sneaky powerful if you've played gloomhaven and if you've gone through this stuff before but it's it's very very powerful just reliably giving you some blesses giving you the opportunity to do some times two draws and then potentially strengthening yourself so that you're gonna be more likely to draw those blesses yes please the problem that i have with this and this is a personal problem we talked about it on stream is that this to me feels like i'm back to my old tricks right this i know that this is very good and i understand that this ability is great but for me i want to play with new stuff i want to explore new things in frost haven i don't want to you know go back into my old kind of ways my reliable ways of winning scenarios all the time so if you are like a gloomhaven veteran and perhaps you've you've done this many times before with many characters you're of course immediately going to want to bite uh you know by the game's handoff for offering you the ability to do this and i think that's perfectly natural because it's it is compared to these things it is probably the best ability on offer for you here at level 8 in my opinion however i do also feel like maybe it's better to try something new try a slightly different card and uh maybe use this and this is still good right you've still got the strength and there's still an opportunity for you to have to strengthen and it's on the topic you don't get the bless but you do get the strength on this is kind of busted levels this is uh i think much more fair but this really interests me because i think playing a melee uh card out of hand is much better than maybe playing a range card out of turn so uh yeah so i i'm just i'm torn between these two as a player because i i would have to recommend that if you've never done it before if you really want to do the best thing this is really what you should be looking at but i'll probably be taking accelerated metabolism for a bit of fun so at level 9 we have harbinger of ruin as our melee final level 9. the top of this says on the next four sources of damage from melee attacks targeting us we gain ward then the attacking enemy suffers of five damage this is like pretty cool this is almost like retaliate five right it's kind of like retaliate five but it it's not quite retaliate i like the fact we gain ward here that's really cool i guess the reason why it's not retaliate five is maybe there might be some you know broken combo here where you could give your retaliate range or something or double the amount of retaliate on somebody i feel like that's probably why this has been written in this way rather than just saying retaliate five however the fact that it's only melee damage that this works with means that that's a little bit tricky you're gonna have to um only do it against certain enemies that means it's gonna be bad against certain other enemies it's gonna be bad against archers because even if an archer is attacking you from melee range it's still considered to be a ranged attack they would attack with disadvantage so even if you were to muddle an archer move up to them they would still technically be attacking you as a ranged attack which means that this would not trigger and i think that that's not maybe not a necessarily obvious downside but it might be worth considering like it is means that this card doesn't always kind of do what you want it has to be a melee attack and in the end that's the reason why it says this rather than retaliate five right i like ward i think ward is gonna be a good tanking ability and it's gonna be sneaky good so i i'm behind this i think this is a very solid piece of of tanking um ability that you've got here i'm just a little disappointed for me personally that at level 9 we don't get something really cool here and like damage wise on the top that's all on the bottom here we have attack for retaliate ii so we do have some retaliate we have an attack four that's just like incredibly solid you're obviously incredibly uh excited to see attack on the bottom of a card for me that doesn't really kind of get me excited about about the the concept of playing this character to level nine the one thing i'll say as well about this uh is that you know i was really hoping for a level nine and we'll go across to the other level nine card now i was personally really hoping for something a bit more to do with our states just some other interaction some weird rule or something we could break or some interesting thing now we do did have two different cards at level eight that kind of did that in a way so i may actually consider going back and taking the other level eight which will be like the first time i've ever done that i mean there's been some bad level nines in gloomhaven before but i'm not sure i've ever really gone back and taken level eights aside from trying weird builds but if we go to the other level nine which is voice of salvation the top of this is undoubtedly one of the best buffs that you'll probably see in the game which is this round all allies within range three add plus two to all their attacks and all enemies within range three at minus one to all of their attacks that's like a a huge swing a huge huge swing if you're playing with a summoner or you know you've got people who are doing ranged attacks ranged aoe attacks there's a huge buff it's a huge huge buff but it is a top action which means that you're giving up anything you know you doing any real attacks on your turn really the fact it says all allies as well means that it doesn't target you so that also means that if you did have a bottom attack let's say with some of the the melee cards that give you those bomb attacks you don't actually get the buff either which i think is a bit awkward um so 11 initiative though so the earliest initiative i think we we get with this character and obviously you need that early initiative to ensure that the top of this will go off and be useful the bottom is on the next four cards allies would lose to negate damage they instead do not lose the card so essentially what this allows your allies to do and i think this is probably the best form of damage mitigation that i've seen aside from maybe the the top of this like this is obviously you tanking and this is actually kind of damage mitigation it's a little bit different this is certainly something because it's allies not you this is obviously more of a support ability this card is completely support top and bottom through and through i think that this is quite interesting and very unique so what this is is that when potentially you know an ally would take a large amount of damage at some point they can say hold up i actually don't want to take that damage i will burn a card and then this would happen and they could would negate the damage if they would choose to so this just gives your allies an incredible amount of flexibility as to when they want to burn the card like when they want to take damage when they don't and i think that's worth quite a lot um i think it's pretty worthy of a level 9 kind of effect this essentially is just completely mitigating damage but at the key times that you want it now the thing is with voice of salvation is the top is so good that i think you're just going to be playing the top the top the top the top constantly and then maybe towards the end of the scenario if you really really need to because uh your allies are dying and they're going to be hit and maybe you would do this maybe you need to survive maybe there's going to be some scenario types that that might come up but boy is the top very very strong i said mike my main kind of reservation with with with this at level nine is that we don't have another card that does anything really funky with our forms i would actually seriously consider going back and taking the other level late that i did not take just so that i could really enjoy the concept of doing this and i think that this could be a really fun thing to try and do and really freeze your character up in some way and maybe that's the intention with the character design it's just it just surprised me slightly and maybe this was the intention but it's um to me this is pure support which is not something i'm personally particularly interested in doing for this character and this is kind of like obviously tank and there's a decent melee attack here but it's not enough to make me you know excited to take this card personally so yeah that's sort of how i feel about uh the level nines and all of the cards so let's take a look now at the perks so with the geminate perks we get some kind of some spicy ones and we get some standard stuff that we're used to kind of seeing so we have the replace one minus two card with one plus zero we see that all the time replace one minus one card with one plus zero consume any elements to make an element now this is interesting i was kind of hoping to see some just elemental rolling elemental style cards here to maybe help us out with our elements but uh this is much more thematic and fits much better with the theme of the character on the style of the character this actually might be a decent-ish perk to go for if you've got lots of elements kicking around in your team and you don't want to have to invest as much health into those ones that allow you to do it yourself so that's kind of interesting you got replace one plus zero card with one plus one poison card you've got replace one plus zero with one plus one wound card replace two plus zero cards with two rolling ps3 cards and you've got add two plus one push three cards you'll add one times two but brittle self card so yeah you can add another crit into your tag so now you've got two crits but one of those crits will inflict brittle on you but this is you can mitigate this some way this i think is like is like pretty cool so i think i'm gonna i'm gonna go for it i'm gonna go for the all in i like it the risk and the reward for me is probably worth it i'm gonna i'm gonna try it the other one we have here is add one rolling plus one and heal self oh sorry this is regenerate itself so this is actually uh much better than that so add one plus one uh with regenerate itself this could obviously get rid of this potentially uh on the following next turn so i think we like uh rejuvenate regenerate i think it's very good ignore negative scenario effects the classic we've had that from gloomhaven until we really know and understand the scenario the possible scenario effects and how many there are across the campaign it's completely we cannot speculate as to whether or not this will be worth it or not but in gloomhaven it kind of was so potentially it will be again whenever you short rest you may remove one negative condition from one ally within range three this one i'm not so hot on this is interesting though a benefit for just short resting really interesting and useful to to have something different and i'd have to say that these bottom three perks i think are great and i really really like the fact we've got these kind of different builds that we can go with and the perks help support those builds rather than the perks being the same regardless of what you did and now i think actually you're the taking of the card is much more intrinsically linked to you picking a perk so i think you'll be looking at both your options for leveling up and your perk at the same time whereas in gloom haven't it often felt like oh i'd take this card and then or what perk do i take oh i'll just remove some minus ones right it just felt a bit too uh it was a bit too samey and a bit too boring and repetitive after a while you didn't really feel like you were you were picking really cool things with the perks so is this good or not i think if you're playing the support build then yeah i think it can be good and even if you're not playing the support build it can be quite nice if you're playing in a four-person party i think the value goes up if you're playing in a small party not so much the thing is though is again is your is you are incentivized to long rest a lot more on the geminate than you are because of the whole switching forms thing because you can switch forms when you long rest you are a lot more incentivized to do so unless you go for that burn card that allows you to also do that when you short rest so again this could be a part that if you go for that card and you go that route with it you actually get a lot of value out of it so could well be worth it once each scenario when you give yourself a negative condition prevent the condition so this is nice this allows us to just negate one of those brittle effects potentially we can negate this brittle times two when we when we draw it right just stop it and i think that that is useful and that's very useful because there's gonna be times when you really really want to do it you're like i really want to do this damage i really really want to do this super powerful attack but the drawback is going to really hurt you if you miss or it's going to really um upset your turn right immobilizing yourself you're like damn i can't move now like this is really going to hurt me it's going to really ruin my next turn or you know being brittle or poisoned oh i can't heal myself because i'm low health but i'm poisoned so it's just going to remove the poison there's all of these things and i think that you're going to find a really good opportunity to do this and it's going to it's going to be incredibly useful and again with this i think you want to get these perks early because obviously the earlier you get them the more value you can get out of them because the more frost haven you've got left to play so i think i think i like this one the next one is whenever you perform an action with a lost icon you may discard one card to recover one discard so this is pretty neat too this requires two perk points hence the two boxes so you must put two perk points in there before you actually unlock it so you put your first one in then you unlock you know you do some battle goals level up whatever get your second and then you check it and then you get it and the way that this um why this is going to work and the why this is going to be pretty useful to you is it's going to allow you to filter your cards again it's a little bit of a lazy man perk maybe but it allows you to to filter those those cards in your hand much better right much much better it's going to if you make a mistake like oh you accidentally play a card for his top rather than his bottom and then you realize oh no i don't have the change i don't have the change forms card anymore you can fix that problem right you can be like okay fine i will do my big attack which i'm planning to and then i can get this other card back i think this one is is better than like the lazy man stuff because this is almost like a stamina potion almost not quite and stamina potions are obviously amazing so this is kind of like a stamina potion and i like that so i'm going to be i'm probably going to be getting this now whether or not i get this first i don't know i think in terms of order of perks it's going to come down a lot to personal preference in the end but i feel like this particular perk with the negative conditions is going to be useful immediately so i'm probably going to be taking that pretty early on then i think i'm probably going to end up taking something like this maybe going down here and in putting some person or i may just end up starting to build my deck out a little bit and getting it a little bit better because if you're going for the attack build then this is still going to be very valuable to you it's not as good as um it was but it's still very very good and certain characters if you're going down the damaged plan you're still gonna need those perks right this times two i think is also a gimme love it i wanna take the times two because i wanna have fun so i'm taking the times too so yeah i think my first perk might be this maybe my second perk is the uh the extra times too because again brittle hurts you more later than it does early because if you're brittle and a living bones attacks you for one or two great you're gonna take four damage maybe two damage whereas if you're you know playing at level nine and you're maxed out and you get hit by a night demon for nine yeah suddenly it's 18 damage and you're dead right so bristol as well does uh he's better early than it is late for players so maybe you just take that as your first perk i don't know but anyway those are the uh the available perks you have for the gemini so there you have it there is my geminate first thoughts kind of final review of the cards with all of the final cards that we now have i feel like this character has not really met my expectation really uh upon reading all of the cards i was really really interested in the mechanic of having two separate cards and being able to play the two i thought that sounded like a really interesting way and something completely unique and could be very interesting and a challenge for you know someone who really was looking for that and looking for a character that could be quite difficult to play and challenging to play but having looked all of the cards and having looked at the kind of abilities and things that this character gets to me feels a little bit unfocused at times the fact that you can go different builds i think is interesting the fact that you can use sort of like the left side the melee side is really good at melee attacks and tanking and the right side the range side is really good at ranged attacks and with support abilities and i think that's quite cool and i think that there could be a really fun mix between the two there where you can kind of come up with some hybrid builds but also it feels like there just isn't enough choice maybe in the leveling up the fact that you start with 14 cards and you have to play seven and seven means that this can be very very difficult i think for a lot of people to get their head around and also the fact that when you level up you only get a choice of one of two cards when you level up you know that means that realistically out of those 14 cards that you start with in your opening hand you're only going to replace like a grand total of about eight of them and to me that's not that fun usually a lot of the fun in gloom haven comes when you get to level nine and you've got a lean mean fighting machine you know your deck and your hand is really well trimmed and shaped and you're really the character that you want to be whereas for me this character is gonna feel like you're gonna get to level nine and you're gonna wish that there was another nine levels after that for you to be able to get some extra cards and for you to really make this character unique this was the character that i was most excited about this is the one that i was planning on playing initially from the first reveal but now this character having gone through it is actually dropped to the bottom of my list of characters i'm interested in playing i just don't see that the mechanics are particularly exciting i don't feel like the interplay between them is is either particularly interesting or at least just reading the cards it doesn't perhaps when playing things will be slightly different but it just doesn't really jump out at me and feel great it just feels like it doesn't have an identity the drifter is a character that i think really really well kind of shows off the potential of a character i can do a bit of everything a character who can do a bit of tanky do a bit of attacking can do arrangement and has these different options and has a real diversity of builds that you can go whereas this character just feels like they're just it's there's they're too all over the place there's no consistent or coherent strategy between them or at least any that i can really see or at least one that would be rewarding or at least one that would be um maybe the power level would warrant that level of play the power level of this character i would say is quite low and that's mostly done because of the large hand size so i can kind of appreciate that they're not going to give a carrier with 14 cards some kind of ludicrously crazy abilities that they can loop over and over and over again because you could just abuse that stamina mechanic and just burn a different card and just go again and again and again like in it it could cause some gameplay issues so perhaps this type of character just isn't really going to to fit um and um makes me wonder maybe we'll see other characters like this in frost tavern characters are maybe just a little bit too wacky for their own good uh so they kind of just end up being a little bit kind of all over the place and not coherent so we'll see and yeah for me now the gemini has actually slipped off of my list of characters and it was my first choice and it's no longer going to be my first choice whereas the surprise for me was the death walker the death walker really is jumped up i think some of the the cards and the abilities that this character gets now is super super cool and i'm really looking forward to maybe playing with those so for me the geminate is just it doesn't really cut it anymore i'm afraid so yeah those are my thoughts about the gemini let me know in the comments down below if you also feel the same way or maybe you think yeah this is great and maybe this is exactly what you were looking for but for me it's just not quite there and uh yeah i think this is now gonna be one that i'm gonna steer clear at least on my first pass of the game i think thank you again so much for watching i do really appreciate it and if you did enjoy the video please do consider tossing a like and subscribing got lots more videos to come including one for every single one of the frost haven starting classes so let me know which one you'd like me to do next and yeah i'm gonna try and bash these out and get through every single one in as much detail as i can i also stream regularly on twitch twitch.tv slash manage request every monday wednesday and sunday so you can always come hang out and maybe play some gloomhaven with me live there on sundays when we do community save sunday or just ask me any questions about frosthaven or gloomhaven in general okay guys that's gonna pretty much do it for this video catch you in the next one thank you again so much for watching bye [Laughter] isaac at this point can we get your approval to add an additional attack modifier deck for allies in the digital version

Channel: MandatoryQuest

Views: 27,598

Keywords: Frosthaven, Frost haven, Gloomhaven, Gloom haven, Kickstarter, Starting character, Starting Class, Guide, Tutorial, Should you play, Digital, Steam, PC, Co-op, cooperative, campaign, legacy, board game, boardgame, tabletop game, Geminate, Harrower, Hive Mind

Id: VamFerT443k

Length: 125min 42sec (7542 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 19 2021