I recently wrote a blog post about Henry Wan, who was recently spoiled in a mythos pack announcement. Here's the article:

https://ntguardian.wordpress.com/2018/12/03/making-profit-henry-wan-arkham-horror/

Long story short, he sucks. Unless you have a combo out helping you, he can't even beat (in expectation) just drawing a card or gaining a resource the normal way.

Henry Wan is better early in campaigns before the token bag is glutted with special symbols.

NotZ starts at 11S/5F with expected winnings of 0.92.

Dunwich and Carcosa start at 11S/4F with expected winnings of 1.09. Hooray for small profit!

Also, an early Dunwich spoiler follows: cheating in the Clover Club essentially makes Dunwich start at 12S/3F (1.45).

FA starts 10S/4F with expected winnings of 0.99.

Of course, having a Mystic around sealing tokens ramps this up pretty quickly, so this Ally might be a way for someone on the right team to afford their early campaign toys and then be upgraded into Hot Streak at the earliest convenience. Personally, I'm not sold, but he's an early game card if anything and that's decent soak for Rogue.

nice write up. 5/5 for markov chains.

Maybe with Wendy and you really want to drop events in your discard pile? Seems like filler to me. Criminal has better ways to get resources and he's never making you back the 3 he costs.

On 12/3/2018 at 11:40 AM, Iuchi Toshimo said:

Of course, having a Mystic around sealing tokens ramps this up pretty quickly, so this Ally might be a way for someone on the right team

I've checked that myself, assuming the best possible chaos bag (WDA expert, no additional tokens) and three sealed symbols. If you take into account the resources you burn on Protective Incantation (because you have to seal skulls with them to work with Wan, when you're normally better off sealing large negative numbers), you're netting one resource per round above just trading your action for a resource. That makes him an absurdly finnicky Dario El-Amin without the static bonuses. He's potentially useful for a party that wants to transfer resources from the mystics to the rogue, but how often does that seem appealing?

He only gets powerful if you throw in a Seal of the Seventh Sign as well, to seal literally every negative symbol in the bag. That'll quickly get you set for life. Of course, by the time you get there, you should have Hot Streak anyway, so why bother?

1 hour ago, rsdockery said:

He only gets powerful if you throw in a Seal of the Seventh Sign as well, to seal literally every negative symbol in the bag. That'll quickly get you set for life. Of course, by the time you get there, you should have Hot Streak anyway, so why bother?

I mean, I already said I'm not sold on the guy, he can find a home in the binder for now, but since we're simply theory crafting:

Mateo could run 7th Seal at start. Then, the investigator pool could contain up to 8 copies of Chthonian Stone and 8 of Protective Incantation, which could significantly limit the special tokens remaining in the chaos bag. Investigators with access to Mystic tend to run these cards sometimes, so it's not totally absurd. Seems expensive until we're drawing all the tokens with Henry and getting 10 resources per action. Fun, I guess, but why isn't everyone just winning instead? Still, aside from Mateo who carries the 7th Seal but not Henry, there are still Jenny, Sefina, and Jim who could run both Henry and all these Mystic cards. Sure, Henry's unique, so only one person gets to go crazy at a time, but that's not a bad team, and oppressing the chaos bag that hard might actually be a interesting style of play.

20 minutes ago, Iuchi Toshimo said:

Then, the investigator pool could contain up to 8 copies of Chthonian Stone and 8 of Protective Incantation

I'm not sure if you're suggesting sealing loads of tokens, or merely ensuring they can get into play more quickly, but you should be aware that Chthonian Stone is unique and Protective Incantation is group limit 2 in play. The only time you're sealing every single symbol token in the game is if there's only 3 symbols plus auto-fail, which is so far only possible in The Dunwich Legacy, and only if you're following a specific route of campaign decisions.

1 hour ago, Allonym said:

I'm not sure if you're suggesting sealing loads of tokens, or merely ensuring they can get into play more quickly, but you should be aware that Chthonian Stone is unique and Protective Incantation is group limit 2 in play. The only time you're sealing every single symbol token in the game is if there's only 3 symbols plus auto-fail, which is so far only possible in The Dunwich Legacy, and only if you're following a specific route of campaign decisions.

I am aware, and was more concerned with consistency, but should have mentioned as much.

You can also do it in Forgotten Age if you deliberately throw the first mission. The first token only gets added when you deal with Itchaca; after that, you can navigate around all the other tokens by taking the "forge your own path" route but not actually forging your own path.

Good luck getting the rest of your team to go along with your plan.

its very possible that the rogue in this set has an ability that synergies well with this card.

26 minutes ago, Iuchi Toshimo said:

I am aware, and was more concerned with consistency, but should have mentioned as much.

Fair enough, then!

15 minutes ago, Jobu said:

its very possible that the rogue in this set has an ability that synergies well with this card.

I mean...it's not impossible but I would be very surprised. Unless gambling with the chaos bag in general becomes a strong theme in the cycle it would be weird to have an investigator whose ability specifically redeems an otherwise worthless card, but I guess there are other cards that only seem to exist for use by a single investigator...

I realise that theorycrafting is all for fun and the card is weird enough that it invites this kind of analysis, so I by no means want to spoil anyone's enjoyment, but I can't help being amused by just how much effort is being gone to to try and find any benefit, any at all, to this card. I suppose it's simply because of how unusual its effect is, but it makes me feel sorry for Rogue. Rogue has already had more than its fair share of bad cards - though at least this is entertainingly bad, unlike Switchblade (0), say.

There are a bunch of cards that really only work with specific investigators. Like encyclopedia, song of the dead, venturer, lantern or knife. Sure you can use them on other gators but they just don't pull their weight.