Oh noooo. I was soooo hoping for Patrice to be good. I have no idea what her deck building is like, but her mechanics don't seem very advantageous, and her stat line is atrocious (4, 2, 2, 2?... that's only 10 stats!)

There has to be some kind of trick here with her deck building right? No matter what, I'm likely going to play as her as I've been waiting for her, but anyone want to take a shot in the dark about why her stats are so awful with no apparent way to make them better?

Will she start with bonus experience? Will her deck size be bigger than 30 (this almost a solid yes considering her mechanic)? Will her out-of-class options be something phenomenal? I'm guessing they will be mystic or there would be no reason to have a will of 4.

With her mechanics, to me, it seems like you would want to jam-pack your deck with skills since she gets a full 5 cards every turn, but when your stats are 2, that seems pretty sub-par. I mean, cards like trial by fire and fight or flight are almost must-haves with her stat line.

Any guesses?

21 minutes ago, Soakman said:

...

Will she start with bonus experience? Will her deck size be bigger than 30 (this almost a solid yes considering her mechanic)? Will her out-of-class options be something phenomenal? I'm guessing they will be mystic or there would be no reason to have a will of 4.

...

I was thinking the same thing about Mystic. She feels like she has to have similar deck-building to Mandy (size) and Tony (variety). And yeah, skill heavy.

I think it's interesting that her violin gives you the ability to further cycle your deck as a free action. Her Elder Sign ability to shuffle all but 1 card in your discard is fascinating.

I get a weird déjà Minh feel off her.

Pretty sure the low stat line is to balance the power you can have when you start every round with 5 cards in hand. Definitely on board with thinking she'll be secondary Mystic.

I really think when they reveal these investigators they should be showing us their deckbuilding restrictions at the same time. Ah well....

Her ability is nuts . There's loads of Survivor cards that interact with Discard, to the extent that it's almost a second hand. Survivor can toss cards to Cornered for boosts, her signature weakness is gentle (can clear it with any auto-evade for instance). Support benefits. We don't know her deckbuilding but as things stand I think she's going to be extremely powerful. As a friend of mine put it, she's effectively Preston Fairmont but for cards.

She's going to be incredibly hard to build. Not a newbie card for sure.

Once we know her deckbuilding we'll know exactly how well she can or cannot contribute to a game.

I still don’t think the low stats are needed even with 5 cards every turn because you never know what you’ll have and you will have to improvise every turn. If she is part mystic a quantum flux could be useful but you will never know if you’re getting it turn 2 or when her deck is empty. Dayana is going to be a must if you take spell events because otherwise who knows if any given event will be worth playing on a turn.

Cornered is a great option but if you dont have the chance to play it when you draw it...you can’t hold onto it. Even winging it and improvised weapon and the evade one are going to be pretty awful because of her stats.

I guess I’ll be bringing stray cats to feed that monstrosity.

5 cards every turn is 5 cards you can commit to a skill test. It's a little annoying to see another Survivor who wants to utterly load up on skill cards but there's loads of great options.

I don't think that, say, Winging It is going to be "awful" with a fully charged Last Chance in the test, for instance.

Sure there's a small possibility you could be in a situation where you don't have the ability to play Cornered (or whatever other card) on the turn you draw it but by the same token, she will tear through her deck faster than almost anyone, so she'll be far more likely to see the cards she needs earlier than other investigators.

Preston has a statline of 1/1/1/1 and I'd say he's probably the strongest Rogue investigator in the game; I'm not worried about her statline.

I hear you and Preston IS great, but I’m not yet convinced. Resources can be used in nearly any situation while cards can only be committed to specific tests. Do you lean mystic and only take will icons? What happens when an agility test shows up? Do you commit all of your non wild icons during your turn and save wilds for encounters?

I currently feel like the inability to plan ahead is going to be very difficult to navigate. I don’t think 1 or 2 more intelligence would have overturned her.

17 minutes ago, Soakman said:

I hear you and Preston IS great, but I’m not yet convinced. Resources can be used in nearly any situation while cards can only be committed to specific tests. Do you lean mystic and only take will icons? What happens when an agility test shows up? Do you commit all of your non wild icons during your turn and save wilds for encounters?

I currently feel like the inability to plan ahead is going to be very difficult to navigate. I don’t think 1 or 2 more intelligence would have overturned her.

Her ability happens in the Upkeep phase, so you will see Encounter cards (and know whether you need to use cards in hand) before your turn begins.

An adaptive strategy will be important certainly, but on the flip side, she actually enables far greater deck consistency than other investigators: If you have a card that you really want to build around (Dark Horse or Yaotl or the degenerate 2x Drawing Thin/Track Shoes combo, as examples) you know for a fact you will see it within the first 6 turns, whereas other investigators might not see their key cards for ages and have their build fail to get off the ground at all.

My bad. I always believe mythos encounters are at the end of a turn even though I know it isn’t.

One of Preston’s unofficial signatures is the fire axe because it is immediately a great choice for consistent damage. I’m just trying to figure out something comparable with excess cards. Cornered seems the closest but requires 2 xp and is only applicable once per test. Unless you double down with a 2nd card, you’re still only looking at a consistent 4 except for willpower and it will not net you bonus damage or clues alone. It will depend entirely on what action and other cards you pair it with.

The more I think about it the more I think will pips and cornered for mythos is probably the best way to go if she has mystic access. Otherwise it’s going to very difficult to decide what actions she’s going to have reasonable success with each turn.

I think the Survivor card pool definitely supports a strong Patrice deck build. If she's a secondary Mystic then all she needs is a high Will anyway for the Mystic spell assets. So you could potentially play her more straightforward if that's the option.

I'll also reiterate that Preston seems bad on paper, but is maybe one of the strongest investigators in the game even without something like Streetwise on the board precisely because the Rogue card pool supports him. I suspect this cycle we will get alot of tools that synergize with Patrice's playstyle just like we got alot of Preston tools during Circle considering she's the real odd ball investigator this cycle. So even with Yaotl, Dark Horse, Cornered, Resourceful, True Survivor etc.. in the pool I suspect she'll only get better.

I like that they are leaning into skills for Survivors since they should be the people succeeding with almost nothing on their board considering their theme.

She’s also going to likely have to deal with her weakness multiple times in a game. Evading or killing it will only put it back in her discard.

Believe me I’m up for the challenge. I just am not convinced they couldn’t have given her more intelligence at the least. If she’s running mystic she’ll be slotting sixth sense or rite of seeking most likely but it would give her a bit more flexibility to go winging it since she would be seeing it a lot in theory either in hand or discard.

2 hours ago, Soakman said:

I still don’t think the low stats are needed even with 5 cards every turn because you never know what you’ll have and you will have to improvise every turn. If she is part mystic a quantum flux could be useful but you will never know if you’re getting it turn 2 or when her deck is empty. Dayana is going to be a must if you take spell events because otherwise who knows if any given event will be worth playing on a turn.

Cornered is a great option but if you dont have the chance to play it when you draw it...you can’t hold onto it. Even winging it and improvised weapon and the evade one are going to be pretty awful because of her stats.

I guess I’ll be bringing stray cats to feed that monstrosity.

If she is a Mystic secondary, then she can’t have Dayana. Isn’t she 3 pip?

It is very intriguing. My very first reaction was identical to yours. Terrible stats and what???? How is that an ability?So giving her a bigger deck makes a lot of sense.

In thinking about it, one of the problems survivors have is that they don’t get through their decks to get all the awesome cards they need sometimes to be really effective. So this ability will get her through the deck. Is it more or less likely as she will have cards in her hand that she can really use at that specific given time? I’m so bad at odds. I have to think it will make spending experience weird, because you know you will be almost guaranteed to have to discard a lot of them, if they don’t show up when you need them! You It’s like Joe’s hunch deck on steroids!

The thing you would really have plan to do, is put your assets into play as soon as you get them, which will definitely change your ability to strategize very far out. Maybe she will have a more Dunwich type secondary (8-10? 0 level cards) in a larger deck.

I think it is going to be very important to sit on large piles of resources since you will have to play a card as soon as it enters your hand or wait for it to cycle all over again. It’s one reason why I’m not convinced dark horse is a strong choice for her. I’d actually maybe be tempted to include an alchemical transmutation or two in her deck for this reason if I have any 3 or 4 cost cards at all.

Especially with access to torrent of power if mystic pool is open. A 1 cost 1 action card can turn any will test into a +7.

44 minutes ago, Soakman said:

I think it is going to be very important to sit on large piles of resources since you will have to play a card as soon as it enters your hand or wait for it to cycle all over again. It’s one reason why I’m not convinced dark horse is a strong choice for her. I’d actually maybe be tempted to include an alchemical transmutation or two in her deck for this reason if I have any 3 or 4 cost cards at all.

Is there a way to become Prestons long lost sister and cash in on his inheritance?

Presumably there will also be new Survivor cards that will support her. Getting resources for passing a skill test perhaps, like Entaptured is with charges.

And who knows, maybe because of her crazy ability, she won’t get a basic weakness, that would otherwise hit her over and over.

I wonder if her deck build will do something different with her Basic Weakness. She'll be hitting weaknesses a LOT, and something like Doomed... you might as well retire her before the first scenario.

Throw me in with the "She's going to be difficult but very good" crowd. Much like Calvin she's going to rely heavily on the Survivor fail-to-win mechanic. I'm not sure what her secondary will be but I think she's going to play like an iterative Mystic - Mystics have to adapt their role to what spells they have available, she's going to do the same but every turn.

11 minutes ago, Mimi61 said:

Is there a way to get the resource from Madame Labranche between discarding and drawing your new hand??? 🤔

Nope, no window in there to trigger her.

2 minutes ago, Buhallin said:

I wonder if her deck build will do something different with her Basic Weakness. She'll be hitting weaknesses a LOT, and something like Doomed... you might as well retire her before the first scenario.

Throw me in with the "She's going to be difficult but very good" crowd. Much like Calvin she's going to rely heavily on the Survivor fail-to-win mechanic. I'm not sure what her secondary will be but I think she's going to play like an iterative Mystic - Mystics have to adapt their role to what spells they have available, she's going to do the same but every turn.

Nope, no window in there to trigger her.

I realized after my bid for glory, that even if there was a window, she would not get a resource anyway. She would get a card! 🤦🏼‍♀️

With a stat line of mostly 2's she can make excellent use of Drawing Thin (especially with the low Int). So I think she'll have plenty of resources sitting around as long as that or Take Heart comes out early, and she's the investigator most likely to blow through her deck early it seems.

just upgrade your deck to eucatastrophe and reshuffle your deck when you need to.

Drawing thin will be a must. I am almost more worried about time to get assets into play. I guess that is an eternal problem for all investigators...sigh.

She could make pretty good use of Backpack though, which would get some cards out that she can count on.

Oh yes!

DUmping skill cards every round like crazy will be fun.

I'm guessing you'll wanna play lots of ways to discard for an effect and/or recur cards from the discard pile. Just throwing a bunch of skill cards in Patrice is probably not gonna be optimal. Though even if she does dump a bunch of cards each round it doesn't much matter considering she didn't spend anything to draw them in the first place. That's kinda how Preston works. It ultimately is jut a sanity tax, and your weaknesses are cycling more quickly potentially, but she might have tools to mitigate that depending on her deck building options.

This has totally been the most crazy options for deck building of any group of investigators so far! And we don’t even know if the last two will follow the path of the others in regards to secondary class. Would you assume they won’t have the same option since they have said nothing about it for Tommy and Patrice, or is it just old news?

Good thoughts all and eucarastrophe is a great card for her for sure. I didn’t think about the basic weakness but yikes yes... amnesia [edit: Paranoia] will be rough on her.

I don’t think deck build will be the same choose-a-secondary others have. I could see Patrice having access to rogue or seeker but I doubt it. Seeker card draw and tutor cards will be awkward on her at best and her intelligence is too low to make use of most cards. Rogue is more likely but I’m doubtful.

She and Mandy look really peculiar and fun while Tommy and Tony are more straightforward about what they do. Luke just looks neat.

I’m super curious about the build for Patrice but I’m not sure where her role in the group is going to be. Drawing thin is fine but I hate the idea of failing tests for extra money or cards and I am just not going to run track shoes to that end. She also should be wearing fine clothes over track shoes thematically 😂

Wouldn’t it be interesting if Patrice’s secondary was access to permanent cards only?

We also have little idea what the expansion will give us in terms of new player cards. What is the normal ratio of new cards to class in the expansions?

With Improvised Weapon and/or Winging It constantly going to discard and then being shuffled in after use, she will sure get a ton of action efficiency for some pretty basic tasks.

Yes she needs to overcome some lowish stats, but... deck building. Like, just Survivor has access to 6 skill cards that are Wild icons, and cards like Resourceful give her a 3 in every stat that aren't willpower and recycle a card. So, 25% of her deck already boosts her weak stats every turn and I barely looked at stuff. Chances are good you drew the card(s) she needed for the turn. This is, of course, just Survivor stuff and not including her (other?) deck building options.

As someone mentioned, her low stats mean that Eucatastrophe essentially resets her deck every time it's drawn, since she can try and throw a skill test, so while this doesn't dodge her weaknesses (unless you leave one of them in her discard) it's not like she'll be bleeding sanity all day.

I do admit that Dunwich appears scary since missed Eucatastrophe opportunities can lead to trauma, and Doomed feels unfair, but Indebted feels unfair the other way... and don't be lead investigator for Carcosa b/c of extra weaknesses, but otherwise go ham.

Verdict: Another broken Survivor sure to get eyerolls from my fellow investigators as I do all their jobs better than them.