Seed Patterns - Monster Era I Patterns

With the Gambler's Chest generic patterns forming a broadly positive impression it is time to move onto the Monster specific ones, I'm going to again try and push these together as much as possible, but looking at them I can't guarantee less than two or three parts especially because these particular patterns have hybrid armor sets included in the mix.

To write that I excited to write about this bunch is a bit of an understatement, the Era I cards offer some exciting offerings, some of achieve the goal of making other pieces of gear valuable, even if only as the crafting component. This first pool of seed patterns covers the White Lion, Crimson Crocodile, Butcher, Gambler and for some reason the King's Man (I mean I get the reason, but it's mechanically irrelevant and thematically a failure). We also get not one, but new armor sets in this entire selection and I love writing about hybrid armor sets because I absolutely adore the way this mechanic can breathe new life into armor cards that might other wise get left on the wayside.

003 – Lucky Cat Fang Knife (White Lion)

We start this section with a creation that I am so thrilled and jazzed about. The Lucky Cat Fang Knife is close to exactly the kind of Pattern I like to see, it's taking a previously underwhelming design and using it as the base to build something unique and powerful. I really do appreciate the steps that Team Death have taken to make Daggers a more broadly viable and thematic weapon, I do hope that whips continue to get more love and that Thrown Weapons finally get let out of the basement in the future.

Back to this weapon, we have a relatively restrained and easy to achieve recipe with only the Sword Beetle representing a potential stumbling block due to vermin not being a regular element in the White Lion fights. There are showdowns such as the Screaming Antelope and Dung Beetle Knight which do have consistent Bug Patches present, and the Bug Trap could also be employed to increase the odds. I'm not a huge enjoyer of the bug trap due to its potential to do absolutely nothing during a showdown, but this weapon is exciting and fun enough that I would consider using one in order to try and complete this pattern.

The weapon we get from this is one of the most potent Luck Fighting Style options we have seen, it is a base 4 + Razor Sharp strength weapon, meaning it's between 9 and 14 strength (with an average of 11.5). Which is about right for an upgraded Node 1 Level 3 specific weapon should be. The kicker here though is that puzzle affinity ability which gives us a crazy Deadly 3. There are precious few weapons that reach this level of Deadly, with the Ink Sword being one of the notables and that weapon requires support from a Sunspot Lantern to work. This affinity layout isn't even a major challenge to get active due to many armor sets having an up and down blue layout as standard for the connection between the head and body armor pieces.

If I'm hunting the White Lion this Pattern Gear is my pinnacle for that particular monster, this dagger while relatively straightforward in what it is doing, is simply doing everything right. I love this one a great deal, I think it is correctly balanced and I consider it a crafting goal.

Final Verdict: Staple for campaigns with the White Lion in them unless one is super anti-daggers for some reason. Luck/Deadly based weapons scale incredibly well in Kingdom Death due to critical wounds having a very different 'either its here or its not' system and only a few monsters get good luck/deadly protection as they scale up in level. I probably wouldn't bring this one against monsters that are immune or mostly immune to critical wounds however.

004 – Imitation Butcher Mask & Imitation Butcher Armor (Butcher)

This is a bit of a tough one to fully evaluate, it's Era 1, but it requires leather and armor and the armor set uses Blacksmith elements. All of this kind of makes it a pseudo-Era III card, though in truth it's more Era 0 because there's no Node specific monster resources required here.

Crafting it is pretty straightforward, you'll get Frenzied survivors just about every time the Butcher turns up, plus there's always other options like the White Lion's Frenzy Drink. So crafting this one is very much a guarantee if you want it. Also the Frenzy Drink has a nice bit of synergy with this one to boot.

This gear card's -2 to all brain trauma rolls makes this a risky proposition for Collective Toil settlements, but Accept Darkness ones can chill pretty well with this card, which is extra thematic and straight up a delicious bit of roleplaying.

However, to properly assess this card we have two additional elements to consider, the first one is the entire Imitation Butcher Armor set and the second is the Ballad of the Butcher Settlement Event card. Because evaluating the Puzzle Affinity ability on the Mask needs us to assess the armor set as a whole in order to determine its potency we'll look at that now.

This armor set is doing a lot. We have the set bonus counteracting the -2 movement from the Lantern Cuirass (which I appreciate) plus we are gaining the Infectious Lunacy status card (which will decrease the delay in which we can get Frenzy online) and we are incentivised to seek out gaining Frenzy because there is a powerful 30% chance of ignoring monster attack rolls while under that entire effect. Again we can use tools like the Frenzy Drink or self inflicted brain damage (Speed Powder for example) to get the Frenzy online as rapidly as possible. All of this is really sweet.

The tricky part of this armor set is the layout, there are not a lot of Red affinities on this gear grid and we have 4 slots to get this activated in. While we can move the Cuirass/Mask pairing about, the cuirass needs to sit on the bottom row if we want to use it to assist in the Mask's activation (it doesn't have to do this, but it is more efficient this way). One doesn't have to use the layout I've put up here btw, this is one of many different options.

It is very possible to get the Mask online, there's plenty of ways you can achieve it, especially if you are not going to worry about any affinities other than the ones which activate that powerful +1 activation puzzle affinity ability (and I think you should, because being insane is very viable with this armor set). There is just going to be a lot of compromise, and there's one compromise that I think is in particular a shame. That's if we want to use the Cleaver Weapon Proficiency from the Killenium Butcher expansion box (see review here for more details). Something I'd argue is 100% a goal if you want to use this armor set.

So, on the whole I don't think this one is a slam dunk auto craft, but it is a fun and thematic armor set with some interesting and unique options surrounding it. There's just a lot of brakes pulling this one back and hoops to jump through to get the best out of it. It's still sweet as heck though.

Final Verdict: A Situational craft that gets better when you own the Killenium Butcher, I like this one but as an armor set it has stiff competition from a whole bunch of other excellent options around the time that you can craft and those options tend to have an easier affinity layout to deal with. I think this is a very thematic and fun gear/armor set, I always do adore hybrid ones that make use of older armor sets. This one is a bit more awkward than the others, but has a lot of potential for cleaver based damage dealers.

007 – Dream Keeper Knife (Dream Keeper Campaign)

While this is not the first campaign specific gear we've seen (there's Watcher specific stuff in the promotional cards) the Dream Keeper Knife is a pretty sweet dagger that leverages Savage more effectively than most weapons with that ability. While it doesn't have Deadly to pair directly, it does offer a bunch of blue affinities to combine with the Lucky Charm and that LOPS (Limit Once Per Showdown) ability of giving the monster -1 Luck token until the end of the of the showdown is very strong, especially when combined with other survivors on Luck based builds. There's few monsters who can no-sell luck, the main one usually encountered being the Butcher and that means this weapon's low strength isn't as much of a deal as you'd initially think.

Crafting this is also pretty straightforward once a Perfect bone drops. You only need a survivor with Insight (Understanding 3+) and that helps a great deal in getting this online.

Final Verdict: If you get this early and you have other daggers (like the White Lion one above) to craft later on this one is phenomenal and it'll be effective for a long while due to how luck is good all campaign as long as the monster can be critically wounded. A staple for dagger users if gained early on, even if you're not running Daggers this can be utilised by a Luck based damage dealer in order to leverage whatever weapon proficiency they are actually levelling up (Such as Fist & Tooth).

009 – Fingernail Whip (Crimson Crocodile)

I honestly feel like this weapon was constructed with me in mind, my favourite weapons are Whips, Daggers and Thrown Weapons and I absolutely adore the Crimson Crocodile (it's still my Number 1 Node 1 Quarry monster).

Crafting this is pretty simple, you need a survivor who fought the Crimson Crocodile (yay, another “milestone” to record), Paint innovated (which the Croc can even give you at times) and having unlocked the Crimson Crockery (which is super easy, even easier if you have a Prologue Crimson Crocodile). The use of the veined glass is the main sticky point because if you're saving for the Scythe then this holds you back (making the Crimson Crocodile Scythe takes a lot of crocodile hunts).

What we get is an interesting weapon that looks so fantastic, and mechanically it's also quite decent, though its scaling leans heavily on which monsters you have as your quarries/nemesis monsters. Heroic means that only 1% of 1s rolled wile attacking are going to stick (increasing its accuracy a lot) and the Razor Sharp dice adds +5 to +10 strength (average 7.5) as long as you're hitting Super-Dense hit locations. That means this weapon works considerably better against monsters who are crunchy on the outside, and soft on the inside like the Crimson Crocodile and Dung Beetle Knight, but it doesn't scale well against always externally soft monsters like the White Lion.

Final Verdict: I'm biased on this one, if I get it early during my Crimson hunting and I have a mid game monster like the Dung Beetle Knight I'll be crafting and using this one all the way until the place where I can get a late/end game whip. So this makes it a staple for myself, but ultimately due to its nature as being a weapon that doesn't work all the way into the end game it is situational.

020 – True Lantern Halberd (King's Man)

Last pattern for this stretch and we have a really interesting one that is putting in a lot of work in order to try and tempt us back to the King's Man. We need a Lantern Halberd (possible to tear one out of the ground with a Guidepost or otherwise get it from the Regal Collar death blow hit location). That second option is the one which is more reliable if you're patient about it.

Here's the original version (1.6 has the lantern keyword printed on it, but is otherwise identical). As you can see, both of these weapons are irreplaceable, so if you're interested in crafting the True version you should probably get it done as soon as possible and if you've not drawn the pattern already it is probably best to keep it in the settlement storage until that time.

The True form is a heck of a pushed weapon, with double base strength of its original form and razor sharp jammed on top of that for even more strength. Also you are Hushed (Hushed survivors are cloaked in silence. They ignore vibration damage, are considered deaf, and cannot encourage, roar, scream, perform audible effects, or activate noisy gear.) which is an overall benefit, especially when tackling The King. Finally we also get an automatic 2 space reposition after hitting with this weapon (and a down red affinity, which is sometimes useful, but mostly thematic).

All of this means that the True Lantern Halberd is an impressive piece, while it's not enough to justify playing The King's Man in isolation, it does help, especially if you're theming your campaign about going against the King's Faction with The King's Man, King, Hand and Godhand as elements of that experience. Maybe one day in the future we'll get a campaign that is designed about this, exploring what happens to a settlement which falls into their orbit fully, cumulating with that final showdown against the Squire. Allowing the survivors to punch their creator firmly in the dick once for every single wrong he committed during his existence.

Final Verdict: If you get the Halberd during the process of fighting the King's Man (or after you rip it from the Guidepost after the Hand visit which interacts with it or find it via the Glowing Waypoint terrain card) then this is a staple “must craft”. I am still not super interested in playing with the King's Man, but if we have future campaigns that require this monster I will definitely start to use this one.

Final Thoughts:

There's some really interesting and thematic stuff here, I especially love the dagger and whips in this selection. Each and every one of these is a delightful addition to the campaign if you are playing with those particular monsters, but the Lucky Cat Fang Knife wins my cream of the crop award here because not only is it strong and scales really well, it's also making a previously unappetising piece of gear worth crafting. That's something that I love to see, new gear that re-contextualizes older stuff, the only shame is that the original Cat Fang Knife is relegated to the position of being a crafting component rather than a viable weapon in its own right.

Next time we return to this series we'll take a look at the later Eras, which includes stuff for the Screaming Antelope, Phoenix, Atnas and weirdly enough the Sunstalker!