Seed Patterns - Generic Era II Patterns

Era II makes up the remainder of the Gambler's Chest Expansion (GCE) generic pattern cards, this means that our foundational seed patterns halt around the Node 2 power level; and as we saw with Era I last time, there is not a large amount of rhyme or reason to how these generic era cards are organised. Jarngreipr and Masamune both need Iron and the Masamune even needs the Blacksmith generic settlement location, which is easily Node 3+ in power. We'll see if that trend continues in this batch.

012 Cyclops Ledger

Our crafting and blue requirements for this particular piece of gear are not difficult to achieve, but they do require the Barber Surgeon settlement location to make that Bug Trap along with Ammonia + Leather Worker and innovating along the line of Symposium → Storytelling → Records. That holds this piece of gear solidly in an Era II window, thereby making it an appropriate craft. The hardest things to sort here are the Bug Trap (which requires a Perfect Organ) and getting the Cyclops Fly (I often draw the Cyclops Fly myself, but that's just chance in action).

This gear card is one of the first to draw a link between the Cyclops Fly and the Cyclops Knight, and it's quite a strong link when we look at the flavour of this crafting process, these schematics seem to be coming from the Fly's brain.

Mechanically this Ledger is a solid inclusion, for an offensively orientated loadout. It's boosting both Strength and Luck based strategies by improving their keywords. Sharp to Razor Sharp is an overall increase in average strength (from 5.5 to 7.5) and a tightening of the ranges one can roll (from 1-10 to 5 to 10) but it does need the weapon to have Sharp in the first place. Deadly weapons turn up a lot earlier than Sharp ones so initially this item will probably be used as a second Lucky Charm in order to leverage Deadly even further.

That makes this a solid item even if its affinity isn't that useful. (I like to think that the one green affinity on this ledger is a reference to the Cyclops Fly's appearance, which has a single green iris).

Final Verdict: Like most items this one is very Craftable. It's useful at all moments during a campaign. Solid as a rock.

016 Itemsmith's Lens

Another gear card that requires the Barber Surgeon; this one's a lot easier on settlement crafting requirements though the other requirement is Analyze which is the showdown Insight ability. That one's a little bit harder to achieve but there are monsters that give understanding while fighting them like the White Lion and Butcher. Suffering Blind is a bit of an issue because survivors with Analyse are combat capable ones most of the time, but I believe you could always do the old trick of returning with Dried Acanthus in the gear grid to ignore that blind injury. If you can't do that, you want to make sure that you're not having the future wielder of this gear card being the one who gets blind, because then they'd have -2 accuracy when using this.

The Itemsmith's Lens is the first of the Plus shape Affinity pattern gear cards and it is a very powerful accessory. But this power costs a lot to utilise as you'll need to produce a second activation every time you want to take advantage of the Grace of Splendor ability. Given that we need to connect all of these blue affinities to get the Grace active, we have a minimum of +2 luck here, but we are also very restricted in what our gear options are; especially if we rely on armor for protections. Rawhide with a Lucky Charm would cover top, bottom and one of the left or right, meaning we're very close to that +2 bonus in the early portion of the campaign (and we can easily fill out the last of those four slots with a Fecal Salve) so that +2 luck is the floor of this item. The obvious candidate to combine with this is the Blue Ring from Spidicules, which will connect with the top and also provide another two slots to connect blue affinities (for a total of +3).

The single largest obvious combo here though is Cycloid Scale Armor; That set will connect to this (and both of the other two Plus Shape Affinity Pattern Gear cards coming up) and give us the potential to score the maximum bonus of 12 blue affinities for a +6 total. Which means this item is far more powerful when you have access to either the Sunstalker for its gear or “naked” builds (Marrowism, Crystal Skin etc). Also worth noting that Death King armor doesn't work with any of these items, which holds them back while also telling a story about how the Cyclops Knight (the inspiration behind these patterns) is in opposition in some form to the Scribe's faction (King, Hand etc).

Final Verdict: A strong item for a damage dealer when supported. You need something that generates extra activations like Surge (or a preferably a “Squire” support survivor who can give you that extra activation) to be able to take advantage of this one but as long as that's available in the campaign this is viable because it can be affinity activated with gear from the generic crafting locations.

017 Armorsmith's Tongs

The Itemsmith's sister gear card is the Armor Smith tongs, this one is again tied to a second tier crafting location (Leather Worker this time) and that places it firmly in Era II. In a fun reflection of the Itemsmith this time we need to support a Plus Shape of green affinities. Something that Leather Armor + Leather Shield can do with a lot of ease.

Crafting this one is relatively straightforward, almost all settlements need access to the Leather Worker and Heat. So all that is really needed is those lanterns and holding a Perfect Organ in the settlement storage in order to utilise it (but not expend it) during the crafting process.

This card is easier make use of than the Itemsmith due to being a "fire and forget" rather than require constant activations, and it shows us that Team Death consider Deadly/Luck to be a lot stronger than armor points (as they should). With the Tongs we get at least 10 extra armor points and with the right expansions we can get that all the way up to 12 affinities for +30 armor points. That means this is a gear card that can function as an “armor set”, which is a very exciting thing even if you are limited by having to utilise green affinities in order to get this online.

The activated ability is “Fire and Forget” meaning that you can hit it on the first turn of the showdown and then it'll be active for the rest of that showdown. This is far less demanding on the survivor than the Lens above and all of this comes together to mean I'm of the opinion that these Tongs are stronger than the Lens.

Oh and this one combos with Acanthus Doctor for a super tanky health conscious lady, and of course it's really strong with Spidicules' Green Ring.

Final Verdict: Easy auto craft here, this one opens up too many options and has too many synergies to pass up on, especially in campaigns with the Flower Knight, Spidicules and/or the Sunstalker as quarry monster options as they provide very strong additional synergies.

018 Weaponsmith's Hammer

Our requirements here are pretty easy due to being elements that naturally occur through play. Tinker is a very common ability for survivors to gain from Insight, none of the crafting resources we have here are hard to collect and Scrap Smelting is pretty much an essential innovation. So when we have this, we're absolutely interesting in making it.

The Weaponsmith's Hammer is different from its siblings in that it is a weapon rather than an item. The base strength here is pretty low, but the design concept is having all those +strength boosts from the red affinities along with an activated Impeccable (meaning only a 1% chance of rolling a 1 per dice). But the real issue here is that normally clubs are combined with Lantern Armor to increase their longevity, this is a hard fit into a Lantern Armor build because you'd have to push every piece of the armor set to the corners (apart from the greaves which can go in slot 4 or 6) and when you do that, you'd still need to find 3 more gear cards to complete the plus shape. It's not good news for a club to be failing to synergise with the club armor set.

With Cycloid Scale Armor of course that's a different matter entirely, and White Lion armor also combos reasonably well with this weapon on the affinity front, even the Lion God white lion “supplemental” gear cards synergize with this also, but White Lion Armor struggles to remain viable once you're past L1 Node 3 monsters, so that's not the best spot to plan for keeping this weapon around a long time.

Final Verdict: I think this is the weakest of this family, the base weapon stats are not great and while it does have strength scaling, that scaling is still in need of support from other places and let us be fair, Red affinities are the weakest class of affinities when compared to its siblings. If you're a sans-armor survivor then this weapon gets a fair bit stronger, but that makes this one more a Situational Craft than an automatic one. If you can support it, then you'll be in a good spot.

-019 Hypersight Visor

First of our minus patterns, these negative patterns represent goofy, silly and/or fourth wall breaking pieces of gear. If I remember correctly, the Hypersight Visor was initially suggested/designed by a member of the community as a Dragonball Z reference (I apologise I can't remember their name and the Kickstarter website is awful to try and navigate through, if you know who created the first version of this card please put it in the comments). The name used here in the final version is a reference to Hyperlight Drifter, a video game that is not only beloved by Adam, but also has a crossover Wanderer coming some time in the future. It is also a part of Sci-Fi Aya's kit and one of two pattern gear cards that she uses.

Crafting this one requires Symposium → Storytelling in order to gain Story of the Young Hero and a Bold survivor who either has Severe Injury protection or you don't mind retiring (like say a survivor with double blind already). Interestingly Heat is not bolded in the third step, but I would assume it is needed. So this is another gear card that is reasonably positioned in Era II.

The Hypersight Visor is doing something new and unique in that it is scouting the resource decks and giving us very limited amount of manipulation (that doesn't require an activation). That's interesting, but ultimately not that useful. Sure against a monster that has a specific resource you want (like say the White Lion's Eye) you get that one single reshuffle to increase the odds it appears on top of the resource deck, but I personally don't think that's enough to justify a slot. Given the visor isn't doing anything else apart from a lone blue down affinity I am not impressed with this one.

If you're curious what I think would have changed my opinion and made an ability like this worth doing it would have been being able to activate it multiple times per showdown as long as the cost or trigger was high enough. For example if it gave you the option to shuffle the decks when a Persistent Injury was inflicted that's interesting enough because it is a point of decision each time it is triggered. As it stands when I arrive I look at what the top of the decks are, if they're not things I want, I reshuffle and then this gear card hangs around doing very little beyond offering an affinity.

In respect of that affinity, down blue is situationally very good, Gorment Armor and White Lion Armor both like this affinity. But compared to the other options like the Gorn (which is better) or the Armor Spikes (which are cheaper and easier to craft) it is hard to find a space where I want to pay this steep cosst.

Final Verdict: I think you can leave this one in the binder/box, it isn't doing enough for the price you pay in resources and especially the slot. If it had more affinities and/or an additional ability, such as some stat boosts, we might be in a different situation. I'd almost always prefer something else in the gear slot, something that doesn't blind a useful survivor during the process.

-022 Neko Twilight Armor

Last of all we have the perfect outfit for Zachary, aka the Cat suit. There's some interesting lore behind this one, that knowing smile suggests that there's an Entity behind the Twilight Order (something I've suspected, though I'm not sure if it is the Cyclops Knight or something else).

Crafting this one is relatively easy in People of the Lantern, but it's very difficult in other campaigns as there is only one way to get Hooded Stranger and that is when you acquire the Twilight Sword via the hunt event “Golden Ember” and it requires a few successful rolls to land correctly to boot. So while this one isn't strictly People of the Lantern only, you might as well consider it that because the odds of being able to craft it in other campaigns is slim at best.

We get a pretty solid little armor card from this, Full Ensemble means that the Neko Twilight Armor is the ultimate in armor slot compressions, 10 armor points, +1 evasion and an upgraded version of Pounce is a great little set bonus (6 space Pounce alone is very good). The slot compression here is also so high that we can utilise this armor set for a lot longer than one would think initially, we can slip shields onto this grid very easily and that will increase the lifespan of this gear card for a lot longer.

I do think that this card should have had the symbols for every armor hit location put in the top left corner though. It could have easily been 2, Head, Arms, Body, Waist, Legs there as we've already had multi-location gear cards before.

Final Verdict: Probably leave this one in the box unless you're playing People of the Lantern. If you somehow get Hooded Stranger on your timeline in other campaigns you could then shuffle the pattern card into the deck. It's a good craft if you can manage it though.

Summary

I think almost every single one of these is great when you can craft it, with only the Hypersight Visor representing a dud because a situational gear card that might do nothing at all beyond providing a blue down affinity isn't worth spending a pattern draw, all those resources, a grid slot and a probably useful survivor's eyesight to get and that is an entirely optional negative pattern. The rest of the cards aren't easily made obsolete by the passage of time, either because they're unique, they offer a lot of potential to combo with other options or they take up such a small amount of gear space that they

There's a lot of nice storytelling here, we get even closer links between Seed Patterns and the Cyclops Knight and there's even a bit of “show don't tell” world building that helps further cement the Cyclops Knight as functioning in a tritagonist role as far as the survivor's are concerned.

All of this means I really like what we have here a lot more than the Era I options overall, and we only have that 1 single gear card that I wouldn't craft except under the most edge of cases. There's no Generic Era III or IV so next time we'll get onto the keyword based patterns, hopefully that will be no more than 1 or 2 articles to get this all rounded out. We'll see how it goes.