Agatha Crane
The Parapsychologist

Badacz

Miskatonic. Scholar.

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  • 4
  • 4
  • 1
  • 3
Health: 6. Sanity: 8.

When your turn ends, if you sealed, canceled, or ignored 1 or more chaos tokens this round: Play a Spell or Insight event from your discard pile. After that event resolves, remove it from the game.

effect: +2. You may cancel this token and draw another in its place. If you do, draw 1 card.

Magali Villeneuve
The Drowned City Investigator Expansion #7.

Agatha Crane - Back

Badacz

Deck Size: 35.

Deckbuilding Options: Seeker cards () level 0-5, Neutral cards level 0-5, Insight events level 0-3, up to 10 other level 0 Mystic cards ().

Deckbuilding Requirements (do not count toward deck size): Ocula Obscura, Glimpse the Void, 1 random basic weakness.

With degrees in Mathematics and Psychology, Agatha Crane has always placed a premium on evidence-based science. In her youth, she cared little for ghost stories, but mounting evidence has led Agatha to conclude that there is an unmistakable truth to the tales of monsters and magic that permeate Arkham's history. If these things are real, then they must obey consistent rules. As she will explain to anyone who listens for long enough - and as her husband Wilbur has heard many times - this new field of study is called "parapsychology." With tried-and-true scientific methods, Agatha seeks to bridge the gap between the mystic and the rational, between occultism and science.
Agatha Crane
Agatha Crane
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FAQs

(from the official FAQ or responses to the official rules question form)
  • Q: I have a couple of questions about how Agatha’s ability works and when it can be used. Based on previous rulings you’ve provided: "Q: I have a question about some card interactions for cards that trigger “at the end of your turn” and “during your turn.” To give a specific example, if Monterey Jack’s reaction ability draws Cryptic Writings, is he allowed to trigger Cryptic Writings’ ability and play it? More generally, when an ability triggers “at the end of my turn,” is that considered “during my turn”? And similarly, if an ability triggers “at the start of my turn,” is that also considered “during my turn”? A: Short answer: Yes, “at the end of your turn” is still “during your turn,” so you would be able to play Cryptic Writings if you drew it with Monterey Jack’s triggered ability. (By extension, “at the start of your turn” should also count as being “during your turn.”)" And regarding Grappling Hook and unused actions: "A: We have reconsidered the previous ruling on Grappling Hook and are making a ruling that we find more intuitive. Essentially, an investigator is given 3 actions to use when their turn begins and forfeits any remaining actions when their turn ends. This means an investigator cannot choose to end their turn with an action remaining and decide to use that action later; that action is instead lost. (Note: The “3 actions per turn” can still be affected by encounter card effects that instruct an investigator to “lose actions.”)" I have the following questions: 1- Can I play Working a Hunch from my discard pile using Agatha’s ability, or does “when your turn ends” no longer count as “during your turn”? 2- Can I end my turn without spending all 3 actions and then use Agatha’s ability—along with an unused action to pay the additional cost—to play Thorough Inquiry from my discard pile? Additionally, to help avoid these kinds of doubts, could you please specify in the FAQs exactly when leftover actions are lost? A: (1) You can play Working a Hunch using Agatha Crane’s ability, because “the end of your turn” is still considered to take place “during your turn.” (2) If you declare that you are ending your turn while you have unspent actions, you forfeit your remaining actions before resolving any “when your turn ends/at the end of your turn” abilities. You would not have an action to spend toward Thorough Inquiry, so you could not play it using Agatha Crane’s ability. We will plan to add an FAQ entry for forfeiting unspent actions. (Rules Forum Answer, March 2025)
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Reviews

Agatha Crane is one of the two latest seekers from the Drowned City, offering a gameplay centered around events and token manipulation instead of Lucius Galloway's roguish ways. This review will mostly focus on her seeker iteration, Seeker Agatha or Sagatha for short, although obviously many points made will also apply to Magatha as well.

Stats

  • 4 is a great defensive asset, and a decent enough base to start using Spells.

  • 4 is good, but needs some work to help investigate 3-4 shroud locations. Perfectly serviceable.

  • 1 : Great. Its your dump stat, one that many investigators like her have overcome before (Wendy Adams, Mandy Thompson, Marie Lambeau). And as a bonus, you get...

  • 3 can help you evade some enemies in a pinch, and leaves you less vulnerable to treacheries, many of which often target your Health.

  • 6 Health / 8 Sanity : Between your 4 and 8 sanity, you should not struggle too hard to stay sane. 6 health and 3 should be good enough for most scenarios, certainly less vulnerable than someone like Daisy Walker.

Deckbuilding, , Signature and Weakness

Sagatha's deckbuilding options are generally a worse version of Daisy's. In exchange for a more limited access for 0 and no access at all to 1-2, she gets to splash a selection of Insight events. Notable options include Tinker for an extra slot, Scout Ahead for speed, a handful of draw / clue acceleration from (Nature of the Beast, At a Crossroads, Unconventional Method, Fortuitous Discovery, ...), Emergency Aid for healing and Stargazing for support.

Agatha also has a slightly larger deck compared to other investigators with 35 cards instead of the standard 30. This makes it just a little harder to find any one card in your deck. As a result extra tutor / draw / redundancy is worth a consideration.

Agatha's should allow her to pass any test she could realistically attempt. It does offer Agatha to redraw the token for a card and to enable her , which is very fun. Are the rewards worth giving up on the successful test and trying your luck again ? Well, it will depend, but the choice is ultimately yours.

Agatha's Signature, the Ocula Obscura, is the best activator for her ability, with extremely easy requirements (just succeed at a skill test, with a non-symbol token), little to no downsides and the benefit of predicting exactly what you need to commit to pass the next one. It fits extremely well into the "Precision" archetype (Chemistry Set, Antikythera, ....) and more generally oversuccess strategies, allowing you to get the payoffs you want. See ElseWhere's Sagatha deck for an example of the idea.

Agatha's weakness, Glimpse the Void is quite annoying. Generally speaking, you will never want to take a skill test where you reveal and resolve 2 tokens instead of 1. It creates so much variance and dramatically reduces your odds of success without really high skill values that Sagatha cannot easily reach. This means you will want to spend an action to reshuffle it into your deck, where it may creep up again and slow you down some more. With the exception of a lucky Scroll of Secrets or an Ally's Foresight + Alyssa Graham, you don't really have a way to get rid of it. If relying mostly on events to accomplish things, this card can slow down how fast you can draw new ones to replace the ones you played.

The Puzzle

I think Sagatha's stats and ability combine for an interesting puzzle : Your base stats are too low to fully work on their own, meaning you need to invest cards/resources/commits/actions to boost them somehow. Except you also need to invest cards/resources/actions into triggering your (unless you're just praying for tokens). All in order to pay the resource cost of the events in your discard pile once you've triggered your . And you have to do all that in spite of the loss of consistency that comes with your slightly larger deck.

Its interesting that, despite being a interested in Insight Events, she is the opposite of Joe Diamond : He gets to play his events practically for free, while Agatha has to work extra hard to replay hers. I guess this is what happens when you have to show proof of your work rather than relying on a hunch...

With that said, this is not an unsolvable problem, and there are a couple of directions to go from here...

The Directions

A card I want to highlight for Sagatha in general is Ancestral Knowledge : providing skill boosts to her early game while you're looking for these key assets, helping you find them with the draw of Perception, Eureka! or Plan of Action, storing a potential Agatha with Analysis while making more room in your deck for events worth (re)playing. Speaking of, ...

  • use your events : I mean, Agatha litteraly has EVENT written on its front and back ! Maybe you don't need to boost your skill value to handle high difficulty tests if your events are here to take care of them ! For example, Read the Signs or Drawn to the Flame can power through the highest shroud locations with ease, and an Explosive Ward helps to lend a hand against small enemies. There are 3 pitfalls to avoid however.

    • Not finding the event you need for the task at hand : For example, you don't want to be stuck without your "testless clue" card against high shroud locations (again, 35 card deck, remember ?).
    • The opposite : if you have say 10 events for testless clues, you miss out on a lot of the power of your . Does it really matter that, unlike the aforementioned Joe Diamond, you get to choose which event to play (from your discard) each turn, if all your events do the same thing ?
    • The third is to run out of steam, meaning you probably want to have some form of additional card draw (aw gee, how are you gonna find that in the card pool) and/or a way to consistently and repeatably activate her . Which leads us nicely onto the main event (get it ?)

Agatha's Ability : Setup

In order to trigger her , Agatha needs to seal, cancel or ignore a chaos token before her turn ends. Notably, this does work if you do so during the Mythos Phase, or during another investigator's turn, provided it happens before yours. With the exception of her , there are generally 2 kinds of activators you can find :

I think the answer probably lies in the middle. Having to expend a card every time you want to trigger her is not a viable long term plan, especially with Glimpse the Void polluting your draws over time. And yet, finding the repeatable activators in your 35 card deck can be unreliable, unless you start packing many of them, at which point you run the risk of them being redundant after the first one. I find having 2 copies of one repeatable activator, + the Ocula Obscura is good enough to find one early, and a handful of limited use cards can allow you to activate her ability in the meanwhile and provide additional payoffs later once you have drawn them.

Agatha's Ability : Payoff

With the whole "If you sealed, canceled or ignored 1 or more token this round" covered above, and "Play an event" being self explanatory, I will focus on the interesting part : "from your discard pile". How do we get those events here ?

  • Play Events : Probably the best and most enticing option of the 3, using Agatha's to double-cast events. Cards worth mentioning in this section are Farsight / Cryptic Grimoire for some fast casting, Crafty for resource discounts / boosts on Insights, and Lab Coat for an extra skill boost on events. Some types of events work particularly well here :

  • Commit Events : This allows Agatha to behave as a reverse Crystallizer of Dreams, where you commit the event first and play it afterwards. Cards worth shouting out here are Grisly Totem for additional icons and draw, and Guided by the Unseen, which lets you search for an event, commit it for a test and place it in your discard ready for use. Cryptic Writings is also excellent here : commit it for its icons, and get the resources later on. Finally, I will mention Logical Reasoning and Bizarre Diagnosis. Both of these cards have excellent icons and a strong healing effect. With Agatha, you can freely commit these cards and still keep them in your discard for healing later on in the scenario if the need arises.

  • Discard Events : Besides Scenario effects, cards like Occult Lexicon, Occult Invocation, Forced Learning and Artistic Inspiration offer additional payoffs for discarding cards, with a few more spicy options like Scroll of Secrets, Scroll of Prophecies or Written in the Stars. Agatha is no George Barnaby, but her can still offset the cost of discarding her events. Also worth noting that Occult Invocation and Blood-Rite are Spell events that can be double-cast by Agatha, and that both the aforementioned scrolls work very well with the new Library Pass. Maybe End of the Road has found a home after all ! (if you play it at the end of your turn, what happens to the extra action ???)

Conclusion

"So, you've mentioned about 80 distinct cards that do a whole bunch of different stuff ! What am I supposed to take away from that ?!" Well, simply that Sagatha is a fascinating investigator to build and play, that lends herself to a whole bunch of unique options and play styles, and has plenty of ties to all kinds of archetypes worth exploring (Clue drop with Analysis and Captivating Discovery, Curse builds replaying Gaze of Ouraxsh and Stirring Up Trouble, Science Precision, Big Hand with Farsight, etc ....).

Sagatha's main challenge is to strike the balance between her rational and her extraordinary Events. Which is quite a thematic home-run for Agatha Crane, isn't it ?

aurchen · 237