The humble Whippoorwill, a bird whose sole purpose is to annoy you as much as possible. Hunter + lowering all your stats by 1 while it's near you means you want to kill it, but it having aloof (and lowering your combat slightly) motivates you to maybe just ignore it or run from it. And that core conflict this card presents has inevitably lead to many groups being chased around the map before reluctantly taking up a round or two stabbing these birds to death. But the annoyance of this card transcends gameplay. First off, it's kind of a pain to spell it out: W H I P P O O R W I L L. Why two P's, two O's, and two L's? Why do I always seem to forget one of the P's or the O's every single time? Second, it's in the ArkhamDB twice. Here, check this page if you don't believe me: Whippoorwill. See? They couldn't even be contained in one set, let alone one campaign.

Anyway, there are certainly good tools to help deal with these now. Tony Morgan can put a bounty on them, which is hilarious and incredibly satisfying. You can get their attention with a makeshift bird call. Or you can just go full Mystic overkill and Spectral Razor or Storm of Spirits them to death. In one scenario, our Carolyn Fern chose to Dynamite Blast a room full of Whippoorwills, which is probably a triumph for the field of psychology, as it certainly relieved a lot of our anxiety that day.

Side note: Please describe to me exactly the situation in which you would ever evade one of these. Seriously, I doubt anyone has ever evaded a Whippoorwill in the history of this game. Not one person. I really want to know what situation would arise where someone would try to evade it instead of just punch it when they've presumably already purposefully engaged with it.

I'm actually very surprised there hasn't been a single review of Yorick's signature card. Well, let me summarize:

A+. 10/10. Literally the best signature event in the game. Quickly searches up all the signature events to confirm. Yeah, I'm right. It's the best one. Honorable mention to Obscure Studies and Dark Insight, but I do believe Bury Them Deep bests them.

Why is this card so good? I'll tell you. First off, ignore the icons. You will never commit this, period. It's too valuable. At the end of the day, you might fail that test you considered committing this, and that test might fail a scenario, but as long as you manage to kill a Swarm of Rats before things end, you've at least got a VP to show for it. You will kill something nasty, Bury it Deep, and it'll just chill in the victory display like a trophy, knowing that, no matter how bad the scenario goes from there, you got something out of it.

And yeah, that's really satisfying. But let's think about that application. Any non-Elite enemy gets added to the Victory Display, as long as you kill it once with this card in hand. That's incredible. You might think "well now, non-Elite is a pretty hefty restriction since all the really annoying things are Elite", and that's where you'd be dead wrong. This game is full of stupidly annoying enemies that, for some reason, are not Elite and don't have victory on them, meaning you can often encounter them multiple times a scenario (especially if you get a reshuffle). Here are a few, spoilers of course at your discretion:

• Abyssal Revenant
• Brotherhood Cultist
• Cats from Saturn
• Conglomeration of Spheres
• Deep One Bull
• Hand of the Brotherhood
• Hunting Nightgaunt
• Inconspicuous Zoog
• Mindless Dancer
• Priestess of the Coven
• Spawn of Hali
• Spider of Leng
• Whippoorwill
• Wizard of the Order

I bet you thought at least some of those were Elite, didn't you? There are plenty more, but I think I've made my point. This card is just amazing. Enjoy the victory, enjoy the slightly safer travels.

So apparently the running theme with Innsmouth's enemies, specifically those with the Deep One trait, is that they do bad stuff when they engage with you. This is not very nice, especially for those of us who enjoy using evasion as a reliable countermeasure. This one compounds that problem by making him creep towards you if there are any Deep Ones you do need to kill. Discarding cards is bad because cards win games, and while it is by choice instead of randomly (thank goodness), this guy will still hit you for a solid 2 damage while you do try to fight him, unless you have the capability to take him out in one round- which is not at all guaranteed, especially in the early scenarios he shows up in. 4 fight is rough. 5 health is a lot- even a full round of attacks with most level 0 weapons, assuming you land every hit, will only just be enough to kill him. And, to top all of that off, this thing DOESN'T HAVE VICTORY. There's only one of him in his set of I believe 6 cards, but still! Having to face this guy more than once is just bad times.

All of that is to say, William Yorick is the perfect countermeasure to Deep One Bull, because of two major reasons. A. Yorick can fight and tank really well. His recursion also makes him hurt less from the discard by engagement (take "Let me handle this!" to make sure it goes to him). But even better than that is B, which stands for Bury Them Deep. Yes, for some reason, Deep One Bull is non-Elite. And sure, that means there's other really strong countermeasures here for the more evade savvy among us. You have Waylay, and Slip Away, and what have you. But honestly? I would just bury this guy as deep as you can.

This card feels similar to fingerprint kit though a good bit worse. It slightly accelerates your clue gathering at the expense of a hand slot and a fairly pricey asset. This makes you take more tests and increases the difficulty of one of those tests instead of making it easier. I already don't use fingerprint kit much because of the high cost, though I think it can be good especially if reloaded with Emergency Cache (3). Will be curious to see if this receives any upgraded versions because as is it's quite lackluster. I'm very unsure why the second ability even exists if not for an upgraded version to make it much better (like setting the shroud to 0).

I have a question about the card slots during upgrading. Carolyn Fern is permitted 15 Seeker/Mystic cards that are non-healing. At the start of a campaign, let's say you choose 15 cards.

After Scenario 1, you spend 2 XP to buy two copies of Ancient Stone. The unidentified version does not say "heal horror", so am I correct that we need to remove 2 of our 15 non-healing Seeker/Mystics cards to add the stones to our deck?

If yes, then once we identify the Ancient Stone, and we then upgrade them to the Ancient Stone, since these have "heal horror" text, then we are now have only 13 of our 15 Seeker/Mystic card slots filled. We have 2 slots available again, yes?

If that's the case, what 1xp Seeker/Mystic card do you recommend to fill that space? Since 0xp cards still cost 1xp when you add them to a deck during a campaign, it feels bad to spend xp on a level 0 card. I'm curious to hear what the community has to say.